Gender Stereotypes

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At what age do people learn to associate tasks with genders? Surprisingly very early.

An interesting experiment caught my attention done with 5-7 year olds at a school in the UK by a charity called Inspiring the Future. Children were asked to draw pictures of a firefighter, surgeon, and a fighter-pilot. Over 90% of the pictures were of men. http://www.mullenlowelondon.com/our-work/redraw-the-balance/ 

Question is how did the children start associating these professions with men? Where are they learning this from? 

As a dad of three daughters, it is a really important point for me because I want my daughters to have equal opportunities in life when they grow up, irrespective of their gender. 

It is also very easy to mix up gender inequality with gender differences. The issue is not whether men and women are wired differently. It doesn't matter if women find it hard to reverse park a car, or men have low threshold to pain. The issue is whether we should have inequality in society due to perceived stereotypes about genders and their roles.

Gender stereotyping has the potential to lead to gender inequality. Stereotypes are like short-cuts that our mind uses to impose pre-held ideas on people based on their colour, gender, race, etc. It is an efficient way for the mind to process information. Problem is that it can reach the wrong conclusion. Imagine the consequences when majority of people reach the same conclusion in the society.

Some of these stereotyping happens at our homes and we don’t notice it. What if your son wants to play with dolls and learn ballet dancing? What if your daughter wants to play with cars and take up rugby as a sport? What about colours. Are they linked to genders? Would you be concerned if your boy wants to wear pink? Scientists confirm that gender stereotyping is a learned behaviour but when it goes unnoticed, it flourishes and is passed on through generations.

Problems start arising when people expect others to look, act, say and earn based on their gender. At workplace if we don’t expect someone to lead, manage, succeed in a certain way, we will not give them the same opportunities and pay the right salary. Salary gaps for genders globally is approx 30-35% in Korea and India, and 15-20% in the US and UK. 

This debate also came to the forefront in Aug 2017 when a senior engineer at Google aired his views about lack of women in technical roles at Google and termed the company’s initiatives to encourage female programmers as ‘unfair’. Company had to let the guy go as they felt his opinions made the workplace hostile to women.
So we need to be on a lookout and see if any of our perceptions, beliefs are contributing to or reinforcing gender stereotypes. If successfully done, we have the potential to eliminate gender inequality in one generation. 

Images taken from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/

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