The Power of Gender Stereotypes

Most people really don't realize the power behind gender stereotypes or stereotypes of any kind. It's a pretty interesting topic; as a society we really have come a long way, but we still have so far to go.

Even though we have updated our home economic textbooks from the 50's, women in a number of foreign countries have no rights. Have you ever seen one of those textbooks? It instructs our girls to do things like the following:

• greet your husband at the door after a long day at work looking fresh, with newly applied makeup and high heels on
• to bring him his slippers to help him relax
• to have dinner waiting
• to let him talk about his day because his was stressful
• to not share the bad things that happened in your day because it would add to his stress

These are just a few examples of what you could expect to find back "in the day!" We are improving, but so much more needs to be done especially in certain parts of our world.

One of the women I am currently working with...a victim of domestic abuse who is now a single mom...did not want to return to her home country because she would have to sit around her parents' home waiting for a new husband to come along...literally.

One of the reasons we have stereotypes is the way that we process information. In order to make sense of our world we need to break things down into reasonable bits. That's where stereotypes come in handy. They get us into trouble, however, when we use them to perpetuate negative beliefs about a certain group of people.

The cool thing is that as human beings, we also have the ability to step back and re-evaluate those stereotypes. For example, there is still the gender stereotype out there that women can't be good physicists. Another interesting caveat to throw in here is that people tend to live up to expectations.

So...if you tell your daughter that she could never become a physicist because she is a girl...basing the comment on her sex...then she probably won't even consider the profession. That is an incredibly powerful belief... When in reality she might win the next Nobel Laureate in Physics! Encourage all the possibilities! Encouragement is just as powerful.