Fighting Sexism One Story at a Time

What is sexism and why is it bad?

Sexism is the prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping of people based on sex, and is most commonly expressed towards women. Sexism is linked to a whole slew of societal problems, including but not limited to poverty, violence, homelessness, substance abuse, and poor mental health. This project attempts to create a small ripple effect by enriching the current children's book market with a story that promotes diversity and demonstrate an array of expressions of womanhood in hopes that it helps foster difficult conversations among children and their caregivers and peaks their curiosity, all the while expanding their horizons and schemas of who they can be.

Woman Enough:

An Anti-Sexist Children's Book

The goal is to use the power of narrative to shape cognition and identity to provide school-aged girls with exemplars that will widen the scope of what they view as acceptable forms of self-expression

Link to Book

Resources for Parents

Discussion Guide:

Use Specific Language instead of Generic

Children are very in tune with verbal cues and are prone to essentializing people into categories, so focus on individuals instead of general statements about populations

Focus on Ability instead of Gender

Challenge your children to develop all types of life skills, not just the stereotypical ones like cooking and cleaning
Develop your kids abilities and use those opportunities to engage in difficult conversations (ex. change your oil with your daughter and talk about the dangers of stereotypes)

Focus on Interest instead of Gender

Allow your children to playfully explore the things they are interested in
Buy gifts for them that are connected to what they like, not what is stereotypically marketed for their gender and age
Provide them with opportunities to try hobbies that they are interested in
Ask your kids what they enjoy without judgement or reprecussion, and validate their identities

Discussion Guide:

The aim of this book is to expand the representation of womanhood in print material. Naturally, children will likely have questions. This guide is meant to help parents navigate those difficult conversations and feel prepared.

Avoid Single-Stories

Provide Your Children with a variety of examples of womanhood by diversifying the types of media they are engaging with and monitoring for sexist biases in the media and naturalistic interactions

Promote Healthy Curiosity

Be excited when your child ask questions and see it as an opportunity to meaningfully influence your child as it promotes connectedness and fun within difficult conversations, making them much more powerful tools for learning
Use elaborative language and point out the thoughts and emotions of other people to also engage their Theory of Mind and expand their vocabulary concerning these complex issues and emotions they too may have

Essay's From This Semester:

Unit 1

Conceptualizing the issues of sexism and framing them in the context of cognitive development

Unit 2

A research-informed explanation of the importance of play in learning

Unit 3

An in depth look at why the language we use makes all the difference

Useful TED talks:

The danger of a single storyOur lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

How language shapes the way we thinkThere are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."

We should all be feministsWe teach girls that they can have ambition, but not too much ... to be successful, but not too successful, or they'll threaten men, says author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this classic talk that started a worldwide conversation about feminism, Adichie asks that we begin to dream about and plan for a different, fairer world -- of happier men and women who are truer to themselves.

About Author

Hello! My name is Anya Henderson. I am junior at Pacific University, and I am a double major in Criminal Justice and Psychology. This project is dear to me because as a woman who enjoys many things that are not considered conventionally feminine, I have experienced my fair share of sexism in this world. I hope that this project can serve as a useful resource for parents, educators, and children alike and that I can do my part in promoting diverse representation through this book!

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