Parents in Australia are being urged to buy Barbies for their little boys this year’s Christmas in honor of ‘No Gender December.’
The annual campaign to break gender stereotypes was introduced by the Good Education Group, an education publisher backed by the United Nations, according to Yahoo Australia.
“According to those behind the No Gender December campaign, the movement correlates with the perception that STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) are fields dominated by men and avoided by women,” the publisher’s CEO, Chris Lester, said.
Lester says encouraging little boys playing with dolls will help fight gender divisions which cause girls and boys to shy away from certain jobs later on in life just because of their gender.
“According to the taxman, women make up over 70 per cent of the education and training sector, and almost 80 per cent of all health and social workers,” Mr Lester said, lamenting women “represent less than 12 per cent of the mining and construction industries, under a quarter of the manufacturing and transport sectors, and a tiny fraction of folks in IT.”
Perhaps guys might stop being so shy about breastfeeding and start growing breasts already. Because it’s about time they stopped seeing midwifery and nursing as an estrogen thing.
Now, you might think this is sarcasm, but apparently Australia’s government doesn’t.
Australian Federal Government body Workforce Gender Equality Agency is proposing a “bloke quota” be implemented to increase the number of men in nurturing roles such as nursing and teaching, which are often heavily dominated by females.
The agency’s director, Libby Lyons, thinks the government should try to encourage men that their love for science and engineering over healthcare and teaching was culturally influenced, and that the government can rid this cultural job-designator by mandating more men take over female-dominated roles.
“There’s no diversity of thought or innovation happening there in the classroom if we are solely relying on females, particularly in primary school,” she says.
Hospitals and schools should follow suit of mining and rail industries that set quotas to hire more women to heavy labor roles, Lyons says.
Similar campaigns to bring this philosophy to the playground are occurring in other parts of the world such as the United Kingdom, where children are being instructed to stop using gender binary language and start being taught ‘genderqueer’ content in class.
“It’s time to reject the idea that certain types of work are better suited to women or men. A person’s gender is not an indicator of their ability or interest in a particular area,” Lyons says, presumably thinking men secretly want the government to force them to nurse babies, and women secretly want the government to force them onto heavy labor to crack their ovaries, and they are too shamed by society to say so.
“It’s time to reject the idea that certain types of work are better suited to women or men.”
Libby Lyons
Because men and women choosing for themselves is not enough. People like Lyons and the government and the Australian Left know better.
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