Year 8 Interviews

I interviewed a few year 8 pupils (who are our target audience) to see what they thought about gender equality and sexism and what it was so we knew their level of understanding.  This would make it easier to know what information to put into our piece as we don’t want it too simple and for them to not learn anything but we don’t want it too complicated to they don’t understand.  Thomas Kirwin said that he thought someone being sexist was “When a boy says a girl can’t do a certain thing or vice versa”, Aiden Hackney stated that he though that someone was being sexist “When you tell women to get in the kitchen”.  Samuel Kitchen had a similar response as he stated “When you say women are bad drivers”.  The girls I asked took a different view on it and thought mainly about situations in school such as Natalie Sterland who said that “Teachers saying ‘you can’t do that, you’re a girl’”, and Ellie Taylor and Gaby Haywood both said to me that “Miss Walters favours girls over boys”.  Ellie also said that some teachers are “Punishing boys more than girls”, and Gaby even went as far to say that “Boys are always sexist”.

From these responses, I have found that girls generally only think about situations that affect them personally such as in school wheras the boys thought more generally.  In my opinions, all of the responses were to an extent stereotypical but this is not a bad thing as I have now determined that the year 8’s have a general and basic understanding of gender equality so we can now work on the content of our script.