Feminism Flashcards
Glenys Lobban - Early feminist views
Lobban’s examination of 179 children’s books found that women were only represented in heroic roles in just 35 cases. Men were represented in 71 cases. This example of socialisation helps explain why girls historically lacked ambition, confidence and self-assurance in comparison to boys who were encouraged through books and literature to be motivated, ambitious and sucessful.
The Guardian 2018 article: Must monsters always be male?
Male characters are 2x as likely to take leading roles in children picture books and are given far more speaking parts than females, according to Observer research that shines a spotlight on the casual sexism inherit in children’s reading material. In-depth analysis of the 100 most popular children’s books of 2017 (carried out by this paper and market research company Nielsen), revealsthat majority are dominated by male characters, often in stereotypically masculine roles while female characters are missing from a fifth of the books ranked. 2017 bestseller list includes favourites like The Gruffalo, Guess How Much I Love You and Dear Zoo, in which all animals are referred to as the male pronoun. This approach to gender is equally present in other published bestsellers like You Can’t Take an Elephant on the Bus, The Lion Inside, Supertato, The Day The Crayons Came Home, The Koala Who Could and There’s A Monster in Your Book, none of which contain any female characters.
Must monsters always be male? - Peppa Pig
Lead characters were 50% more likely to be male than female, and male villians were 8x more likely to appear than female villians. Only 1 book: Peppa and her Golden Boots potrayed a sole female villian, acting alone (a duck steals Peppa’s boots and takes them to the moon). Over the course of each book characters who got an opportunity to speak were 50% more likely to be male than female, and male characters outnumbered female characters in almost half the stories that made it into the top 100. Twice as many of the characters who were given a speaking part and a main role were male and there was, on average, 3 male characters for ever 2 female characters - sometimes the ratio is far higher (Mr Men in London - 13 male characters vs 2 female - published in 2015).
Must monsters always be male? - criticisms
Media can put women in empowering positions - Mulan, Moana, Frozen and books for both children and YA can have strong female protaganists.
Michelle Stanworth - Teacher’s attitudes
Interviewed teachers and students across 7 classes in a school humanities faculty. Found that teachers attitudes were responsible for the underachievement of girls lone. Quiet, well-behaved girls were often overlooked and ignored. Teachers held stereotypical views of girls’ futures. One teacher even imagined that one girl would ‘become a personal assistant of someone rather important’. Girls were more likelt to underestimate their abilities and believe they were making slow progress, leading to a self-fuffilinh prophecy of underachievement.
Michelle Stanworth - Criticisms
Girls now chieve higher GCSEs grades than boys on average and teacher’s stereotyping changed to disadvantage boys. Girls are doing great in school.
Heaton and Lawson - Patriarchal ideology
Despite girls outpreforming boys, the education system continues to transmit patriarchal ideology through the hidden curriculum. This is seen in 5 main ways:
- Education resources: tend to focus on male not females usually by featuring more males in textbooks and as main characters in reading books, whilst female characters are just sidekicks or helpless victims
- Boys tend to dominate classroom discussions: they frequently call out and often interrupt girls when they try to speak. Classrooms can be seen as male territory by marginalising girls to the sideline, especially in computing and DT suites, which are usually masculinised as part of the gender domain
- Sexist stereotyping: teachers continue to subtly reinforce a helplessness in girls, by calling upon biys to move heavy furniture and allowing boys to dominate equipment in practicle subjects yet expecting girls to tidy it away
- Marketing of the curriculum: gendered subject choices still exist and are stereotyped for girls and boys (in PE lessons, there is sometimes a lot of varied sport for boys but only specific, fixed sports for girls)
- Lack of female role models: especially in positions of authority in schools.
Heaton and Lawson - Criticisms
BBC News article: call for more female teachers in the curriculm (though there is still bias there).
Sexist stereotyping goes both ways.
Boys are often the ones having anti-school subcultures; suggests that boys feel more out of place than girls.
Are things really this sexist these days? Even if it is true, girls do very well in school, suggesting they are unaffected by these points.
They ignore the initiatives trying to put girls into STEM (GIST,WISE).
Sex is a protected characteristic across the UK, equlity is taken seriously (Equalities Act 2010).
