Improving gender balance in Scottish schools

[Aesopfable]

Started looking at the EIA for reopening of schools here , under sex:

“15) We see evidence of gender segregation in participation in different subjects in the senior phase at school with, for example, females more likely to take up subjects such as languages and males tending to take up subjects such as computing. This gender segregation persists in courses in further and higher education and in apprenticeships and in the labour market and leads to women’s poorer labour market outcomes, gendered pay inequality, and the gender pay gap. We do not know if gender segregation in subjects and the sexist bullying and harassment which can contribute to this segregation will have been exacerbated in the context of home learning and lockdown or not.”

And they offer a couple links to resources:
education.gov.scot/improvement/learning-resources/improving-gender-balance-3-18
education.gov.scot/media/as0hl3fz/sci38-igb-a-literature-review.pdf

I couldn’t find a definition of what they think gender is. It is just muddled. They go one about ‘gender stereotypes’ but isn’t that just gender? At times referring to sex and sexism so it is not clear whether ‘gender’ is a replacement for sex.

Ooo, I found a definition here

What is the difference between sex and gender?
^Sex and gender are different concepts. Sex is determined at birth, is based on physiological differences, and is usually fixed: a person is born as a man, woman or intersex. Gender refers to sets of learned behaviours. These are socially defined characteristics and expectations attributed to being male or female. Gender is fluid and can change.
The challenge comes if we confuse sex and gender and start to view gender as innate. Gender is not fixed and should not prevent girls or boys from participating in an activity or making a life choice. In reality there are very few activities or choices that are not open to both boys and girls.^

Sex usually fixed?? Determined at birth? And that third sex ‘intersex’.

Actually can anyone interpret this for me:

education.gov.scot/media/khsi24hr/gender-stereotyping-intro.pdf

How can they basically define gender as good and gender stereotyping as bad when they are both the same thing?

It's terribly muddled. If you subscribe wholesale to transgender ideology, as the author(s) of this seemingly do, effectively addressing the harms of sex stereotypes and sex role stereotypes is almost impossible.

For starters they explain that sex and gender are not the same thing, but then they go on to use gender both when they mean sex and when they mean the stereotypes associated with our sex. And do so every single time.

Presenting assertions without evidence is never a good look, even the references at the end cannot make up for that. They seem to have gone for form over substance here - pretty infographics make for a better leaflet of course, but when you don't know which reference goes with which assertion, meaning you'll have to read or at least check all of the references even if you're just interested in one aspect, it's less likely the reader will investigate further.

They also use sex segregation when that is not what they mean, but don't suggest sex segregation when that is a possible solution to the problem.

Yes. It is a mess.

Not sure it is quite ‘on message’ for gender ideology though: it says gender is not innate.

Babies are not born man, woman or intersex, they are born male, female or intersex. Man and woman describe adults not infants.

So if anyone who likes maths gets assigned to the boy category (for example), how do they square that with getting more girls interested in maths?

The lack of logic is bizarre.

@Aesopfable

Yes. It is a mess.

Not sure it is quite ‘on message’ for gender ideology though: it says gender is not innate.

You are quite right, they don't.

I was judging that from the way they write the while thing, especially how they write about gender identity as if every child has one. I reckon this is what happens when you buy into the ideology that everyone has a "gender identity" based on internalising sex stereotypes and sex role stereotypes and also understand that sex stereotypes and sex role stereotypes are harmful to us.

Can't square that circle.

If those stereotypes are an intrinsic, innermost part of every child's personality, does a teacher even have the right to seek to help the child overcome them? What particular stereotypes are worse for particular children? Who decides which need to be overcome? And teachers will of course have a "gender identity" too. Can those who are themselves walking collections of stereotypes really be expected to help children overcome that which they couldn't?

Of course, if you ground your efforts in addressing stereotypes on the many decades of research into childhood development (which surprise surprise never reported finding this phenomenon called a "gender identity" in the many tens of thousands of studied children or their adult selves), you can indeed address stereotypes. If you understand they are not an intrinsic, internal matter but societal norms and expectations imposed on us from the outside, you can indeed help children understand that they do not have to meet those norms and expectations and instead forge their own path in life.

This leaflet though won't help a single teacher to do that.

"Girls, women, boys and men can have both female and male characteristics. Gender is not binary and is more complex than being simply female or male. It can instead be viewed as a spectrum, with people identifying at various points along it, or at multiple points at the same time (non-binary gender). Some people feel they do not fit within the spectrum at all (agender)."
Isn't that just describing personality.

I don’t understand how they could write that document and not think ‘hang on a minute! this doesn’t make any sense!’

@Mumofstanley

Babies are not born man, woman or intersex, they are born male, female or intersex. Man and woman describe adults not infants.

Yes, you are right that we are not born as men or women but male or female. But we really should not accept this narrative that we are born male, female and intersex.

Just as we don't write babies are born with ten fingers and toes and 12 fingers and toes.

We are born male and female. Full stop.

A very small number of male and female babies are born with a DSD. Differences in Sex Development is the collective term for 40 different but specific conditions affecting sex development in humans.

1 in 5000 babies require specialist input in determining sex - these are cases of a baby born with ambiguous genitalia. (The prevalence of polydactyly in live births is 1 in 500.)

That's approximately 130 babies per year in the UK. In about 7 or 8 of these babies, even specialist input does not lead to conclusive results and sex is assigned based on all available results and discussion with the parents.

Taking the numbers over a two year span, this sex assignment may eventually (often in adulthood) be found to be wrong for 1 of these babies. That's 1 in 260 babies with ambiguous genitalia, or 0.0001% of the population.

Statistically speaking then, every two years one person with a DSD in the UK decides to have their sex reassigned because the doctors got it wrong at birth. But the doctors don't simply guess and assign a sex arbitrarily where a baby isn't obviously male or female at birth.

(Those numbers are from the submission to the Scottish Census Draft Bill by dsdfamilies, a small charity supporting parents of children diagnosed with a DSD as well as the children themselves.)

So, even 94 to 95% of children born with ambiguous genitalia can after investigation be determined to be unequivocally male or female. There are no true hermaphrodites in humans (that is persons capable of producing both types of gametes, neither at the same time nor one after the other), and there are no non-binary bodies.

Ergo, when making statements concerning the norm, it is correct to simply say humans are born male and female. Unless you typically say babies are born with 10 fingers and toes and 11 or 12 fingers and toes. That is ten times more common in babies than ambiguous genitals after all.

Gender is not fixed and should not prevent girls or boys from participating in an activity or making a life choice.

What a garbled load of rubbish. This reads as though I have to change my gender if I want to do boy things, surely that can't be their intention..? So when I go to work in my job as a physicist I need to redefine my gender as male...but I wear dresses whilst doing it...aaahhh!

This reads as though I have to change my gender if I want to do boy things, surely that can't be their intention..?

Encouraging girls to do physics would surely be conversion therapy then!