In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re going to discuss how teachers and homeschooling parents can educate their children or students about gender equality. This is because gender identity and perceptions of others start in early childhood. Children need to know that gender roles do not shape their identity, capacity, or professional preferences.Teaching gender equality for kids is a vital topic in early childhood.
The clear benefit of reducing gender inequality is improved mental health, self-confidence, and dignity of both men and women, but there are other far-reaching benefits to society in general.
According to the International Labor Organization, increasing gender equality would also increase the employment rates, improving the global economy. Other studies confirm the link between gender inequality and child mortality, even gender inequality and lack of environmental awareness.
Considering these important implications, we must be prepared to revise the educational curriculum and implement practices that positively influence children’s cognitive and emotional development. Experts agree that even the little things, like exposing kids to non-stereotypical characters through literature, movies, or games and dividing work-assignments (also at home) equally, can redefine their behavior and perception of gender roles.
Nonetheless, that’s not all you can do! Keep reading to find out how to implement the topic of gender equality for kids in formal education regardless of age!
Teaching Gender Equality for Kids
Before you start teaching anything, the golden rule is to test the waters. If you naively ask kids to tell you the difference between boys and girls, beyond physical characteristics, you’ll be surprised to hear that even preschoolers have already formed some stereotypes. Unfortunately, this is usually learned from hearing or seeing how adults behave or while watching TV.
What are the most common stereotypical perceptions that young children can have? Here are several examples:
- Boys are stronger and faster than girls.
- Boys like blue colors and girls like pink.
- Boys like to play with trucks, while girls like dolls.
- Girls wear makeup, boys don’t.
- Girls gossip more.
You might not get these answers immediately, but if you ask tricky questions like who’s smarter, or who likes sports more to encourage them to share their opinions, you’ll get them talking.
The Starting Point
Now that you’ve evaluated your students’ or kids’ way of thinking, where do you go from there? Our advice is to use that knowledge as a starting point and introduce the topic of gender equality in age-appropriate language. What does this mean?
Well, let’s say that your students or children have already formed some gender-based stereotypes. You can proceed by explaining how those kinds of assumptions are faulty observations and not real knowledge. Continue to explain that all people make these faulty assumptions, even in situations when we feel like we really know it’s true – it’s not. So, how do we recognize that we’re wrong? We’ll recognize our mistakes by learning about gender, gender roles, gender bias, and discrimination. Finally, make sure to explain to kids why it’s important to learn these things – our mistakes and words can hurt other people and put them in a very bad position!
On the other hand, if your students or kids haven’t been exposed to gender-based stereotypes, proceed by telling them the typical examples that they might hear in the future. Then continue to describe how such examples are wrong and bad, just like we’ve explained in the previous paragraph.
With this introduction, you’re ready to dive deeper into the topics you’ve just mentioned.
How to Teach About Gender to Preschoolers
Let’s start from the most basic concept, the first thing you need to explain to kids is gender. What exactly is gender and how it’s different than sex?
Most parents and teachers dread this conversation thinking it might get uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to be like that! By showing pictures of different kids, ask kids to guess whether they’re a boy or a girl, and make sure to include non-stereotypical photos of kids such as a boy dressed in pink, playing with a doll, or with long hair and vice versa. Regardless of whether they answered right, ask them – how do we decide who’s a boy and who’s a girl?
They might be confused a little, or assume that the differences that are easily observable, like “boys don’t wear dresses” are somehow determining their gender identity. This is completely normal and understandable. In early childhood development, around 5 to 8 years old, children form their identity by comparing themselves to others – defining an “I” versus “everyone else.”
You can see how this developmental process without proper knowledge and guidance from adults can lead to stereotypical behavior – “If I am a girl and she is a girl and we both wear pink dresses, but he is a boy and wears only pants, then a girl is someone who wears dresses and a boy is someone who wears pants.”
Another example of this phenomenon is when you introduce your child to a friend who’s a doctor and they say all confused “But, doctors wear white coats!” If they only see doctors in the hospital, they’ll assume that the concept “doctor” means someone who wears a white coat.
The easiest way to prevent such misguided assumptions is to, first, expose kids to diversity, and then explain why these differences make sense and are okay.
Biological Sex
When it comes to gender and people’s sex, explain to kids that boys and girls can be very different because what makes someone a girl or a boy is their biological sex only. This is a word that describes the differences in bodies between men and women. For example, men are usually bigger and taller than women, they’re also hairier, especially on the face – men can grow a beard, but women can’t. On the other hand, women have bigger breasts and wider hips. They can be pregnant and give birth. But, we can’t always see these things when we look at someone, which is why people have invented another word – gender.
Gender
While a person’s biological sex tells us whether they’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, a person’s gender tells us how most people will look or behave based on their gender.
Make sure to highlight the very nature of gender – it’s not accurate and it doesn’t tell us how things should be, but only how things typically are. The problem with this is that while it’s very easy to spot these characteristics when we see someone, they can be misleading. Most girls wear dresses, while most boys don’t, but if some boy wants they can also wear a dress, and this is okay.
Another way you can make the distinction between sex and gender is to tell kids that sex is what people can or can’t do, while gender is what people most frequently do or don’t do. A good example of this would be – women can’t grow a beard even if they wanted to, but they can have short hair! Men can’t get pregnant and give birth, but they can wear dresses if they want to!
This brings us to the next step – gender equality as people can do things that are not typical for their gender if they wanted to!
Definition: Gender Equality for Kids
To give children a memorable definition of gender equality, make connections between the concepts that we’ve already defined. For instance, we’ve just mentioned that gender refers to differences that don’t apply to all people and differences that can be changed – if women want to have short hair, they have the right to do so!
This is why gender equality means that all people have the same rights! If men want to wear dresses, they have the right to do so! If they want to wear makeup, they have the right to do so! If women want to wear pants, they have the right to do so! If they want to play with trucks and cars, they can do so!
Keep the examples simple and relevant for the child’s age so they can understand the main idea behind the concept.
According to UNICEF, gender equality means that all children have the same rights, resources, opportunities, and protections that can help them fulfill their full potential.
Explaining Gender Bias and Discrimination
While the definition of gender equality sounds great, children might ask, why do we need it? Does it mean that sometimes boys and girls don’t have the same rights? Now that kids know about gender and gender equality, take some time to discuss these things, encouraging kids to think of examples when boys and girls don’t have the same rights.
If you put it like this, it might sound too abstract for little children, which is why you may show kids pictures of people who break the stereotypical grande roles – a man with long hair, holding a doll, wearing a dress, a tiara, or anything else that’s typically considered feminine. Also, a woman with short hair, wearing a suit, lifting weights, fixing a car, etc. After this, ask kids are these pictures weird or funny, and why? If men and women had the same rights to do everything they wanted to, why do we think that some things are funny or weird? This is a great introduction to the concept of gender bias and discrimination.
Ask kids whether they would feel good if other kids would laugh at them. Then proceed to explain that when we treat people differently, when we accept one thing as normal and another thing as funny or weird, we’re doing something that’s called discrimination. And, when we’re discriminating against someone just because he’s a boy who wants to do a thing that most girls do or the other way around, we say that we have a gender bias.
It would be a smart idea to show kids examples of sayings or conversations and to encourage them to recognize whether people are discriminating against someone based on their gender. Make sure all the examples are relevant for the kids’ age and their everyday life.
Teaching Feminism: How to Explain Feminism to a Child?
At this point in the lecture, it would be very easy and it would logically make sense to associate our history with the development of the concept of gender equality.
Once you’re showing kids examples of sentences or conversations, you can slowly move toward older commercials and typical conversations or speeches when women didn’t have the right to vote, to work, or even to study. If kids understand the concepts we’ve covered so far, they’ll react to these examples. Tell them that they’re right and that we know this now, but unfortunately, this was not the case a long time ago.
Briefly explain to kids how people in the past didn’t know a lot of things. They couldn’t explain these things as we do now, so they believed that there are many differences between boys and girls – which is false! In our article, “The Parent’s Guide to Teaching Kids About Cultural Diversity and Inclusion”, we go into the details of how being uneducated and not knowing things can lead to stereotypes and prejudices, so don’t hesitate to check it out if you want more information regarding this part.
Continue to give examples of the things that people believed in the past and all the things that women were not allowed to do, including simple things like wearing pants, going out with friends, owning property, voting, and so on.
So, how and when did things change? When did we realize that we need gender equality?
Here’s when you introduce the concept of feminism. While the women in the past that first demanded equal rights are known as suffragettes, belonging to the Suffragette movement, they are also considered feminists, it’s just that the word feminism was not that popular in the past.
Feminism is the belief that all people are equal in social, economic, and political aspects. According to this definition, a feminist is a person who beliefs that all people, both boys and girls, are equal, having the same rights in society.
As we mentioned, in the past, people didn’t know better and they didn’t believe all people are equal, which is why those that did believe we’re all equal were called feminists.
Check out our worksheet bundles on Suffrages, Women’s Equality Day, as well as our article on Women’s History Month for Kids, to get more details on how to teach kids about feminism and gender equality.
Examples of Gender Bias and Discrimination Through History
To support your arguments that people in the past discriminated on the basis of gender and were biased, you need to give real examples to kids, bringing the topic closer to them and making it more relatable. In addition, you’ll also pay respect to the women who were overlooked in history, yet deserve the world to know and celebrate them.
In the following paragraphs, we’ll describe four inspirational women through history, but there are many more, which you can find browsing through our “Inspirational Women Through History” section on our website.
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin is probably the most frequently mentioned name when it comes to sexism in science and gender inequality. Why? Well, when the time comes, kids will learn that Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, without ever learning the name of Rosalind Franklin. The reason why some people argue that this is unfair is that Rosalind Franklin also worked on the same problem. It was her picture and information that Watson and Crick used without permission to publish their discovery.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie was not quite overlooked as the greatness of her work could not be overshadowed, yet she too faced a lot of injustices and obstacles in her life due to sexism. Her application to the French Academy of Sciences was rejected just because she was a woman, and she also wasn’t allowed to study in Poland, so she attended an underground, unofficial university.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is not a name we know all too well, even though Burnell’s work is considered “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century.” She discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. After her discovery, Burnell faced extreme discrimination just because she was a woman, and had to battle sexism to pursue her career. Her colleague Antony Hewish was honored with a Nobel Prize, instead of her.
Ada Lovelace
Another woman with a genius mind is Ada Lovelace who’s today known as the “the first computer programmer” – a profession which even today is dominated by men. Ada lived a long time ago, from 1815 to 1852, and people seem to forget her legacy when they tell the story of computer science. However, you can help future generations to celebrate and remember her name.
How to Promote Gender Equality in Education?
Throughout the article, we mentioned some ways you can promote gender equality in education, but there are many ways to teach kids about gender equality. Here’s what you can do:
- Be a role model. Treat children equally and objectively. If you see stereotypical behavior, address it and explain why it’s not okay.
- Revise the reading materials and the required literature before assigning it to kids. Make sure it’s not sexist. Try to include as much diverse materials as you can, so you can expose children to different situations where the gender roles are not traditionally illustrated.
- Include both boys and girls in sports activities equally.
- Include some gender equality activities whenever possible.
- Use gender-neutral language when referring to children.
- Include many toys for kids to choose from and make sure to encourage kids to play with different toys regardless of their gender.
- Don’t use colors associated with gender, or make sure to mix the colors – boys’ names in pink, girls in blue, etc.
Gender Equality Activities for Kids
In our articles about Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, we composed a detailed list with several activities that promote awareness and gender equality, so don’t hesitate to check them out.
In the meantime, here are a couple of activities on gender equality for kids:
- Are you acting like a man or a woman? – Understanding the stereotypical expectations in society and being comfortable breaking from those predefined roles. For this activity, divide the students into two groups and let them create a list with two columns. In the first column, the students try to identify what people think women should act, and in the other how men should act.
- Man’s work or woman’s work? – Give students a checklist with different occupations or housework tasks and ask kids to write next to each occupation whether it is a woman’s work or a man’s work. After this, have a discussion about why we perceive some occupations as men’s or typically women’s jobs and whether both sexes can actually do that job.
- Watching a gender equality documentary.
- Drawing an inspirational figure from the opposite sex.
- Participating in reverse role activities – girls do boy’s typical activities, while boys do typical girl’s activities. For example, all girls play football, while all boys dance and cheer (for one day).
Teaching Resources on Gender Equality
We can’t cover everything in this article, so here are some amazing resources for you to find more information and dive deeper into this topic.
- World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education by United Nations.
- Worksheet bundles and autobiographies of inspirational women through history.
- Girls into science: a training module by Clegg, Andrew.
- Little Leaders by Vashti Harrison.
- Diversity and Marginalisation in Childhood: A Guide for Inclusive Thinking 0-11 by Paula Hamilton.
- No Difference Between Us: Teaching children about gender equality, respectful relationships, feelings, choice, self-esteem, empathy, tolerance, and acceptance by Jayneen Sanders.
- Gender Equality in Primary Schools by Helen Griffin.
- Why Gender Matters, Second Edition: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences by Leonard Sax M.D. Ph.D.
Before You Leave
Gender equality is a highly important topic that should be introduced in early childhood. As we’ve seen in this article, that’s not a challenge once you have the right information. Hopefully, our article provided just that. We tried to explain everything in detail and shared some relatable and simple examples that you can use for kids of all ages.
Nevertheless, you can find much more information on our website, so don’t hesitate to follow the links and download any bundle that seems relevant. All of our worksheets are easy to edit and follow, saving you a lot of time and energy. Best of all, kids will learn while having fun!
Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter and visit our blog because new insightful pieces are coming soon!
