{"id":5408,"date":"2017-03-08T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T16:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wou.edu\/westernjournal\/?p=5408"},"modified":"2017-03-08T05:53:18","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T13:53:18","slug":"breaking-gender-stereotypes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/breaking-gender-stereotypes\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking down gender stereotypes"},"content":{"rendered":"
By: Jade Rayner\r\nNews Editor<\/pre>\n
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\u2019 Conversation Project.\"\"<\/p>\n
\u201cMind the Gaps: How Gender Shapes Our Lives\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The event was centered around participation from those attending: Jade Aguilar kicked off her presentation by telling the room, \u201cit is a conversation, so I\u2019ll do a lot of talking but I really encourage you to jump in at any time \u2026 so prepare to speak as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
At times the conversation would go beyond questions about gender, and expand to discussing many other factors. In response to this, Aguilar said, \u201cThat\u2019s what makes this both so fascinating and so complicated \u2026 we map gender on things, but sometimes it\u2019s about size, or institutional level power \u2026 or it\u2019s about power within families. It\u2019s hard to unpack it all, because it\u2019s not just one of those, it\u2019s about a lot of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
\u201cthey took a baby, and dressed the baby in yellow \u2026 of course it\u2019s a baby so you can\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Summing up the results of the experiment, Aguilar continued, \u201cThe students that thought it was a little girl were more likely to say that they thought she was scared \u2026 and the ones that thought that it was a little boy were more likely to think it was angry.\u201d<\/p>\n
One participant added that she felt uncomfortable the first time she had a female dentist; Aguilar responded to that explaining, \u201cThere\u2019s no way you can\u2019t be sexist. Even if you\u2019re a woman and you know women can do anything. We have stereotypes, we\u2019ve internalized them, we have a conscious bias \u2026 so you see your female and you think \u2018oh, I hope she knows what she\u2019s doing;\u2019 it\u2019s deep in you.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was the last talk in the Oregon Humanities\u2019 Conversation Project schedule to take place in Salem. The next free community discussion will be \u201cIn Science We Trust?\u201d in Stayton, Oregon on March 22 at the Stayton Public Library. For more information about the project go to oregonhumanities.org<\/a>.
\nContact the author at journalnews@wou.edu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019 Conversation Project. \u201cMind the Gaps: How Gender Shapes Our Lives\u201d a discussion led by Jade Aguilar, an associate professor of sociology […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":937,"featured_media":5443,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/937"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}