The harm of sexist stereotypes
Is Google male or female?
Female, because it doesn’t let you finish a sentence before making a suggestion.
Have you ever heard these kinds of jokes from passing conversations or social media? Because according to a school-wide survey about sexist jokes, many people have.
From make me a sandwich to the stereotype of women always being wrong, sexist jokes and slurs are a major problem that aren’t talked about enough.
While the majority of our society has tabooed racial or homophobic slurs and jokes, people seem to have the right-a-way when it comes to similar jokes and stereotypes about men and women. This problem is so prevalent in our society today that most of these jokes and stereotypes aren’t even questioned when used in everyday conversation.
As an anonymous student wrote in a school-wide survey about sexist jokes, “They're horrible and they're always pointed towards women doing 'male' things,” many of these jokes are exactly that.
And not all sexist jokes are aimed towards women, as shown in that same survey, where 18.9% of people said that many of the sexist jokes were aimed towards men. But you can typically hear the kind of joke where women are doing “male” things on a multitude of occasions.
Have you ever heard the saying “you play like a girl?” It’s a great example of the kind of joke where a woman is doing a “male” thing. The idea of this slur is, to quote the author of Running Like a Girl, Alexandra Heminsley, that, “If you do it like a girl, you're doing it in an inferior manner.”
As said from another anonymous person from the survey about sexist jokes, “I feel as if women are being put down, like we are not as good as the men.”
Not only is this profoundly discriminatory against girls, but it also sets up the idea that you’re already less of a person if you’re born a female.
About two years ago the sanitary wipes company, Always, came out with an amazing “Like a Girl” advertisement where teenagers were asked to “run like a girl,” to which the teenagers began to awkwardly run in place while flailing their arms around. However, when the children were asked to “run like a girl” they actually ran with no exaggerated flailing or awkward movements.
The idea of the “Like a Girl” ad is to show that the minds of both female and male teenagers have been implemented with the idea that being called a girl is an insult, while the children, male or female, haven’t had that kind of bias pushed upon them yet.
And while these jokes and stereotypes are usually said without the intent of harm against a certain gender, as shown in a survey where most people said they weren’t offended by sexist jokes, these stereotypes still have the ability to induce an implicit bias in our society.
An implicit bias is where someone makes a certain judgement about something without conscious awareness that they’re making that judgement. They have this ability because, when these slurs become so omnipresent in everyday life, they become unconscious fact in everyone’s minds.
And when these jokes and slurs add up, young girls come to believe that they are what these jokes insist they are. These girls will begin to agree that they gossip and talk too much, that they’re usually wrong, and worst of all, that they’re inferior to men.
That’s why these sexist jokes shouldn’t be laughed at, and shouldn’t be so commonly told. Because not only are they the gateway to discrimination against females, but they’re also a problem that contributes to the overall sexism in our society.
