Gender Workshop at Kiteto Secondary School

 "...neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power."

John William Money

We held our secondary school teachers' workshop on gender equality yesterday. Michael and Mindy, the local Peace Corps volunteers and our neighbours, agreed to facilitate the discussions. There were about 36 teachers in attendance.

Micheal and Mindy are young and just recently married and I knew they would do a better job than me. I, having gained most of my knowledge about gender from reading about the World War II icon, Rosie the Riveter, am an innocent when it comes to gender.

Rosie the Riveter from a WWII Poster

Thanks to Wikipedia I did learn that gender is a term that began to be widely used in the 1970s replacing sex as the commonly used term. The term was first coined by John William Money a sexologist who was writing during the 1950s.

Without trying to offend any of our readers who are rabid chew-off-the-nearest-male's-head feminists or recent graduates with Womyn's Studies degrees, I will go out on a limb and define gender as the characteristics used to distinguish between male and female and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Gender is socially constructed and includes ideas about behaviour, actions and roles that a particular sex performs.

Teachers discussing gender issues

The workshop began with an activity in which each teacher was given a word written on a piece of paper. They were then required, without contemplation, to place the paper under either the male, female or both headings on the chalkboard. Some of the words were pregnancy, money, leadership, authority and love.

Mindy facilitating

After each teacher had stuck his word under his chosen heading there was a stimulating discussion about why we placed our words where we did and some of the papers were moved to different categories.

Mindy then wrote the following prompt on the board: “Educating the female child is the best way to empower a nation.” In the very lively discussion which followed we either disagreed or agreed with the prompt.

Kudos to Mindy and Michael for being stimulating facilitators

The session ended very enthusiastically with all of the men psyched for the Friday afternoon cooking competition. The male teachers will cook for the women. The winning team will win a fabulous prize. Here's hoping that Team Mzungu (Michael and I) will win big. Stay posted.