Portfolio Week 5 - Recognition of personal prejudices

For this portfolio, I specifically wanted to focus on outcome 4.3 by looking at my own prejudices and how I propose to try and overcome them. To provide some background, when I first went to live in the Netherlands in 2011 I discovered to my surprise that I was more similar to other ‘macho’ Australian men than I thought. I refused to ride on the back of my girlfriend’s bicycle and couldn’t really explain why other than it felt ‘wrong’.

Perhaps similarly, there are many occupations that are gender imbalanced, and sometimes the reasons people think this is the case are just as vague and unhelpful. For example:

“When I started as a nurse student myself, all those decades ago… we were starting to come into the profession in fairly regular numbers, and at one stage we thought that [the percentage of males] is likely to get up to 15, 20, 25 per cent but it never has, and it’s not clear to us as to why that is.”

Source: http://lipmag.com/featured/the-gender-imbalance-in-female-dominated-occupations/

What I think many people could agree on is that all professions should offer people pathways to pursue them, and not be blocked based on societal perceptions of whether that role is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for a particular gender. Perceptions can be formed from a very young age, and as such, I think it’s important that educators, to quote the Hippocratic oath, at least ‘do no harm’ in this regard.

So, in order to challenge some of these stereotypes, I came up with 6 occupations that I perceive as gender-biased in one way or another, and sought out pictures depicting someone from the opposite gender carrying it out. My idea is that these could be used in a room to provide children (and educators such as myself) with examples that run contra to our expectations. 

Here are my 6 posters. Please note that I have linked them rather than uploaded them due to very large file sizes, so they would be suitable for printing.

Female engineer

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/64437699.JPG

·     Female ICT specialist

http://blogs.cisco.com/wp-content/uploads/Women-in-ICT_gallery.jpg

·     Female welder

http://newsroom.lincolnelectric.com/images/9026/media_gallery/JessiCombs8.jpg

·     Male nurse

http://www.jacksonnursing.com/uploads/2011/07/aa-male-nurse.jpg

·     Male early childhood teacher

http://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/life/parent/2013/02/07/men_stand_out_as_daycare_workers/nicholas_earle.jpg

·     Male dancer

http://balletnews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/audition-attitude.jpg

Just the act of seeking these images out was insightful. I found some of them very difficult to find a positive image of, for example female construction worker images seem to be largely caricatures or ‘sexy’ Halloween outfits, so I had to scrap that category.

I also found some of the male ballet dancer photos confronting. I think this is partly because many of these were scantily clad, but also I think part of this is due to my own prejudices, something that I will need to continue to work on.