Whether in school or in the toy shop, sexist assumptions about boys and
girls can have a long-lasting effect on children. Luckily, some kids are
on top of it Scrolling
through my Twitter timeline this week, one particular tweet, with an
image attached, immediately jumped out at me. A parent had shared a
snapshot of her six-year-old child’s homework – a worksheet asking
pupils to research a scientist or inventor. So far, so normal. But the
question, in jaunty Comic Sans, read: “Who was he? Who was the person
you have chosen to look at? How old were they when they began inventing?
Did they have a wife and family?”
The frustration of the parent, who appealed to other Twitter users
for suggestions of female inventors, would be dismissed by many as an
overreaction to a carelessly worded question. But she is far from alone.
Parents share similar homework woes with the Everyday Sexism website and Twitter account with startling regularity.
One referenced their son’s physics homework, which used examples of
men pushing vans, lifting weights, climbing trees and shooting arrows.
The sole female example was a woman pushing a pram. Another parent
described an assignment where children were directed to use a particular
biographical research website, only to find that, of the 21 historical
personalities listed, just two were women. One person’s son had even
been asked to compare the qualities of a “good wife” from biblical to
modern times (with no similar exercise discussing the merits of
husbands). Numerous questions involved men doing active, strong tasks
such as driving or playing sport, while women cooked, cleaned or, in one
particularly bizarre example, simply “sat on a rug”.
To those who cry “overreaction”, a new study published this month by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research
suggests that gender bias at primary school may in fact have long-term
implications for pupils. The study saw several groups of students take
two exams, one marked blind by outside examiners, the other marked by
teachers who knew the students’ names. In maths, girls outperformed boys
on the anonymously marked exam, but boys outperformed girls when
assessed by teachers who knew their names, suggesting that they may have
overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls.
Tracking the pupils to the end of high school, the researchers found
that boys who were given encouragement as youngsters not only performed
better later on, but were also more likely to take advanced courses
involving maths, compared with girls who had been discouraged. They
concluded: “Teachers’ over-assessment of boys in a specific subject has a
positive and significant effect on boys’ overall future achievements in
that subject, while having a significant negative effect on girls.”
Of course, many teachers actively encourage girls into Stem (science,
technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. But gender
stereotypes are not only passed on at school. They also proliferate in
the advertising, television, books, magazines and conversations that
children are exposed to from a young age. One parent recently recounted
to me the moment that their three-year-old daughter picked up a toy
stethoscope, only for another well-meaning adult to swoop in and
comment: “Ah, are you going to be a nurse?” Not, of course, that it
wouldn’t be a fine choice of profession, but what would the
corresponding comment have been had a little boy chanced upon the same
toy?
That young people might be deeply influenced by the gender
stereotypes thrust upon them should give us all pause. How often do we
heedlessly shower little girls with platitudes about prettiness and
looks, or comment on how “big and strong” their brothers are growing? We
hear comments about the sweetness and politeness of daughters, while
sons are proudly described as boisterous instead.
In the strictly segregated aisles of many toy stores, blue shelves
mark off chemistry sets, dinosaurs and building tools as the domain of
boys, while girls are left holding the (plastic) baby.
Each individual incident is easily dismissed as harmless. And, of
course, there’s nothing wrong with an individual child choosing to
identify with any of these roles. But it’s the assumptions made for them
that matter. Young children are not always equipped, as most adults
are, with the critical tools to analyse and probe information – what is
presented as fact is often absorbed without question. This might seem
extreme, until, as I have, you visit a variety of primary school
classrooms and start to realise just how many under-10s genuinely think
that girls simply aren’t allowed to be footballers or doctors or
lawyers. Ask your nearest small friend about these matters – you may be
unpleasantly surprised.
The silver lining is that change is happening. Several toy stores
have abandoned gender segregation, partly thanks to the efforts of
campaigns such as Pinkstinks and Let Toys Be Toys.
The parent whose tweet first caught my eye later reported an excellent
response and apology from the school. There is hope, too, in the
reactions of children themselves. According to one project entry, a girl
who faced her first experience of street harassment aged eight, when a
passing man told her the muffin she was eating would “go straight to
[her] hips”, patiently drew on her biology knowledge to explain: “No, it
won’t, it has to go to my stomach first.” One mother described how,
asked to complete a drawing for homework showing “Mummy in the kitchen”,
her seven-year old son added his daddy to the picture, doing the
washing up.
It’s refreshing to see how ridiculous sexism can look through
children’s eyes. If we could only restrain ourselves from passing our
own inherited assumptions on to them.
