Three things collided on my social media feed today: an article showing that despite girls outperforming boys at school, the statistics against them in terms of equality go steadily downhill from there. The second was a video from Finland that clearly depicts how young boys see girls as their equals and feel they should get the same rewards for doing the same job as they do and the third was a friend on Twitter, whose 11-year-old son had asked her what a feminist is and once she’d explained he replied, “oh, so I’m one then”.
All these elements can on one level give us hope, but at the same time they are extremely depressing. Because whilst girls are born equal to boys, there’s immediately a whole load of gender stereotyping that is shat right upon them.
It takes a huge amount of parenting in a particular way, a mountain of good teachers and a strong will to shovel your way out of the crap as a female.
In my book, ‘Raising girls who can Boss it’ I talk about the importance of bringing up our daughters to be confident, self-assured individuals. I teach Taekwon-do and when I have a girl in my class who is displaying a bit of attitude, I am pleased. It may challenge me as a teacher, but when channelled, it is exactly what she is going to need to boss life.
Of course the boys need strength of character developed and channelled too, but because of the patriarchal way society is set up, it’s vital that as teachers and parents we are hammering home to both sexes, that boys and girls are equal. It is too easy to get drawn into traps.
Parenting is bloody hard work and we don’t necessarily feel we have the mental capacity to be waging the equality battle. It’s so easy to not notice the gender stereotyping that underlines most things and is all set to sabotage us when we are knackered and wrung out.
I really do believe that the only way we are going to achieve gender equality is by mass education of the young. By the time they leave school the statistics are clearly telling us that it’s too late. The damage has already been done.
I worry that we sense that little boys are emotionally vulnerable and want to protect their fragility, whilst simultaneously seeing their physicality and wanting to enhance it. Or perhaps we are suffocating boys’ emotions, as we perceive them to be weak. Either way it may leave the boys confused.
Boys, just like girls, are emotionally vulnerable, but the way society reacts to this is perhaps the crux of the problem with gender inequality in the adult world. Maybe boys just aren’t sure what they are supposed to be. So while we are telling girls to ‘boss it’, we aren’t quite sure how to deal with the boys and where there’s uncertainty, the familiarity of societal norms and stereotyping prevail.
We have to teach our boys at every opportunity that boys and girls are equal and our expectations of them must reflect it, in the same way as should our expectations of girls. I often get comments from young boys in my Taekwon-do classes that suggest that the girls in the class are weaker. I make sure that I use every comment made like this as an opportunity to educate .
We know that the task for parents and teachers is massive. It’s daunting too. The media is a force to be reckoned with and as it controls our society it is a huge beast to fight.
In sport the experts are always talking about, ‘grass roots’. That is the key to Olympic success. That is how our sports teams will win major tournaments. Train them young. This is how champions are made.
Well I think the same is true of the fight for gender equality. Grass roots is where it has to start for us to win and achieve success.