THIS-GUY DOESN’T HELP ME: What do we do with gender roles?

During the activity the following workshops have been scheduled for all ages:

Face-to-face activities:

• The strength of stereotypes: The words of care

Gender stereotypes are a set of attributes that are assigned to people because they belong to one category or another. Many babies are already born in stereotypical environments where they build their gender identity based on this differentiating socialization. Before we are born we are communicating with them according to their sex and building non-egalitarian spaces. Babies are treated differently according to their sex, which means that the social construction of their gender identities develops according to the traditional gender stereotypes associated with men and women. The cognitive component of the attitude or stereotype, which is generated through our social interaction, is configured as a culturally defined mental representation, and therefore is subject to social, ideological and cultural determinants (Vázquez and Martínez, 2008).

Discrimination against women and gender biases in preschool age is barely perceptible, but we can see how from the childhood stage, girls and boys begin to show differences in the attribution of social roles to men and women, which increases with age. For this reason it is important to analyse gender stereotypes at an early age.

With this activity we check how minors choose, prefer and/or associate certain toys, activities and colors to girls or boys based on their gender stereotypes.

How do children interact with a baby? What do they assign and plan for their future?

In a playful and fun way we can work with these minors their stereotypes and deconstruct what has already been built.

Words and behaviors associated with care.

Projections of that baby’s life

• “I challenge you: Name three!” Stereotypes in Science, Literature and the Arts.

The activity “I challenge you: Name three!” consists of naming 3 people, first female and then male, who stand out in 3 different areas known to society. These areas will be science, literature and arts. For this, a minimum of 2 people will be requested to participate in a small competition. A poster will be displayed with what should be named and verbalized in turn. It is then that the participants will lift the hand-shaped utensil to ask for the turn. The person or the team that first lifts it and hits it, wins.

This activity aims to highlight the invisibility suffered by women in different public professional fields and how the influence of the sex systemGender has affected us and continues to do so today, resulting in ignorance of women’s participation in many areas.

Special attention will be given to scientific contributions so relevant to humanity made by women.

Guess who discovered what I found

Radio signal detection of a pulsar (Jocelyn Burnell)

First programming algorithm (Ada Lovelace)

Wifi precursor system (Hedy lamarr)

Protein that regulates the growth of the nervous system (Rita Levi-Montalcini)

Telomerase (Carol Greider)

Nuclear fission (Lisa Meitner)

• Who and how history is built

In literature, both children and adults, there has been much debate about how it reproduces gender stereotypes and roles, as well as their role in social change. To such an extent that it is reflecting for a few years on whether there is a literature of and for women, that is, if women we make a literature with specific characteristics compared to literature written by men. You could even go further and think if women read a different kind of literature than men. To this should be added the debate on how would be the female and male characters created by men if they had been written by women and vice versa. These reflections help us to unmask and make visible the construction of the life stories of the characters in the stories and from what gender perspective they have been written. From this base in this activity it is proposed to establish a relationship between literature and gender aspects that we can glimpse in the stories to be used in this proposal.

Specifically, it will be sought to ascertain whether the story presented has been written by a man or a woman.  We will also ask for a position on the sex of the characters depending on the emotions, thoughts and behaviors that appear in the story. The objective of the activity is to identify or analyze this degree of social adequacy between sex and gender

• Who does what? Co-responsibility and perception of justice.

In psychosocial research, the weight of domestic and care responsibility has been linked to the perception of injustice. Thus, in the context of the couple, it has been studied what type of distribution of unpaid work is the one that causes a greater sense of injustice, distribution valued through the percentage of activity carried out by each person (Yago and Martínez, 2009). The realization of this activity raises an assessment of this work in couples who want to participate. Through a series of questions about the distribution of work and care, each participant will assess their investment in hours dedicated to unpaid work (food, order and cleanliness, family management, physical and emotional care of third persons, community participation, activism…), paid (employment, training, transport…) and personal activities (leisure, sport, basic needs such as rest, sleep, eating, hygiene…), as well as the perception of justice that such distribution raises compared to the score obtained by his companion. Research results will be discussed based on the results obtained in each couple. We will also see whether the perception of injustice is influenced by the type of contribution that the other person makes; whether the social recognition of such functions affects; whether the degree to which care work is considered a valuable and positive experience is relevant; what happens when the expectations of the gender roles that one person has over the other are broken… ¡ We will open the scientific-social debate to the world of couple and care!

Online Activities:

• Who is this man?

Participants will be able to answer, by QR code, the online scales for the assessment of the degree of attachment to different dimensions that traditionally have been thought characteristics of masculinity. The score on the scale will inform them of their degree of attachment to the model.

• The sexist behaviors

Participants will be able to answer, by QR code, the validated scale for Spanish experienced sexism (Martínez-Marín and Martínez, 2023). The score on the scale will inform you of the level of sexism you have received in your daily experience.

 

Coordination: María del Carmen Martínez Martínez, Department of Psychiatry and Social Psychology, University of Murcia.

Day and time: 29 September, 18-22 hours.

Location: Patio del Campus de la Merced, University of Murcia.