Group activity: Gender discrimination

Every Tuesday afternoon we have a group activity for all the volunteers here in Xylokastro and this Tuesday we discussed gender discrimination through games and controversial statements.

We started out with a game about gender sterotypes where the volunteers had to separate toys, colours and different objects in two categories: boys and girls. This game aimed to point out that, still nowadays, society thinks you can associate a certain toy or colour with a specific gender. While girls’s toys focus on domestic tasks and beauty, toys for boys emphasize preparation for working. So we started wondering if this kind of separation could actually affect the future of

kids by telling them that there are certain things that don’t suit them. Then the debate opened up and the discussion about stereotypes evolved into a debate about gender discrimination. We concluded that children should explore and develop their diverse interests and skills, unconstrained by the dictates of gender stereotypes.

Then we watched a short video of children doing the same job but the girl is paid less candy just because she is a girl. This video gave us the chance to deal with the issue of work discrimination based on your gender and to share our own experiences from our former jobs.  And in the end we played a short game in which we had to associate a certain feature to a given sex.

We were really pleased to see that this topic could involve everybody in a very deep conversation with a lot of food for thought.