NCKU General Education Leadership Forum Lecture - Reflections on Thinking of Gender

Thinking of Gender by Professor Lu Wei-Ming

At the beginning of this class, the teacher first played a chubby parodied version of Frozen to grab the students' attention, and then used maxims, celebrities' experiences, and statistical data to guide students in thinking about society's current status regarding gender. Society's gender stereotypes and the implicit thoughts hidden in the environment all limit what different genders can actually do. Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg once said, "You might not know that you restrict yourself," and "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" This is precisely challenging this social status quo, attempting to impact people's inexplicable mental restrictions regarding gender. Gender stereotypes may not be as glaringly obvious in modern times as they were in ancient patriarchal societies, but when revealed through data, they are still startling.

Taking the gender statistics of faculty at National Cheng Kung University as an example, in the year 101, the statistical number of male professors, associate professors, and assistant professors was still far greater than that of females, with the number of full professors even reaching 500 to 100. It is as if there is a glass ceiling blocking women's promotions. In addition, stereotypes can also be observed from another angle: Ministry of Education statistics show that the proportion of people who agree that men are more suited to study natural sciences than women remains high.

Gender stereotypes exist in many corners, but how are they formed? The teacher attempted to explore this from several dimensions, including: (1) Parental expectations: Is parenting style related to gender? (2) Self-expectations: Are adolescents' self-expectations during their growth process related to gender, such as flight attendants, foreign language translators, secretaries, etc.? During the growth process, it is not hard to find that parental expectations and self-expectations sometimes form a kind of self-limitation, affecting the educational opportunities one might fight for and restricting further possibilities. Another dimension is (3) Establishing a family: In value systems where the family is paramount, women are often the sacrificed party. Post-marital gender division of labor often entails women retreating to the second line, forming yet another restriction on women. Here, the teacher noted that the model mother is the most stereotypical of all gender stereotypes—everything is done in the name of love while actually practicing exploitation. This is also one dimension where family concepts are unfair to women.

Gender stereotypes are simple, fixed, and rigid beliefs or attitudes held toward behavioral norms for a specific gender. The aforementioned inequalities in education and promotion opportunities can be said to be gender prejudice formed after stereotypes develop to a certain degree. Gender prejudice, taken to an extreme, forms gender discrimination, allowing society to rationalize certain behaviors, and regrettably leading to long-term neglect and apathetic treatment of these facts. For instance, the notion that a girl wearing revealing clothing holds responsibility if she suffers sexual violence, or that violence by the person with primary economic control in the family is permissible. What can we do to change the status quo? Systemic efforts and self-demands include legal protections, autonomous fighting for rights, and actively influencing others to impact their mindsets. In terms of self-demands, timely self-awakening of gender consciousness, thinking about and deconstructing the context and meaning behind gender phenomena, and not self-limiting in education and promotion opportunities are all directions suggested by the teacher. Finally, the teacher expressed the hope that students' development in the university can transcend gender, becoming androgynous with both strength and gentleness, as only then can one engage in anything more freely.

After finishing this class, coupled with my observation of the contemporary social atmosphere, I believe that the discourse on gender equality is quite mature in modern times. The younger a person is, the more they can accept debates on related values; in fact, if the content of today's class were repeated to the post-90s generation, I believe many would find it to be a cliché. However, although dialogues are continuously taking place, it does not mean that those who hold resource allocation and power can make corresponding changes. The main age demographic constructing social values remains in the middle-aged to elderly strata, who are not as willing to engage in corresponding self-reflection and change as the younger generation. Additionally, in reality, the power to change through the right to vocalize appeals is certainly related to the proportion a specific group occupies in society, meaning that the smaller the minority group, the less seriously its rights and circumstances will be taken. Related reviews of female stereotypes are already quite mature and continuously evolving, but biological sex is not limited strictly to male and female, nor is psychological gender. It is just that our current societal stage is more accepting of equality for women, but has not yet been able to completely and properly handle issues regarding the third gender and beyond. This is my thought.