Mildred Pena

Professor Ashton

WGST 1001

19 December 2021

Final Personal Reflection

When I signed up for this course, I was not too sure about what I would be learning, but I was so glad I did. In this course, we talked about so many interesting topics that go on in the world today. It felt great to have a professor that is very kind, helpful and understanding. The professor always valued everyone’s opinions and that made us feel comfortable and confident all the time. Being that it’s my first time taking a gender studies course, I learned many new terms that I didn’t know about before. I loved how we were all able to feel comfortable sharing our opinions on different topics and learning from each other. I believe gender studies is so important in the world today because it helps us gain knowledge about gender identity. Gender identity plays an important part in relationships and love. We live in a world where everyone has different views or beliefs, and people are always being judged for being different.

One of my favorite topics to learn and write about was gender equality. Gender equality means equal responsibilities, opportunities and rights for all genders. I enjoyed writing a blog post about gender equality because it gave me the opportunity to share my feelings about this topic and receive feedback from my classmates. Gender equality plays a big part in love, marriage, relationships and family. One of my favorite readings of this course was the S.T.A.R interview because it brings up many valid points on gender equality that I agree with. For example, when Sylvia Rivera mentions that she doesn’t believe that a transvestite or a woman should do all the washing or all the cooking at home (12). In different parts of the world, men are given more power and what they say, goes. I believe everything in a marriage or relationship should be 50/50. Part of being married or in a relationship is supporting and respecting one another in every way. Both men and women can go to work and take care of the responsibilities at home, that’s what love really is. Gender equality shows unity, appreciation, and respect for all.

Another topic I really enjoyed talking about and doing research on was gender stereotypes. There are some jobs that are still gender stereotyped today. For our group presentation, I chose to write about women in firefighting because it’s not very common to see women as firefighters. Firefighting is seen as a masculine occupation because some feel that women aren’t physically strong enough to perform the duties of a firefighter. I enjoyed learning about other occupations that are gender stereotyped like teaching and nursing. I also enjoyed working in a group with my classmates because I feel like we all did a great job at communicating and putting together a great presentation with many important details about gender stereotyped occupations. I was very nervous when I had to present my part of the presentation, but it felt good to receive lots of positive feedback.

Being in this class was a lot of fun because even though we didn’t have class together in person, we all got to learn so much from each other and we had lots of good laughs. This is my first semester back in school after taking a long break and I was very nervous about going back to school but being in this class made the semester less stressful for me. I’m glad I decided to take this course because I learned so much about gender identity and what goes on in our world today.

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