Gender Conformity in Schools and the Workplace, and how to stop it.

Gender Conforming is having expectations on someone’s capabilities or actions simply because of their Gender and their Gender roles that were applied to them, as well as forcing people to “act like their gender”, which is an extremely backward and overall toxic term and mindset. Gender conforming happens a lot in schools, for example, uniforms. Uniform can be a huge part in creating the mindset that men and women are different, and that there are roles applied to them (i.e, men wear pants and can’t wear dresses or skirts, whilst women can wear skirts and dresses but it’s not recommended to wear pants since that can be considered strange). This can create a sense of restriction in clothing and gender-conforming to younger children, and it results in them failing to understand that gender shouldn’t be applied to clothing, or what they wear in general.

A lot of schools also perform other acts that can imply them forcing students to “conform to their gender”, some schools can force boys to not have long hair, or simply just not teach students about gender or the LGBTQ+ overall which can make a lot of students uneducated and can result in them passing their beliefs into children in the future, continuing the cycle. If we want to stop the act of gender-conforming in schools, we simply have to educate those and allow them to understand Gender for what it truly is, and to stop caring so much about other people’s gender. Although a few lectures can sound good in practice, it’s simply ingenuine and it’s best to start from the bottom (i.e kindergarten) and up. Not only that, but we should also focus on the smaller things as well, uniforms could be edited, hair lengths shouldn’t be moderated, etc. By teaching people at a young age, they will become more and more educated in the future and can create a new cycle of teaching children about these topics.

Treatment in the workplace because of one’s gender also happens a bit frequently, a lot of people discuss the gender wage gap in modern times, for example, and discuss if it’s a real thing or not, but they fail to understand that a conversation about this implies that this had existed already, which shows that there is a problem with gender roles and conformity. A lot of people view women as below men, which is to put it lightly, is extremely strange and overall extremely ignorant. Because of this mindset, it can definitely affect the workplace and women can or have been treated worse in the workplace. The solution to this is the same as before, educating children. Children are already quite smart and it would be easier to educate them than educating an adult, it would also allow the children to develop the information and allow them to tell this mindset to other people their age.