Are you a parent or teacher who is curious or concerned about the influence of gender stereotypes on your children? Are you worried about the potential impact of strict ‘pink’ and ‘blue’ labels, and other gender-based expectations from family and friends? Do you want to see a new way of thinking evolve that will help increase opportunities for our children? Or are you totally hooked on pink for your baby girl or ‘boysy’ blue for your boy?

Parents: We’re looking for a few volunteers to take part: someone expecting a baby this year.

Primary Schools: we are going to run free gender stereotype awareness workshops, which will bring science and Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education lessons to 10 and 11 year olds. If your school is interested, please get in touch.

There will be filming involved (subject to further discussions and the necessary consents) for a TV documentary. We anticipate results that are pioneering and educational and that contribute to a wider understanding of the gender pressures that affect our children and their futures. If you want to know more, contact:

Dr Laura Nelson, http://drlauranelson.com

Also, read Dr Laura Nelson’s blog for Science Grrl, which is about the motivation for setting up the gender stereotypes breakthrough project.

Read the news article here and more details, including booking, here.

Date: 30 October 2012, evening

Place: Cambridge

Dr Laura Nelson is also speaking at Bradford Science Festival next Sunday 21 October (evening). See you there!

It’s the start of a school year and the next phase of the gender stereotype awareness project has begun. We are talking to headteachers of schools (mainly primary, at first) to establish interest in the gender stereotype awareness lessons and what form they will take. This research exercise will inform plans for the next part of the project, which will be taking the lessons into a round of schools. We have received a large amount of interest already so will be following up on contacts already made. If you work in a school, or indeed if you work with children who you think would benefit from these lessons, we would love to hear from you.

Get in touch for further discussions!

In the Journal of Applied Social Psychology (and as reported here), psychologists report on an experiment in which students looked at images of two different robots and considered their potential uses.

They looked at the heads of the two human-like machines. The two were identical except that the ‘feminine’ one had longer hair and a slight curvature of the lips, and the ‘masculine’ one had shorter hair and straight lips.

Participants had a list of traits and household duties and were asked to assign them to the robots. They were more likely to view the short-haired robot in a ‘masculine’ way, and suggest it was more suitable for action tasks as ‘repairing technical devices’ and ‘guarding a house.’

They suggested the long-haired robot as more appropriate for such stereotypically feminine tasks such as household chores and caring for children and the elderly.

www.mumsnet.com/bloggers/guest-blog-gender-at-hamleys

Laura writes about blogging, the Hamleys campaign and why she’s now tackling stereotypes in schools with the Breakthrough programme.

The pilot programme has finished. Here’s a brief round-up of clips from week 1 with year 5 (10 year-olds).