Sex and Gender

I found this interesting and thought you might as well. Today I did a
gender and development exercise with my oldest kids. They are 6th
through 8th graders. I have two groups one girls and one boys. Each
group had 6 students today.
We first learned about what the difference between sex and gender is.
These two words (in Turkmen) were words the students had never heard
before. It was a very weird feeling teaching Turkmen students,
Turkmen vocabulary. I’m normally the one doing all of the vocabulary
building. Therefore we spent nearly 15 minutes going over the
definitions and trying to figure out exactly what the differences
were. Then they had to assign a bunch of words into two categories:
either “girl/woman” or “boy/man”. Initially they were made to assign
very quickly, but they were given a second chance to make any changes
they thought should be made as a group. Then we decided which of the
words were learned differences and which were biological differences
(sex vs. gender).
Both groups agreed on the following as “boy/man”: driving a vehicle,
serving others (this I found surprising), authority, army, strength,
power, money, athlete, loud, and bravery.
Both groups agreed on the following as “girl/woman”: weak, pregnancy,
art, fetching water, beauty, nurse, cooking, creative, compassionate,
education (I found this surprising) and sweeping.
The following are words that both groups claimed for themselves (girls
thought “girls” and boys thought “boys”): leadership, quiet, doctor,
work, family decisions, intelligence, and raising children.
There were words that each group assigned to the other (boys to
“girls” and girls to “boys”): disloyal, dowry, and love. Decision
making was in this category at first, but the boys then changed it
from girls to boys at the last minute.
Another interesting thing to note is that the girls created a third
group – the “in between” group. They placed the following in this
group after being given a chance to change their minds about any of
their initial placements. The following were the words the girls
placed in the “in between” group (note: these words are repeats and I
listed them above according to the girls initial reaction): driving a
vehicle, serving others, creative, education, money, fetching water,
intelligence, family decisions, work, raising children, leadership,
doctor, disloyal, love, and dowry.
When I asked them to determine if these words were biological
differences or learned differences we had some general disagreements
as to what I was asking, but once they figured out exactly what I
meant both groups assigned all words to learned differences (gender)
except for pregnancy and weak. Those were, according to both groups
biological differences between males and females.
I know that I learned a lot from watching the students interact and
discuss this topic and I hope you found it interesting. I plan to
continue doing gender activities with my older students and I have the
Gender and Development Committee (GAD) in T-stan to thank for the
activity ideas.