'What does being a boy or girl means?'

“You are a boy, and now you are all grown up so you have to take up the responsibility for running the shop and visit different markets so as to understand how business runs. And, your sisters would soon leave the house so you have to take care of the house as well”

The session on gender with the adolescent participants from Government school began with an interesting activity of ‘who does what?’ Most of the responses indicated the social understanding of work for example household chores, rearing child or taking care of family is women’s responsibility and it is men’s job to earn money and make decisions for the family. However, on twisting the question and discussion on which work is done exclusively by either of the gender – the answer was quite obvious though neglected that every work can be done by both except giving birth to the child and breast feeding.

In the next part of the workshop, we dwelled on what it means to be a boy or a girl -  

‘Boys are asked to pick and carry heavy things’

‘We can go out, roam around any time’

‘I am treated far better than my sister’

‘I am asked by my father to do responsibilities that involves outside work’

‘My father used to take me to school when I was young but now I am a big boy so he told me go on my own’

 “I will have to take care of home and parents when my sisters would go away”

Taking cue from the responses and with a presentation, we co-created a story with the participants to build an understanding on what is gender? What it means to be born as a boy or a girl or how our society dictates what work can be done, which responsibility is to be carried out, our capacity, capabilities and so on based on which sex organ we are born with thereby restricting us from achieving our true potential or expression of who we are? However since we are part of the society that has created this binary system, we can challenge it and can do whatever we want to!

This was a step by step process – so on asking who cooks food in the food – the answer was unanimously ‘mother or my sister’; but one of the students raised his hand and shared that he cooked food (maggi) when his mother was sick; taking this example we talked about how a boy or man cooks food either when the women in the house is ill or when he works in hotels/restaurant in the position of chef! It was wonderful to see that adolescents came up with the answer without us building up – ‘men work in restaurants as chef because they earn good money’

‘Girls are not allowed to go outside for work’

This gave us opportunity to engage on the subject choices – the boys immediately said that girls chose home sciences; on asking why they blatantly pointed out the reason as they ultimately have to support household. With this, we explained that it’s not that girls are not intelligent or incapable but it is because of their gender, they are forced or they make choice of taking home sciences rather than math and science. What was most incredible about the discussion was that the participants were able to see through the lens of how gender is manipulating their vision of current narrative and they came up with the points without any prompts from us.

In the last activity, we invited the participants to share the difference they see in their homes and school based on gender -

“Boys play games, do fun and pranks, roam around when in home where as girls take care of people and home, make food and clean the house”

“In the school, we enjoy, loiter around with friends while girls study hard and rarely talk to their friends”

“Girls always sit together and never with boys”

“Mom take care of me, help me get ready for school, pack my bag and lunch every morning”

“Most of the teachers in school are men, even the workers be it security guard or cleaning personnel they are men”

“Mom and sisters take care of household, mother does shopping for grocery and clothes while I take care of outside matters”

These students see mostly men doing different jobs at their school and around, so it is difficult for them to imagine that all these work can be done by women as well. That’s why the conversations on gender is very important to establish that ability, strength or capacities are not gender based, they can do whatever they wish to, or they can be who they want to be – they just took the first step in the direction of challenging the norms by seeing the differences that exist in the society!