By: Jade Rayner News Editor
A small, but lively group gathered at the Lord and Schryver Conservancy in Salem on Friday, March 3, to attend one of the final installments of the Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project.
“Mind the Gaps: How Gender Shapes Our Lives” a discussion led by Jade Aguilar, an associate professor of sociology at Willamette University, discussed the ways in which gender affects every aspect of people’s lives from the moment they are born.
The event was centered around participation from those attending: Jade Aguilar kicked off her presentation by telling the room, “it is a conversation, so I’ll do a lot of talking but I really encourage you to jump in at any time … so prepare to speak as well.”
At times the conversation would go beyond questions about gender, and expand to discussing many other factors. In response to this, Aguilar said, “That’s what makes this both so fascinating and so complicated … we map gender on things, but sometimes it’s about size, or institutional level power … or it’s about power within families. It’s hard to unpack it all, because it’s not just one of those, it’s about a lot of things.”
Aguilar pointed out the way in which everyone, even those that regard both women and men as equals, has internalized sexist thoughts. She explained this by using a study done on a baby playing with a jack-in-the-box toy as an example:
“they took a baby, and dressed the baby in yellow … of course it’s a baby so you can’t tell [the gender], and they took a little video of it, and they did the jack-in-the-box. The jack-in-the-box popped up, the baby was startled, it made out a large cry.”
The video was then shown to two different classrooms; one class was told that the baby was a girl, the other a boy; both were asked to describe what the baby was feeling.
Summing up the results of the experiment, Aguilar continued, “The students that thought it was a little girl were more likely to say that they thought she was scared … and the ones that thought that it was a little boy were more likely to think it was angry.”
One participant added that she felt uncomfortable the first time she had a female dentist; Aguilar responded to that explaining, “There’s no way you can’t be sexist. Even if you’re a woman and you know women can do anything. We have stereotypes, we’ve internalized them, we have a conscious bias … so you see your female and you think ‘oh, I hope she knows what she’s doing;’ it’s deep in you.”
This was the last talk in the Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project schedule to take place in Salem. The next free community discussion will be “In Science We Trust?” in Stayton, Oregon on March 22 at the Stayton Public Library. For more information about the project go to oregonhumanities.org.
Contact the author at journalnews@wou.edu
