Sexism, Harassment and Masculinity Workshop

This week we once again welcomed Peter Radford to Charters to speak with our Year 10 students about sexism, harassment and masculinity. Peter has a background in teaching and is passionate about educating students around the country to think about power, consent, unconscious bias and gender stereotypes.

He began by telling the students that Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that, "all human beings are born equal in dignity and rights", but that in reality, many women are not treated equally or fairly.

He explained that the workshop was not about blaming people or making boys and men feel uncomfortable, but to increase self-awareness for everyone as we sometimes show unconscious bias in our actions.

Peter gave an example of the misogyny often shown in the fairy tales that many of us grew up reading; the woman always needs saving and the man is always the hero. This power dynamic often begins to entrench the stereotype that women are inferior and this is reinforced in the films we watch and the books we read.

Thankfully times are changing and women can rightly have the same aspirations as their male counterparts, but this wasn't always the case. Until very recently only anatomically male crash test dummies were used to test car safety. When new dummies were created to reflect a female body it was discovered that because a male and female pelvis are different shapes, many seatbelts would actually cause harm to many women involved in an accident.

By encouraging more girls to study STEM subjects in school we can look forward to many more women becoming engineers in the future and helping to change the world for the next generation of girls.

Our thanks to Peter for delivering the workshops in such an accessible way. We know that students and staff alike will be more thoughtful in their actions towards one another.