#pshce

We have here our second guest post; this time from Politics student,Anna Sanders. Though not a teacher herself, she assures me that she went to school a handful of times, and has prepared for us a piece on that oft-neglected topic in pedagogy: gender politics. There’ll be more posts from my own notepad any day now.

 I’ve long been a proponent of incorporating gender equality classes into the curriculum. As a self-proclaimed feminist killjoy, I never hesitate to voice my opinion that sexism still covertly prevails in multi-faceted forms and has become normalised within our every day lives. Stereotyping gender roles, embedded in the depths of our culture, largely perpetuates sexist attitudes and upholds rather dated ideas that women and men should behave in certain ways. At school, my female peers and I were often subjected to the ever-so profound comeback of ‘get back in the kitchen’, which we learned to accept as normal because we were never taught that sexism was wrong. I’m sure we can all partly thank media outlets such as The Sun for demonstrating every reason why we still need feminism. Ladies: if we ever forget our self-worth, we can simply turn to Page Three as a reminder (or alternatively, check out The Sun’s disparaging article ‘the Best of Breastminster’, where if you’re after an all-time classic of tasteless misogyny I guarantee this will be right up your street).

A study by Ambady et al. (2001) suggests that we develop these damaging gender stereotypes from a young age, which stick with us for the rest of our lives. The study found children as young as six developed the belief that boys are better than girls at mathematics, which pertains to a form of cognitive bias. Additionally, they found that “performance is malleable to situational and psychological cues”. Therefore, if we’re told we are better at something from a young age, it could be that we’re more likely to advance in it. Is it then any wonder why 15% of the STEM workforce in the UK is female?

Since we learn our beliefs and values early on in life, perhaps one of the most fundamental methods to erode sexist thinking is through ‘the most powerful weapon to change the world’ – education. Hyde et al. (1990) found that children’s gender identity undergoes significant transformations as they approach adolescence, so there seems no better time to incorporate values of equality through a formal curriculum than at secondary school. One idea could be to incorporate gender equality classes within the PSHE programme in order to raise awareness of existing sociological disparities across society. Within these classes talks of women in leadership could be beneficial, or another option could be to develop initiatives for female students to continue education and career trajectories in areas where women are poorly represented, such as STEM subjects. It’s been suggested that some sort of content review is needed of this subject already. Hell, I’m in my twenties, I have no idea how to get a mortgage, but fortunately I have been taught not to sniff Pritt Sticks.

My 10 year old brother just said to our mum and I that when he was in class and a teacher said ‘men have a penis and a woman has…?’ And my brother replied ‘fatgina’ by accident and the rest of the class laughed…

… I can’t believe he said that. I can’t stop laughing omgg like why did he even volunteer to answer the question in the first place

my mum is completely stunned that her nerdy son could do something like that ahahaha