Gender roles- subconscious expectations- random musing

[CornChips]

... I am just musing on this. I am a feminist,my DH is a feminist, yet yesterday I was handed an empty paper plate at school and asked to bake a cake for the Christmas fair. I came home grumbling ' I seriously don't have time to bake any cakes' when DH said casually 'oh that's okay. I'll bake a cake'.

That floored me and I cannot help but wonder why. DH is a much better baker than me anyway, but at the time it did not occur to me that with the two of us at home today that it might not be me who had to bake a cake.

It is making me think about my own entrenched assumptions really.

[ChunkyPickle]

I wonder if it was entrenched gender assumptions, or entrenched respect for the authority of teachers left-over from school.

Someone handed you a plate, and told you to bake a cake. Your head heard that you have to bake a cake, it was an order to you, so you assumed you had to do it. Now that you've thought about it, you realise that the order was for a cake, not that you have to bake it, but the school-child in your brain just heard an order and followed it to the letter.

Kind of the same way you automatically take things like socks that are handed to you, and end up walking to school still with them because you haven't switched on yet and realised you can put it down.

[EBearhug]

You can check out your own unconscious bias here - implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

We all have them - but I do think just being handed a cake and asked to bake would have also meant you didn't really have a choice in quite the same way as if they'd asked for volunteers.

[SevenZarkSeven]

Oh yes to chunkypickle - many of us are socialised to do as we're told right? That rings true for me.

Incidentally if that had happened to me I would have come home and slammed it down and issued my usual "why do all these primary schools think it's sodding 1956 and there is a woman sitting at home constantly available to bake / attend sports day with 1 day's warning / pull a costume out of her arse at a moments notice".

And DH would have sympathised and made me a cup of coffee and said he'd bake the cake as after all he is good at that stuff and I would have asked him to do it anyway, and then I'd have sat on the sofa and fired up MN

[CornChips]

I wonder yes about being socialised. Mind you, they did not 'tell' me as in an order, it was a request, not a telling, IYSWIM.

I am just not great at putting unexpected things into my day....

Anyway, I pottered about on MN finished a work project and DH made a rose and pistachio Victoria sponge. :)

www.jamieoliver.com/magazine/recipes-view.php?title=rose-aamp-pistachio-victoria-sandwich-sp

Checking out that link now EBearhug

[SevenZarkSeven]

I will share your DHs recipe with my DH lol