Yahoo News With the help of tech, you can be a role model for girls inspire girls
The OECD has just published new research showing that career ambitions are already limited by the age of seven. It is indeed at around six or seven years old that children start looking at jobs as “jobs for women” and “jobs for men”.
If you want to run your own experiment, just show a seven-year-old child a pair of surgeon’s gloves and a pair of marigold gloves, and ask him or her to tell you the names of the person behind those gloves — in 90 per cent of the cases the surgeon is a male and the one doing the dishes is a woman.
Gender stereotypes do not diminish with age, which explains why so many teenage girls start losing interest in some key subjects (particularly science, technology and maths) and sports at around the age of 12. Tackling those stereotypes at an early stage in the lives of children is the only way to ensure women do not continue being limited by them later on.
I chair Inspiring Girls International, a charity that connects teenage girls with female role models all over the world. Whenever I ask teenage girls what they want to do in the future, most of the answers are about traditional jobs such as teachers, nurses, lawyers, or hairdressers — very few are thinking about the many new jobs that now exist. 70 per cent of girls who have met our role models tell us that they have discovered jobs that they had never even considered in the past. The gap between girls’ expectations and the marketplace is very wide.
Today we are unveiling an innovative way to use existing technology to make female role models easily available to girls worldwide: a new tech tool will make it possible for every girl with access to the internet to have access to role models from wherever they are and with just a few clicks.
The platform showcases self-recorded videos from women from all walks of life — and allows girls to connect with the role models in remote talks in schools. Helping to fight gender stereotypes in jobs is as easy as every woman dedicating 10 minutes to recording a video of themselves and being available for a one-hour remote talk — every single woman should be able to do it.
Most educators, international organisations and parents have been aware of the impact of gender stereotypes in young children for almost a decade, and yet most governments and international organisations have taken very little action to fight against them.
The question that comes to mind reading the new research is whether any of us — whether huge organisation with enormous resources like the OECD or each of us in our individual lives — will be ready to take action and actually do something about it. After more than a decade of awareness-raising on gender equality it is vital that we all move into problem-solving mode — with actions not words.
