For this week's post, my articles were focused on when gender disparities begin to appear in education. These differences are apparent when a child hasn't even been born! Parents are often anxious to find out whether or not they will have a boy or a girl in order to paint a baby's room, buy clothing and other responsibilities that come with being a parent. Whether or not it is obvious to them, a parent who buys their son a blue outfit with a red firetruck saying "future firefighter," those parents have just implemented a gender stereotype upon their child. These occurrences are extremely typical and yes, often adorable as well, but are parents setting their children up to be "filed" into categories based on gender? The three authors I have chosen to focus on this week may agree with that statement.
Paul Hamaker discusses this gender discrimination in his article Gender Discrimination Begins in Elementary School. For those of you who are elementary school teachers, please bear with me as the following statistics may make you a bit uneasy, or they might just turn on a light bulb. Hamaker mentions a research study completed at the University of Georgia where "“The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.” The study goes on to discuss why this discrepancy exists and found that often teachers grade based on behavior rather than performance. With these gender differences beginning so early, how are students supposed to overcome these obstacles later in life when it's all they've known since beginning elementary school?
Not only do children suffer from gender discrimination when it comes to grading, but students are also often categorized based on gender; So what happens to those students who are transgender? Martha Irvine tackled this difficult topic in her article Transgender Youth Presenting Challenges for Schools, where she discusses what changes schools are beginning, and need to start making, to make school a safe and accommodating place for transgender students. Irvine mentions a study in her article that gave a staggering fact "According to a 2010 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 41 percent of transgender people surveyed said they had attempted suicide. That figure rose to 51 percent for those who said they'd also been bullied, harassed, assaulted or expelled because they were transgender or gender nonconforming at school" (Irvine, M. 2013). These students need a safe place just as much, if not more, than all other students.
With so many of today's societal problems focusing on gender, Sara Wood takes a different approach in her own life, which she discusses in Gender Neutral. Wood has decided to not let her gender define who she is, at work or at home. She describes herself as "Adventurer, mother, friend, colleague, type A, liberal, oversharer, Southerner, donut-lover, yes, but never "woman" (Wood, S. 2013). I admire her view on how much our gender identity "defines" us, even if that definition doesn't match up to who we are as individuals. If only more people, men and women alike, could adopt this view and thought of identifying more with who we are rather than what we are, men or women, we might all begin to close the gender gap.
For the full links please see the list below:
Hamaker, P. (2013, January 3). Gender Discrimination Begins in Elementary School. In Examiner. http://www.examiner.com/article/gender-discrimination-begins-elementary-school
Irvine, M. (2013,
May 28). Transgender Youth Presenting Challenges for Schools. In Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/28/boy-or-girl-gender-a-new-_n_3345965.html
Wood, S. (2013, May 30). Gender Neutral. In Huffington Post Women.
No comments:
Post a Comment