Gender 101 Reflection

The gender of a person is something that is discussed from even before people are born. When someone is pregnant we want to know what the gender of the baby is, and we even do this with animals. We see a cute dog or cat and we ask the owner what the gender of the dog is. We want to know because we grew up in a society where you either have to be a boy or a girl. With this thought in mind, the communicative contexts that I have learned in this course that seem to really have an impact on shaping me as a gendered being would be language, education and work.

Before this course, I have never actually thought about gendered language and I did not know what it meant. Learning about it made so much sense and everything I read seemed true. In the Gender 101 videos, they talked about how society tends to use gendered words to define a person but it is not actually necessary. We tend to say “he,” or “she” when we can just say “they.” A sentence my mom would always tell me was “little girls should be seen and not heard.” She would always say this when I was being too loud and I always wondered if this sentence also applied to boys. I don’t think it did, because in a way boys were expected to be loud. As a child, I was always told things like “little girls should do this,” or “behave like …show more content…
I say this because some of the jobs I did was mostly female dominant occupation and others were neutral. Two jobs that I have done were dealing with children, and working with children is deemed a female dominant occupation. There were a lot of females at those two jobs and it is interesting to look back and think notice it. At the time, I thought it was nothing to notice because it was just something that was know. “Females are the ones that are more likely to be with children.” When you look back, you can probably count on your hands how many male teachers you’ve had from elementary to high school, but you won’t be able to count the female