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My high school friend had a poster listing ways in which gender stereotypes are bad for both boys and girls.
One item that stuck out to me was something like "For every girl whose told she can't be smart there's a boy who feels pressured to know everything."
One item that stuck out to me was something like "For every girl whose told she can't be smart there's a boy who feels pressured to know everything."
And I thought: "Is that even a current stereotype? If anything it's the opposite: girls are smart/good students, boys are dumb. Maybe there's a stereotype that exceptional geniuses are male, but do boys feel *pressured* to be geniuses bc of gender roles? Doesn't feel like it."
It seemed to suggest a picture of how gender roles work that just didn't fit the world I saw. And I've seen lots of that, claims about what boys/girls are 'taught' and what 'society' does or does not encourage, or what is/isn't 'systemic' that I just don't buy.
Another example I've remembered for years bc it annoyed me: an ad showing a girl growing up, her parents keep telling her she's "pretty" while discouraging her love of SCIENCE, ends with "Isn't it time to tell her she's 'pretty brilliant,' too?"
People tried to imagine what girls getting *systemically* discouraged from science looks like and it was parents chiding their daughters for making paper mache planets.
Meanwhile, I went to the website the ad was promoting, followed it's links to studies...
Meanwhile, I went to the website the ad was promoting, followed it's links to studies...
One study argued that little girls are *more likely* to be told that they're 'smart' in school, while little boys are more likely to be told they need to 'work harder,' and therefore little girls get a 'fixed mindset' and *that's* why they don't go into science.
I don't know if that's true, but if it is it'd be 'systemic' in a chaos-theory-ish 'disparate forces and circumstances interacting' way, rather than what people seem to mean by 'systemic misogyny,' and I think that happens a lot.
