Members of the school’s newly founded Gender Equality Movement Society (GEMSoc) visited Four Elms Primary School on Thursday 23 June to speak about gender stereotypes. GEMSoc is a student-led discussion group that meets every Friday lunchtime to discuss global and local issues of gender equality, and has a thriving community of male and female students presenting and attending. The founding members of the group, Lower Sixth students Rachel Tustin, Lila Mendoza, Liv Lloyd-Williams and Annys Rogerson, accompanied by Mrs Eversfield, prepared interactive sessions for two classes designed to get the children thinking and questioning common stereotypes.
The afternoon started with children in Year 3 and Year 4, who were soon enthusiastically on their feet doing role play exercises and questioning traditional careers for men and women. They were shown a thought-provoking film from UK charity Inspiring the Future about children’s views on jobs like firefighters, surgeons and fighter pilots and discussed areas of their own lives where stereotypes discouraged them from doing certain activities, like football and ballet. In the Year 5 and 6 session, the children had lots of ideas about combating gender stereotypes and engaged with ideas about gender inequality around the world. After both sessions, the children confidently articulated what they had learned and how they would react differently to inequality when they faced it.
The Sevenoaks students really enjoyed their opportunity to discuss their ideas with an enthusiastic young audience and were very impressed with the children’s ideas.
