Nursery World - Equality and Diversity: Part 2

Treating males and females as equal is not always easy in early years settings dealing with an unbalanced workforce and families' different cultural beliefs, says Anne O'Connor.

Ellen Wolpert writes in Start Seeing Diversity that 'Sexism is any attitude, action, or institutional practice that subordinates people because of their gender or assigns roles in society based on gender.'

When prejudice of this kind is backed up with 'institutional power', it can be imposed in ways that advantage one gender while disadvantaging the other.

Historically and politically, there has been a sense that a power contest exists between the sexes and until fairly recently, it seems females have been the losers. With the rise in gender awareness there have been some improvements, but the sense of winners and losers remains. For example, the recent positive rise in girls' achievements in education is now being outweighed by concerns that boys are falling behind. But it doesn't have to be a win/lose situation. Girls need to feel good about themselves as females and boys need to know that feeling good about themselves as males doesn't have to be at girls' expense.

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