Stereotyping still ‘blight’

Press, 18 March 1982, Page 6

Stereotyping still ‘blight’

Sex-role stereotyping still dominated the career choices of most adolescents, said a visiting educationalist, Dr Millicent Poole, yesterday. The “blight” of conforming to sex-role stereotypes stunted adolescents development and caused serious social and economic problems, she said. Dr Poole ■ is in Christchurch in the course of a lecture tour sponsored by the McKenzie Education Foundation. She is an associate professor of education at Macquarie University, New South Wales. She has spent years doing research on the attitudes and values of adolescents. She said that her research in Australia had uncovered a pattern found in other Western democracies, including New Zealand. ’

“Despite a decade or more of so-called consciousness raising and equality laws, adolescents are opting ’ for traditional employment options. Girls still want whitecollar or lower-paid professional jobs and boys want blue-collar and higher-paid professional jobs.”

Dr Poole believes that unless girls widen their choice of vocation, more of them will have only unemployment or early motherhood as alternatives.

Jobs to which girls had traditionally been attracted were disappearing rapidly in today’s economy. Both New Zealand and Australia had surpluses of nurses and teachers, the number of clerical jobs was falling because

of the use of computers, ana the Public Service was shrinking.

Dr Poole said that girls should try fiard to cast off old ideas' about which jobs should be done by which sex. The experience of World War 11, when women had done men’s jobs, had shown that it was stereotyping rather than ability that was responsible for traditional views of who should do what job. The world recession had retarded progress towards sexual equality: in times to economic crisis, people reverted to their old, hardened attitudes. Dr Poole this evening will address a public meeting in the Great Hall of the Arts Centre on the subject, "Stereotyping and the different aspirations and expectations of adolescent boys and girls." She will leave for Nelson tomorrow.