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Primary school is the place where many of the notions that accompany us in adult life are learned; these include issues such as learning to relate with peers, how to follow a teacher’s guidance, understand the idea of authority and its difference from leadership, and even to learn how to learn. It is also a place where, often unintentionally, we encourage differences between boys and girls and with it, sexism.
We have all heard phrases said to boys in schools like, “You play like a girl,” or “Don’t cry, only girls cry.” It is also common to subject girls to behavior based on the social ideal of the female gender, such as requiring them to dress or act in a certain way so as not to “distract” their male peers. This is how we learn the basics of sexism, which permeates the social vision of how we view the differences between the two sexes.
With this problem in mind, five schools in the UK enlisted the help of the English organization, Lifting Limits, which provides research on the subject and disseminates to the general public the dynamics that constitute gender inequality. These schools participated in a social experiment designed by Lifting Limits to reflect on how gender is socialized and taught in schools, as well as the role these dynamics play in the creation of prejudices.
The program was put to the test in a year-long pilot project involving 270 teachers and staff and 1900 students. These are the results.
One year of the Lifting Limits pilot program
Sexism that has seeped into the educational platform was not easy to detect. It is common to confuse it with values, tradition, the order of things, or simply the way we see the world by default. The schools began to realize this when they saw one of the most fundamental educational resources affected by this imbalance, namely, textbooks and supporting materials. “We took all the books that included girls, and from these, we removed the books where the girls spoke no lines; at the end, we were left with only three books,” said a school staff member from one of the schools participating in the report of results. If female images are not included in the curriculum, or these are scarce, the inevitable result is that only males will be properly reflected in school materials and thereby encouraged to aspire to the future and consider the potential of what they can become; while the girls, on the other hand, will have to use their imagination much harder to see themselves reflected in a curriculum that does not include them in the same proportion. This is curricular invisibility, and it seriously affects the projections of the future for girls.
Similarly, a male child whose characteristics and abilities differ from what is socially expected of him will also have more problems finding his vocation, or he will end up working in a profession that does not fully develop his potential or ability to be happy in his work.
“We took all the books that included girls, and from these, we removed the books where the girls spoke no lines; at the end, we were left with only three books.”
By the end of the program, a significant percentage of children had freed their future aspirations from the restrictions implied by gender bias. At the beginning of the year, 35% of the students thought nursing was a women-only profession; by the end, 71% realized that it is a trade profession for all, regardless of whether they were men or women. And while 71% of students who aspired to pursue jobs oriented to the care of others were girls, the proportion of girls who wanted to enter a scientific field rose to be equivalent to their male counterparts.
Professions commonly associated with the male gender, such as construction, also went through a change in perception more inclined to gender equality. In one school, only 55% of the pupils thought that the building trade was for everyone, whereas at the end of the experiment, this number had climbed to 82%. At the global level, the percentage of students who believed that football was a sport for all (men and women) grew from 22% to 70%. Similarly, the number of male children who thought they might pursue teaching increased from 24% to 42%. This type of awareness is crucial, not only to open the future professional possibilities of the students but also to make women visible in traditionally masculine fields and males in historically female ones.
How to combat subtle sexism in teaching
Teachers and academic support staff were the most surprised by the reflections that came out of the pilot program. In the first audits, they began to detect those “red flags” of sexism that they had not noticed they were projecting to their students. Comments that until then had been considered innocuous such as, “Take it like a man,” “I need a strong young man to help me move this,” or “Your outfit is cool, did your mom pick it out?” are loaded with gender stereotypes and perceptions about what traditionally belongs to female or male behaviors or abilities.
The experiment also served to make people notice that spaces also were presenting the typical generalization that considers the neutral or the predetermined to be masculine. Buildings were full of exhibits about the work and history of “Man” as a term to encompass the whole of humanity. And the achievements of male historical figures were shown who had influenced history as inventors, explorers, artists, and more, without any hint of important female contributions.
The idea of doing the exercise and analysis of this representative practice is not to discredit men whose work has translated into progress and historical advance. It is simply to stop making invisible the work of women who have served the same purpose, letting them live in the same historical universe as their male counterparts. It is possible to talk about the scientific advances of Alfred Nobel in the same space that we comment on the relevance of Marie Curie’s discoveries and contributions; to recognize the genius of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs without leaving Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper in the background; as well as admiring historical figures such as the American General Douglas McArthur while at the same time we recognize the legacy of Nancy Wake or Odette Sansom. These examples are crucial to forming in children the idea that achievements and opportunities are not determined by gender. Therefore, the representations we use in the classroom must not be biased to the point that makes a masculine majority visible and numerically superior to the female.
The key to not falling into casual sexism while playing the role of the teacher is this: Understand that, yes, physical and biological differences between the sexes exist, but they do not have to take the social dimension that they have occupied for so long. According to the report from Lifting Limits, inequality does not exist because we have these discrepancies between the sexes but because socially, we focus more on the differences that enable the advantages of one gender over another instead of looking at the commonalities that would lead to more equitable collaboration. This would be the most important principle to adopt as a teacher when approaching g
ender as one of the most influential elements of the educational experience: focusing on what makes us equal and leads us to cooperation, rather than what makes us different and points to dissidence.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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