Nothing will change while parents are so sexist

[12Thorns]

Just in the last half hour on MN I’ve read posts from a pregnant mother wanting to know if her ‘gender scan’ is likely to be correct before she goes shopping for her newborn, and a mother arguing 7 boys should be allowed to play football at break times when they are excluding a boy with ADHD, and not half a thought for the girls being not only excluded from the game, but also from the space the game is played in, and we all know football takes up most of the playing space available

what hope is there for any sort of equality when such attitudes are so deeply ingrained and passed on to babies and children?

I think most people like things the way they are and it wont change.

Really....

I don't think dressing a baby in certain colours is a prelude for a life of sexist stereotypes being forced on them by parents necessarily. I think it becomes an issue when the child is old enough to choose what they want to wear and are told nope that's for boys or that's for girls. Maybe the girls didn't want to play football? There are activities girls like to do in the playground that boys tend to not join in with- it's always boys things like football though that are seen as more aspirational so it's a bigger deal if girls aren't playing. If they were excluded from doing so or if it did indeed take up an entire playground, yes that's something you'd hope the school would intervene in- but there's a lot of assumptions in there.

Sure some parents do force ideologies, but there's far more out there in society at large that need crushing before any real change will be made.

Girls can play football too. Very sexist of you to suggest it's a boys game.

I know girls can play football. Many of them want to. My point is that they were being excluded, thoughtlessly, as a matter of course, as if it was the most normal natural thing in the world

How do you know they were being excluded? Did someone sit them down and tell them they weren't allowed to play football?

When was the last time you went anywhere near a primary school? Our school does not allow football at break times for precisely the reasons given, which may give the OP hope.

I agree with the op. No, of course no one sat down and told the girls they couldn't play football. They didn't need to. Because sexism is much more insidious than that and starts much younger. I saw something once where people were recorded playing with babies. The first baby dressed in pink. The second in blue. It was interesting to see how this influenced what they played with the babies eg dolls vs cars. But what they didn't know was that their clothes had been swapped.

There is nothing to suggest the girls on that thread want to play football. Yes it is wrong if they want to and are excluded but your making an issue of something we know nothing about. Having worked in many primary schools I have never seen one tell a girl who wants to play football at break time they can’t. Infact thankfully as a society as a whole womens sport is finally starting to be taken seriously.

A baby girl wearing a dress isn’t going to cause any long term issues either.

Because if the casual assumption that out of the whole class, no girls were involved. That’s not going to happen by chance. Many girls want to play, most, if they are encouraged. Statistically, you are just not going to get an entire cohort of girls not playing football if they are given the same opportunity and resources as the boys

There was no info in the thread about whether the girls were being excluded. Saying that, I have a DD on a girls football team, she had previously played football in a mixed team and the some of the boys would give a running commentary on how shit they thought she was so there is no way she would have joined in with school break time football. It may be that the same kids would tell other boys they were shit too, I don’t know. She loves football with the girls team and plays 3 times a week.

Surely what’s sexist is wanting everything gender neutral? Nothing wrong with being a girl/boy and they can wear whatever they want - the clothes don’t make the person!

Sexists have a role model in Boris Johnson, and whilst he is in number 10, changes are very unlikely.

I follow this Instagram account about sexism in kids clothes, toys etc and a lot of it is like ‘there aren’t enough girls clothes with dinosaurs on’, ‘I have to buy from the girls section as my son wants a unicorn top, why can’t boys tops have unicorns on’…. But if you buy your boy a unicorn top then it IS a boy’s unicorn top? There should just be a ‘kids clothes’ section, not a boy/girl section. Asking for girls/boys clothes to have more of the ‘opposite sex’s motifs on is surely just playing in to the stereotypes by saying ‘I want a boy motif on a girl’s top’. Can’t get my head around it and it persists so I think I’m missing something.

I completely agree with you OP. And it does start from birth and it does matter. When he was very young (just a few months) I was out with my boy and he had on a gorgeous pink baby grow - the number of people that were shocked to find out he was a boy was a real eye opener. One woman was actually rude enough to say to me me 'what's his name... Nancy?'
Also now he's a toddler and struggling to come to terms with emotions, I've had countless other mum's say things like 'oh typical boy'
It's sad and no, I don't see how things are going to change.

I agree with you OP. I am shocked by the ways many of my intelligent and capable friends treat their boys and girls so differently. I don't think they even know they are doing it.

I agree.

Eg. Person I was speaking to was lovely and would never judge anyone but said they wanted to get married and take their DP name as it would give them more respect from others. So whilst not being sexist herself, she recognised others are and enforced the system. I did tell her to smash the patriarchy, and not to support it!

The million times I've had women who throw out casual lines like "us girls.....(insert some sexist notion of what girls can or can't do)". I suppose they're trying to find a connection but I find it bloody insulting (the worst example was not being good at maths - I'm actually amazing at maths thanks).

So many little micro sexist attitudes or just confirming to the patriarchy because that's just the way things are. I probably do some myself if I'm not paying attention.

We dress baby girls in pink and pretend it doesn't matter even though it's known that will affect how adults interact with the child

Isn't she pretty .. teaching looks matter
Oh be careful dear ... teaching fear

But many refuse to see it so nothing changes

You're just assuming the girls were excluded. There's a good chance it's only boys in the friendship group. If the girls want to play football they could play separately to the boys if they weren't part of the same friendship group.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a certain type of clothing for a boy or a girl. That's not what sexism is...

Basically:

Things typically thought of as boys stuff = fine
Things typically thought of as girls stuff = lesser

Hope that helps.

On the football point - it’s completely true based on my dd’s experience, and the research backs it up.

Summary (for those who don’t want to read the whole thing, but it is very much worth a read):

This article focuses on the involvement of boys and girls in playground football. It is based on research conducted with 10- to 11-year-old pupils at two state primary schools in London. Boys and girls were found to draw on gender constructs that impacted variously on their involvement in playground football. The performance of masculinity through football translated into heavy investments for many boys who took any opportunity to prove both their knowledge and expertise in the sport. This investment rested on the derision and exclusion both of non-footballing boys and of girls. Associations between humility, restraint, niceness and femininity also had a negative impact on girls’ involvement in the sport. Prohibitions around desire and determination proved especially damaging to girls’ attempts at ownership and assertiveness within the game. This was compounded by boys’ co-optation of football as ‘inherently masculine’. Girls’ resistance strategies to male domination of the football pitch tended to focus on disruption and rarely resulted in equal participation. This was due to opposition from powerful boys as well as entrenched gendered zones of play that granted boys automatic rights to football and girls only marginal tenancy.

www.researchgate.net/publication/248975381_'Why_can't_girls_play_football'_Gender_dynamics_and_the_playground

You seem to think Parents made girls only play with dolls. We didn't.
My children wore what they wanted, and played any game they wanted. Got dirty and were tomboys, of the very best kind.
By being so militant about things in a way your forcing Trans onto your children, telling untruths and causing identity crisis onto easily lead minds.
In a decade or two your going to have to deal young adults who find themselves in a while load of trouble, unable to bear children due to medical meddling, after all this is not the first time I know better experts got things so very very wrong.

People don't realise how insidious it is - how they start thinking differently about their baby depending on what sex it is, the impact that the sea of pink that descends about a baby girl has, how it becomes not a choice but the only thing that is being offered, how girls wear be kind teeshirts and boys are given dinosaurs roaring, how all these little things build up to the point where girls and boys police themselves into behaving how society expects girls and boys to behave. And don't play football in the yard as that's not what "normal" girls do. No one needs to formally exclude the girls, they know how they are expected to behave, it takes courage and support to go against the grain.

Walked into a big sports shop to buy gear for my girl last week: the "choice" was black, grey or varying shades of pink from all the major sports brands. Try buying sports clothes even as an adult without having some pink accent on it - it's exhausting. I'm generally left with few options once I exclude the pink. I mentioned it to a small shop owner once and she told me they keep telling their suppliers women who play sport don't need or want everything in pink but it's like talking to a brick wall.

There is research on the public space available (or not) to girls, how they are expected to make themselves smaller to facilitate the needs of boys, how their confidence starts to fall as they hit secondary school and how this impacts on all their life choices. And yes, parents reinforce this. I refused a sex scan and was asked in baby shops how would I know what clothes to buy for a new born. It's telling that people call them gender scans as it is bascially enabling them to start gender stereotyping from even before their baby is born.

The thing with football isn't football per se.

It's that it takes up so much of the playground space, that non players are stuck with the margins, as there's usually no space for other vigorous games, and a big area is no-go. And depressingly often it's dominated by one sex, because of the kind of early stereotyping described above.

All DC should be able to use the playgrounds, and I think that does mean limiting large games such as football (maybe only a couple of days a week, or during one playtime a day only)

Unnecessary gender roles in children are much more evident that they were when I was growing up in the 1960s/70s - before pinkification and when nearly everything was handed down between siblings and cousins.

I once overheard a woman discussing how she had been told she was having a boy so had bought everything blue

Baby was born and it was a girl so she'd had to go and re buy everything again in pink. Including the pram

Crazy

Nothing will change because people don't really want it to.

They especially don't want it to when it comes to employment/childcare

Quite happy to keep the status quo of sahm / working dad