Firstly, I began with desk research. Articles, books, and documentaries will be used to collect enough information to build my knowledge about gender equality and help me know about the exploration of gender equality education.
Books
Before focusing on the theme of gender equality education, I would look back to understand some detailed information on "Gender equality" in the theories. Through these books, I got basic definitions as well as insight about Gender Identity, Gender Expression Gender Roles. I excerpt some content that is related to the gender theories from the book.
1. Gender & Gender identity
Gender is defined as people's social identity as male, female, or non-binary—the last of which refers to students who identify as a gender other than “male” or “female.” “Gender identity is one's innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves." Gender identity thus is not binary (male or female), it’s a spectrum. One's gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth. Gender expression is the external appearance of one's gender identity, usually expressed through behavior, clothing, haircut, or voice, and which may or may not conform to socially defined behaviors and characteristics typically associated with being either masculine or feminine.
Evolutionary psychology holds the essentialist view that some “essence” or underlying biological component makes men and women different(Buss, 1998). According to this view, biological differences determine the behavior of men and women, and therefore those differences are perceived as fixed and invariant. For, example, a higher level of testosterone in men makes men more aggressive than women and men’s left-brain dominance makes them more rational.
On the other side, psychologists believe that social roles create most behavioral differences between men and women. This view holds that strength and reproductive capacity differences between and men and women prompt societies to encourage women and men to adopt different gender roles. The existence of such differences creates the need for socialization pressure to ensure that girls and boys learn and adopt roles associated with their sex. In this biosocial view, biology is an important factor in the creation and maintenance of differences between women and men, but it is not the main determinant of these differences.
The Freudian view emphasized the role of instinct and physiology in personality formation, hypothesizing that instincts provide the basic energy for personality and that the child’s perception of anatomical differences between boys and girls is a pivotal event in personality formation (Hall, 2016).
On the other side, psychologists believe that social roles create most behavioral differences between men and women. This view holds that strength and reproductive capacity differences between and men and women prompt societies to encourage women and men to adopt different gender roles. The existence of such differences creates the need for socialization pressure to ensure that girls and boys learn and adopt roles associated with their sex. In this biosocial view, biology is an important factor in the creation and maintenance of differences between women and men, but it is not the main determinant of these differences.
The Freudian view emphasized the role of instinct and physiology in personality formation, hypothesizing that instincts provide the basic energy for personality and that the child’s perception of anatomical differences between boys and girls is a pivotal event in personality formation (Hall, 2016).
3. Lean in -- Sheryl Sandberg
In this book,Sheryl Sandberg points out some social problem in the world:
1. As a female, it’s incredibly difficult to manage both career and motherhood, even before you give birth.
In the book’s opening anecdote, Sandberg describes what a tough time she had while pregnant with her first child. She gained 70 pounds, her feet swelled two shoe sizes and she vomited every day for nine months. I read this and I thought immediately, she gets it.
2. She points out that men still run the world.
Sandberg marshals plenty of statistics to support this fact. Example: “Of 197 heads of state, only 22 are women.” Another fact: Of the top 500 companies by revenues, only 21 are headed by women. In politics, women hold just 18% of congressional offices.
3. She gets it about women’s compensation.
Though it used to be worse—in 1970 American women made 59 cents for every dollar men earned—it’s still bad. In 2010, women earned just 77 cents for every dollar men made. Her solution: negotiate like a man. When she was talking to Mark Zuckerberg about joining Facebook, she says she was inclined to accept the first offer he made. But after her husband encouraged her to make a counter-offer, she did and Zuckerberg came back to her with a much more lucrative proposal.
4. She believes the feminist revolution has stalled.
Sandberg writes extensively about the barriers women still face in the workplace, including “blatant and subtle sexism, discrimination and sexual harassment.” Despite my impression that she ignored this topic, she underlines the importance of workplace flexibility and the need for accessible child care and parental leave policies. She also notes a 2011 McKinsey study showing that while men are promoted based on potential, women get a leg up based on past accomplishments.
What Works: Gender Equality By Design---Iris Bohnet
A book by Harvard University professor Iris Bohnet, What Works: Gender Equality By Design, argues that tweaking the ways companies identify, develop and promote talent can improve equality and diversity at a “shockingly low cost and high speed.” Bohnet turned this lens on the question of gender equality in the workplace. She finds that often, despite the best of intentions, efforts at improving women’s status and opportunities on the job falter and even backfire when they focus on changing mindsets. Unconscious bias proves persistent and elusive.
Simply encouraging women to be more assertive isn’t enough. In a study conducted by Victoria Brescoll of Yale University, a group of professional men and women evaluated the competence of chief executives. Male executives who spoke up the most were rewarded with higher ratings. Yet both male and female evaluators gave lower ratings to female executives who spoke up more than their peers.
After reading the theories related to gender equality, I began to focus my research on gender equality education. The main goal of this stage was to gather enough information to be able to understand how education works for the gender equality consciousness establishment.
Do Infants Understand and Use Gender?
1. A related question is, when do children recognize their own sex? Infants as young as three to four months of age distinguish between categories of female and male faces, as demonstrated in habituation and preferential looking paradigms (Quinn et al. 2002). By about six months, infants can discriminate faces and voices by sex, habituate to faces of both sexes, and make intermodal associations between faces and voices (e.g., Fagan & Singer 1979, Miller 1983, Younger & Fearing 1999). By 10 months, infants are able to form stereotypic associations between faces of women and men and gender-typed objects (e.g., a scarf, a hammer), suggesting that they have the capacity to form primitive stereotypes (Levy & Haaf 1994). Infants' early associative networks about the sexes may not carry the same conceptual or affective associations that characterize those of older children or adults
When Do Children Develop Stereotypes?
Developmental researchers have identified that rudimentary stereotypes develop by about two years of age (Kuhn et al. 1978), and many children develop basic stereotypes by age three (Signorella et al. 1993). Children first show an understanding of sex differences associated with adult possessions (e.g., shirt and tie), physical appearance, roles, toys, and activities, and recognize some abstract associations with gender (e.g., hardness as male; softness as female) (Leinbach et al. 1997, Weinraub et al. 1984). Children develop stereotypes about physical aggression at an early age, children believe that girls show more relational aggression than boys (Giles & Heyman 2005). Interestingly, even when researchers examine children's spontaneous associations about boys and girls, a consistent pattern is found from preschool through fourth/fifth grade: girls are seen as nice, wearing dresses, and liking dolls, and boys are seen as having short hair, playing active games, and being rough (Miller et al. 2009).
As children grow older, the range of stereotypes about sports, occupations, school tasks, and adult roles expands, and the nature of the associations becomes more sophisticated (e.g., Sinno & Killen 2009). Specifically, early in childhood, children make vertical associations between the category label (“girls,” “boys”) and qualities (e.g., “boys like trucks”). They appear slower to make horizontal inferences (e.g., recognizing that trucks and airplanes are associated with being “masculine”), which tend to appear around age eight. For instance, when told about an unfamiliar sex-unspecified child who likes trucks, older children but not younger ones predict that the child also likes playing with airplanes (Martin et al. 1990). Concreteness of gendered items influences the ability of younger children to make these property-to-property inferences (Bauer et al. 1998). In contrast, adults often rely on individuating information rather than the person's sex to make similar types of judgments (Deaux & Lewis 1984). The difficulty that children have with these judgments suggests that they may not understand within-sex individual differences.
Meta-analytic studies find that stereotypes become more flexible with age (Signorella et al. 1993). A longitudinal study of children from 5 to 10 years of age showed a peak in the rigidity of stereotypes at either 5 or 6 years of age and then an increase in flexibility two years later. Neither the timing nor the level of peak rigidity affected the developmental trajectory, suggesting that children generally follow the same normative path across development despite variations in when rigidity starts and how extreme it becomes (Trautner et al. 2005).
Finally, a few recent studies examined children's perceptions of gender discrimination. children in two age groups (5–7 and 8–10 years) responded to a set of hypothetical stories about teachers deciding whether a boy or a girl did better on an activity (Brown & Bigler 2005). The findings showed that the younger children were somewhat aware of gender discrimination, but such perceptions were higher in the older group. Children perceived discrimination, however, only when explicitly told that the teacher may be biased, not when the context was ambiguous.
Dynamic Contexts: Gender Cognitions and Socialization
An important feature of dynamic analysis is how “context” is viewed. Although context is considered important in gender theories, it is often conceptualized as being distal (i.e., cultural contexts). In contrast, DS theorists view context as a dynamic characteristic of interactions, one that is temporally and spatially close and is an aspect of the interaction process itself (Steenbeek & van Geert 2008). Even influences typically considered distal, stable, or abstract are represented and carried forward in time by their embodiment within everyday interactions. For instance, gender stereotypes and gender identity become embodied as children dynamically engage in “gendering”—remembering gender and acting on gender—incorporating the immediate contextual factors, and this being carried forward to the next moment of knowing and acting on gender.
Developmental processes that occur in real time then carry over and become consolidated and generalized across different contexts (Fischer & Bidell 1998), and these then influence and constrain behavior (e.g., Lewis 2000) (although there is controversy about the extent to which this happens) (for review of the issue, see Witherington 2007). For instance, as toddlers come to understand their sex, become motivated by same-sex expectations, and begin to develop stereotypes, these features can be carried into interactions with others. The patterning and display of the gendered self may evolve into new forms (e.g., styles of dress, play partners, activities), which vary from moment-to-moment and over longer time periods. Thinking of gender as being enacted in each interaction is similar to proposals from sociological research traditions focusing on the social construction of gender (West & Zimmerman 1991).
Gender socialization provides a good example of how both the child's and parents' cognitions are enacted in moment-to-moment interactions through the dynamic embodiment of gender. Parental expectations about what it means to have a child who is either a boy or girl (expectations colored by cultural values, etc.) become displayed as actions with the child (e.g., glances, touching, toy offering), and these embodied expectations interact with the child's phenotypic and early behavioral features. Thus, gender socialization involves parents and siblings, peers, other socialization agents, and the individual child, who all act and interact in varied contexts.
The role of education in advancing gender equality has long been part of the discourse on education, gender and development. Gender socialisation begins very early in the life cycle of an individual, thereby paving the way for young children to internalise gender roles, norms, and thus gender inequalities. Educational institutions, particularly schools, are places that equip children with fundamental life skills and thus are potentially powerful instruments to effect changes in mindsets.
Moreover, given that an increasingly large section of children around the world go to schools, it would be prudent for policymakers and governments to channel efforts to promote gender equal values in its young citizens through schools. In doing so, other stakeholders including teachers, parents, academic and non-academic staff, and school administrations will need to be actively involved, which shall in turn also allow them to be exposed to gender-equal values and practices and question long-held beliefs and attitudes about gender.
Gender awareness aims at increasing general sensitivity, understanding and knowledge about gender equality/inequality. It is a process which assists in improving understanding of the prevailing notions of gender roles and stereotypes; sharing ideas and developing the skills needed for a change in behaviour; and shedding preconceived notions. Awareness lesson can be taken to create gender awareness and sensitize students.
Additionally, Teacher education programmes need to be designed to include gender as a cross-cutting theme across subjects. Training in gender-sensitive pedagogy, working with students of all genders and aiding them to shed gender stereotypes is needed. Schools also can organize workshops and interactive sessions with parents so that they are in sync with the efforts schools are taking to impact gender equality lessons. In many cases, gender-based discrimination begins at home and thus is it imperative that parents be made conscious of attitudes and behaviour that may be gender-unequal.
Reference:
Anushna Jha and Mehrin Shah., (2020). Leveraging Education as a Tool to Achieve Gender Equality – Strategies and Signposts, [online] Available at: <http://www.popsci.com/popsci37b144110vgn/html>
Brown CS, Bigler RS. Children's perceptions of discrimination: a developmental model. Child Dev. 2005;76:533–53.
Levy GD, Haaf RA. Detection of gender-related categories by 10-month-old infants. Infant Behav. Dev. 1994;17:457–59.
Miller C, Lurye LE, Zosuls KM, Ruble DN. Accessibility of gender stereotype domains: developmental and gender differences in children. Sex Roles. 2009;60:870–81.
Martin CL, Wood CH, Little JK. The development of gender stereotype components. Child Dev. 1990;61:1891–904.
Steenbeek H, van Geert P. An empirical validation of a dynamic systems model of interaction: Do children of different sociometric statuses differ in their dyadic play? Dev. Sci. 2008;11:253–81.
Sinno SM, Killen M. Moms at work and dads at home: children's evaluations of parental roles. Appl. Dev. Sci. 2009;13:16–29.
Trautner HM, Ruble DN, Cyphers L, Kirsten B, Behrendt R, Hartman P. Rigidity and flexibility of gender stereotypes in children: developmental or differential? Infant Child Dev. 2005;14:365–80.
Quinn PC, Yahr J, Kuhn A, Slater AM, Pascalis O. Representation of the gender of human faces by infants: a preference for female. Perception. 2002;31:1109–21.
West C, Zimmerman DH. Doing gender. In: Lorber J, Farrell SA, editors. The Social Construction of Gender. Sage; Thousand Oaks, CA: 1991. pp. 13–37.
Kuhn D, Nash SC, Brucken L. Sex role concepts of two- and three-year-olds. Child Dev. 1978;49:445–51.
Personal thoughts The literature review allow me to understand some basic theories of gender equality in different field, such as psychology as well as sociology, and I reliazed that a designer should have a broader perspective to think about design question. This is because some social phenomenon are usually complicated, and it's make me view a problem from different perspectives and think about how my design could have social impact.
Besides, the point of the secondary research is to collect more data that deepens my understanding of the problem space. Therefore, during the secondary research, I try to read diverse resources, such as papers, industry studies, government studies, news articles and videos to gether information. It also helps guide subsequent primary research.