Work with 2–3 classmates to create a small “database” of toys popularly associated with boys and toys normally associated with girls. Bring in examples of the toys if you have some at home or pictures from catalogs or the Internet if you do not. Examine the “girl” and “boy” toys and describe how they are played with and what kinds of skills they might teach. Use what you learnt to write a short paragraph on how, specifically, toys are part of gender socialization.
Find two advertisements in a magazine that appear to speak to a female audience and two that seem to speak to a male audience. Do a simple gender analysis of the ads by answering the following questions: What kind of product is a given ad selling? What kind of gender image of men or women is it “selling” along with the product? What specifically does the ad lead us to believe about men or women? How are images of men and women in the ads similar to and different from one another? Compare your ads and analysis to those of other students and discuss commonalities or differences in your findings.
Discuss with a small group of classmates the issue of women and men as students in higher education. Review the reasons, as noted in the book, that today more women than men enroll in and complete higher education. Make a list of possible societal effects of this phenomenon.
Examine the sports section of a major newspaper or the sports content area of a news website over the course of a week. Compare how female athletic activity is reported compared to how male athletic activity is reported. Count how many stories are about male athletes versus how many stories are about female athletes. For situations such as professional tennis, professional golf, and college basketball where there are equivalent-level male and female leagues, tally how much coverage is provided to discussing events in the male leagues versus female leagues by counting the number of stories and amount of words and pictures provided in the stories for each league. Examine if there are differences in the content of the stories. Do the reporters use different words, metaphors, or imagery to discuss female athletic activity versus male athletic activity? What do your findings tell you about how gender and athletics is being represented in the media? What is the impact of this representation?
With a group of male and female peers, discuss the household tasks and chores you were expected to do growing up. Are there gendered patterns in the types of tasks you were expected to do? Do these patterns fit the broader societal pattern of the second shift described in the text? Why or why not?
