Today is International Women’s Day, and this year’s theme is “Inspire Inclusion.” I’ve been thinking, therefore, about how we parents can help our children inspire inclusion for girls and women. Here’s my own experience.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, my mother taught me that there was no reason a woman or girl shouldn’t have the same opportunities as a man or boy. Both she and my father were understanding enough not to stop me when I wanted a football for a birthday present or spent my weekends playing with Legos or climbing trees. I knew these weren’t usual activities for girls, though, but somehow never let that stop me. I credit much of that to the support of my mother, a first-generation feminist, as well as to my own stubbornness. My father was supportive as well, and perhaps that is even more striking, given the era, but my mom, as another woman, had more impact on my budding sense of the gender inequity in the world and the need to confront it.
I took my mother’s lessons to heart not only in my career and hobbies, but also, later, in who I loved. There was no reason I shouldn’t have the same opportunity as a man to love a woman. That wasn’t necessarily what my mom had intended, I think, but to her credit, she never blinked and was as good a mother-in-law to my spouse and grandmother to our son as I could ever have wanted. Same for my dad as a father-in-law and grandfather.
When I became a parent myself, I knew I wanted to raise our child with the idea that nothing was off limits because of gender. As the child of two moms, our son has watched two women handle everything there is to handle about running a household—from fixing the plumbing to making dinner, going to outside employment, and folding the laundry. We have taught him to ride a bike, program a computer, bake a cake, throw a punch, and mow the lawn—in ways that don’t always align with what one might guess based on my spouse’s and my gender expression. (She looks more masculine, though I’m the more athletic, for example; but I’m also the primary cook and baker and she’s an engineer.)
We’ve always made a point of exposing him to examples of strong, capable women in both real life and fiction (including, at various ages, PBS’ Word Girl, Disney’s Princess Merida, Nickelodeon’s Korra, and Star Wars’ Leia, Rey, and Jyn Erso). He has plenty of positive and varied male role models, too, both in person and in the media. We’ve simply striven for balance, offering him ways of seeing both himself and the people around him.
As he’s grown older, we’ve also talked about gender bias both in settings close to him (e.g., teachers not calling on girls in math class) and in broader arenas (e.g., the gender pay gap). We’ve spoken about treating the girls he knows fairly, even in the face of pressure from his male friends. We’ve discussed how gender bias puts unrealistic pressure and expectations on people of all genders. Additionally, we’ve talked about what it means to be transgender or nonbinary and how trans women are also women. (As a college student now, he probably has at least as many trans friends of various genders as we do, if not more.)
Have we succeeded in raising him to be a feminist and an ally to women? I hope so—and I was heartened a few years ago when I showed him a photo of then-President Trump standing with a group of “CEOs of leading U.S. health insurance companies.” Without my prompting, he observed, “It’s all men,” before segueing into his Alec Baldwin-as-Trump impression, “But they’re all great men, yuuuge men. The best men.”
I think he gets it.
If you’re looking for kids’ books about gender roles, filter my Database of LGBTQ Family Books by the “Gender roles” tag (or just click that link).