These writing/discussion prompts are only starting points. Feel free to alter these to reflect the issues that affect your family and your community specifically. I encourage you to add a racial component as well, since race also has a major role within the gender equality issue. You can use these prompts to spark discussion at the dinner table, get the conversation going on long car rides, or for writing prompts for homeschoolers. It is easy to get girls fired up about gender equality, but nothing is really going to change unless everyone champions the cause. My boys will be working on these writing prompts as well. Here are just a few writing prompts and topics to research, consider, and discuss, that we are doing this spring and summer, as a family. Hopefully, this will get us thinking, as a family, about how we can support each other.
- Why women in professional sports should be paid as much as men playing the same sport.
- Why ticket prices for women’s professional sports should be the same as men’s ticket prices.
- Why coaches for women’s professional sports should be paid the same as coaches for men’s professional sports.
- Why women in technology should be paid as much as men with the same job.
- Why women should have access to the same amount of venture capital funding as men for technology driven businesses
- What can be done to even the playing field between boys and girls in early science education
- Name three technological innovations/scientific discoveries made by women, and explain how they changed the world
- Why is it important that women and men make the same amount of money for the same work?
- What would you tell someone who says that you can’t do something because you are a girl/boy?
- What are some of the advantages of being a girl or boy, if any? What are some of the disadvantages, if any? What would you do to eliminate those disadvantages?
- Are there some things that boys can do better than girls? Are there things girls can do better than boys? What are those things? Explain.
- What are some of the craziest things that you have heard someone say about being a girl/boy? What were you thinking when you heard that?
- Do you think that boys and girls should be in the same classrooms or separated? Why?
- How do you feel when competitions are boys against girls or men versus women? Should people compete along those lines?
- Why is improving the lives of women in other countries important?
- What would you do to improve the lives of women around the world?
- Whose responsibility should it be to address gender issues?
- Who are the women in your family that you see as role models? Why?
- Name three women that are not in your family that you look up to. What qualities do they embody that you admire?
Here are some topics to think about before and during your discussion of the writing prompts.
WAGE EQUALITY
Professional sports
Marketing
Salary caps
Why more value is placed on men’s sports
Which sports pay equally and which ones do not
Leadership in sports governing bodies
Government subsidies for professional sports (stadiums, tax breaks)
Title IX
Technology
Final product has no relation to gender
Number of women in science/tech
Respect and trust of women in science
Women who were science and tech pioneers
Are women discouraged from being scientists
Number of women in leadership in science/tech
Statistics showing wage gap in technology based jobs
GENERAL
Where does gender bias come from
History of gender bias
History of women in the workplace
Impact of family on income and vice versa
New gender roles and responsibilities in the household
Wage gap statistics
Salary negotiation
GROWING UP/EDUCATION/GLOBAL
Initiatives to improve women’s lives in poor countries
Roles of women in various countries
Global poverty statistics
Education statistics
Income disparities
Social status of women and girls
Matriarchal societies vs. Patriarchal societies
