Gender Equality: A Work in Progress

[planetbrilliant]

Originally Posted by alephzer0

In other words, the only reason this is an issue is because we make it one. If children were treated the same from birth, that is, given the same toys and taught the same things, and not exposed to words like "tomboy" or "sissy" or "girlish" or "boyish", and not separated by gender, then this would not be a problem. Girls and boys should not care about what the "intended" gender of something is. In my ideal world, boys and girls alike would both watch princess movies and power rangers.
I'm not saying to force anything on anyone. They can and should be allowed to be interested in whatever it is they want. But they should be exposed to everything in an equal light. Kids aren't inherently interested in anything based on their gender. Everything they know about that is taught to them.
So if, at the earliest stages, children are integrated and gender diversity is encouraged, we won't have the underrepresentation of women in STEM. We will get as close to 50/50 as humanly possible. But as long as people nudge their boys to be boyish and their girls to be girlish, this will never get anywhere.

Yeah, that's basically the entire problem with gender roles right there. Gender roles kinda suck, but they're a part of our society right now. In order to fix anything we as a society need to work toward abolishing our ideas of what boys should do and what girls should do. By telling girls they can and should only play with 'girl toys', we're telling them that if they want to play with 'boy toys', something is inherently wrong with them (the same goes for boys and 'girl toys' as well), and that's a problem, one that's going to be hard to fix.