Today Education and Employers launches a new video to raise vital awareness that stereotyping about jobs starts at a young age and risks limiting the futures of girls all across the globe.
Children in the UK, Canada, China, Denmark, and South Africa were all asked to draw pictures of people doing typical jobs and the film captures what they draw…revealing their astonished reactions when they meet the people who do those jobs in real life!
The new video is a global version, based on the original ‘Redraw the Balance’ UK version, which the Education and Employers charity published to mark International Women’s Day in 2016. Kindly made by Mullen Lowe, it showed 66 children aged five to seven drawing a picture of a firefighter, a surgeon, and a fighter pilot. 61 children drew these roles as men, only five drew women…
That first video has now attracted over 100 million unique views and has been internationally recreated in a number of countries. Footage from these recreations has been included in the new ‘Redraw the Balance International’ video.
The new video reinforces the need to urgently tackle gender stereotypes, which if they remain unaddressed, limit girls’ individual aspirations and ultimately narrow countries’ future labour forces.
The video will be shown on 13th December 2023, during the opening ceremony of a high-profile international conference on gender run by the OECD in collaboration with the Spanish Government, marking their Presidency of the European Union – ‘The Future of Girls in STE(A)M’.
Education and Employers will also run a virtual session at the conference, with children joining from Landakotsskóli School, Reykjavík, Iceland; Maria Assumpta Primary School, Mityana, Uganda; and Barham Primary School, London, England. Children will have the chance to ask questions of Sara García Alonso, European Space Agency Astronaut and CNIO scientific researcher.
One simple and proven way of helping to tackle preconceptions around gender and jobs, is for a diverse range of role models from the world of work to talk with young people in schools. The Inspiring the Future programme does this by connecting primary and secondary schools with brilliant volunteers from the world of work, talking about their jobs.
You can be part of this!
Please help all young people discover their future by volunteering just one hour a year, visit:
#RedrawTheBalance #InspiringTheFuture #FutureSTEAMgirls