In today’s society, we see that gender gaps continue to highly influence the norms about masculinity and femininity especially in regards to occupations. Due to self-selection bias, children are being taught to adhere to gender rules at a young age. Not only does this greatly impact their confidence, but it also trains them to demonstrate certain behaviors towards various roles and situations. Furthermore, it undermines the potential one has to break from these norms because of the consequences and punishments that could isolate an individual from society.
For my picture, I choose to display a little girl whose fulfilling a male-based job that is associated with having both math and science skills. The tools in her hands symbolize hard work and dirty tasks. In addition, she is working on a male. Although the child is not following the “gender appropriate” stereotype, the viewer can clearly see that the mother is trying to reinforce girly behavior through the ballerina painting in the background. The dress, color, glitters, and even her name on it serves as a reminder that beauty is of great importance and that is what she should lookup to. This is the reason why the frame is positioned above her head. However, I positioned it to the side to emphasize how the girl does not understand the affect of gender differences. Rather her innocence represented in the white wall highlights the lack of this concept that won’t fully dominate her change of actions until adolescence is reached. Another aspect the picture portrays is that ladies should not partake in difficult assignments or roles. Instead, they should be viewed as objects that adhere to men and their desires. Overall, the little girl is clearly confused by trying to follow what is being taught (being a girl/wearing a tutu) from what she enjoys and has a talent in (dentistry).
2 comments:
There is a large discrepancy within specialized fields between men and women. These discrepancies can be traced back to social and media influences in childhood. For example in this photograph the young girl is playing with a play-doh dentist set. This toy being of a man may make this particular toy gender specific as most children like to play with toys of their own sex. Also most toys geared towards young girls are often pink, like the girls clothes and ballerina picture. This photo shows how these toys can categorize boys and girls from a young age and have a profound impact on their future professional interests. I also thought it interesting that the girl is wearing a tutu. I think it shows that a girl does not have to like only boy things in order to be interested in math and science. In fact math and science should not have anything to do with gender. Furthermore I thought it interesting that the medium the girl is playing with is play-doh. I felt as if this could represent how a child is molded by its surrounding environment, and that this girl chose to use it to play dentist.
The tutu painting on the wall could be either she loves the pink colored tutu, or her parents expect he to be a ballerina, having a symbol on the wall to remind her all the time. As we can see this little girl is really into the dentist stuff, she might think she found her interest and talent which is quite opposite as what her family expects her to be or a female's career should be. On the other hand, dentist is a cross gender type work nowadays, it doesn't matter you are a male or a female, being a dentist is absolutely acceptable.
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