Conclusion: People are ignorant. They either don’t know about gender bias or can’t recognize it when it’s right in front of their faces. Smashing Sexism analyzed the surveys this past weekend, and from the data, we discovered that people are extremely uneducated and unaware about an enormous issue in our school. An overwhelming amount of people, adults and students, reported that they didn’t have an opinion on the dress code, or had never thought about it. Similarly, a great deal of people, including a significant amount of females, responded that they had never witnessed gender bias or gender roles in MUHS, where we administered the survey. This initially disturbed our group, but we eventually realized that we have our work cut out for us.

We decided that our project would develop in two stages. First, we want to educate the students and teachers in Vermont schools, in order to make people aware of the significant presence of gender bias and gender roles in schools. Once people can recognize these issues and their importance, we can hopefully get support from a large group of people in the state to make change.

This week, each member of our group is writing a blog to describe our personal and collective progress, and what implications the survey has for our project. We’re also going to analyze classroom demographic data to form hypotheses about the effect of gender roles/gender bias on student’s academic enrollment and success. We (mostly my group members) wrote a letter that will be emailed to certain high schools in the state (as of right now, we’re planning on CVU, U-32, and Rutland) to accompany a digital copy of our surveys, so we can gather data from other places in the state. We (again, my group members) met with our principal, Mr. Lawson, to get his approval and signature on the letter, so the schools would take us seriously. Our goal is that next week, the other schools will hand out surveys so we’ll have even more data to analyze before the retreat.

Our group is making really good progress and working together really well. I’m looking forward to what we can accomplish!

P.S. Out of 150 student surveys, we only had 8 that gave us ridiculous answers. That’s pretty impressive. Some of my favorites:

“What is your opinion on the dress code?”

-“I hate it. Legalize nudity”

-“#freethenipple”

-“Beer Clothes For Days and Booty Shorts”

Among my favorite responses to gender: Attack Helicopter, Non-Hexadecimatory Gendersolid Potsexual, Dragon, Gender is a Historic Myth

One person said they would like to have a future career in petting dogs.

Another said they enjoy enthusiastic walks.

Thank you MUHS for being informative and entertaining.