Breaking Down Walls for Women Empowered Women Trainers Serve as Role Models
As gender-sensitive women teachers can be role models for girls, empowered women trainers can help teachers they train to understand and reduce stereotypes and prejudices by drawing on women's experience, or "lived realities." They can turn demeaned and devalued traditional female behaviours into respected assets that benefit themselves, their professions and their societies. All cultures have long recognized that "different" is too often a synonym for "deficient" and seen as a consequence of immutable female "nature." This can confine women to stereotyped and restricted gender roles. Feminism in the 1970's understandably accepted the "gender blind" argument that women's differences were a result of nurture (or lack of) rather than nature and if women were given the same opportunities as men, these differences would disappear. Since the 1980's a voluminous body of literature has acknowledged and heralded women's wa...