CHANTAL BOURGAULT DU COUDRAY: Hello.
I'm Dr Chantal Bourgault du Coudray,
and I'm the convener of gender studies major at UWA.
I'm presenting this video from Whadjuk Noongar country,
and I pay my deep respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary major,
which means that students take a small suite of core units,
accompanied by electives from a large range of disciplines,
such as history, industrial relations,
anatomy and human biology, music, and many, many others.
All of the units in the major focus on issues
of gender history, or theory, or experience and embodiment,
and/or issues with social justice
or social responsibility, more generally.
The major is also a second major only,
which means that it must be taken in conjunction
with another UWA major as the primary major.
What this means is that the gender studies major
provides an excellent basis for moving into any workplace,
developing competencies in navigating
the complexities of workplaces,
whether you are thinking about a career in STEM,
or perhaps the arts, or human services,
an understanding of, I guess, the politics of gender
is very, very valuable.
Gender studies is also valuable because it explores
many pressing social issues,
some of which are represented on this slide.
As we've seen with the women's marches of 2017,
or the Me Too movement,
feminism is currently a very public concern.
We're also witnessing sustained public conversations
about many other issues related to gender,
such as men's mental health, or the gender pay gap,
or family violence.
All the issues listed on this slide are complex problems
that require interdisciplinary solutions,
and in this sense, gender studies provides
excellent preparation for tackling
many of the challenges of the 21st century,
which typically are of a complex nature.
Gender studies is also globally relevant.
Gender equality is UN Sustainable Development Goal Number 5,
and many roles in international development,
which students may be interested in moving into,
require an understanding of gender.
Gender studies graduates are highly employable
for some special reason.
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field,
our graduates, as I've already mentioned,
are particularly well equipped to work on complex problems
that require social systems thinking
or interdisciplinary collaboration.
UWA graduates also develop advanced relational competence
or communication skills that support diversity and inclusion,
coupled with excellent awareness of the ways
in which social and cultural factors
can impact the individual experience,
and also workplace culture.
This skillset is particularly emphasised
through our approach to teaching,
which foregrounds the importance of engaging in dialogue,
even if, or especially when, there are marked differences
or strong emotions involved.
And this approach to teaching
also cultivates students' self-awareness
about their personal values and commitments.
Also, any factors they know
negatively affect their performance,
and also, the conditions that they know they need to thrive.
So, we pay close attention to our individual students,
and assisting them into really develop
that self-awareness and self-knowledge.
Overall, gender studies is a major
that is extremely useful in preparing students
for everyday working life.
So, it helps support students to develop competence
in navigating career pathways and pipelines,
to navigate the micro-politics
of organisational processes and structures,
to communicate really effectively
with colleagues and stakeholders,
and to pursue and support positive cultural change.
All of these skills are supported
through the approach to teaching and learning.
We strive always to make the content relevant and applicable
so students are strongly encouraged to draw
on their personal experience, to learn about themselves,
and also, to listen to the accounts of other students
in order to learn about how it is for others.
They discover very quickly that their learning is applicable
to every aspect of their lives, including work,
leisure, family, friendships, also intimate relationships.
And throughout the major, we are very explicit
about linking the things that we're doing in the classroom
to the world of employment.
So, for example, in an assignment that we give students
in their first year of study,
it is a three-minute digital story
that they're required to produce.
So, it's quite a complex task.
It involves creating images, recording audio,
writing a script, and then redrafting and polishing.
So, we introduce them to concepts of project management
in order to manage that project,
and we also share some of the ways
that social justice or advocacy organisations
in various industries actually use digital stories
in their own processes.
I'm going to show you an example
of one of the digital stories that our students
in semester one 2020 produced.
This one is by Freya Evans, and I hope you enjoy it.
FREYA: Hello, my name is Freya.
I'm a psychology student, musician, and songwriter.
Growing up, I never really thought about my gender
or what it meant.
I knew that I was a girl, and for the most part,
I was happy to be a girl,
and all the things that came along with it.
As I've grown older, though, I started to realise
what my gender has limited me to, rather than given me.
Growing up, I showed an interest in drums
and electric guitar at a very young age,
but my mum encouraged me to instead play piano,
an instrument that I didn't really enjoy.
This decision did make sense to me, though.
I'd never seen a girl play drums
or a girl play a solo on electric guitar,
so it didn't really seem like something I could do.
So, I settled for the piano
and took up music as a subject in year 12,
and it was here when my ideas of gender were reinstated.
The girls sang, were the centre of attention,
and the boys played the backing band.
By graduation, my friend Ashley wanted to audition for WAAPA,
a performing arts school in Perth.
We drove for three hours from our regional town to the city
to attend the audition for the programme together.
And to my surprise, we both got accepted.
Being someone who had never seen music
as a possible option for me,
I found myself moving to a new city at the age of 17
with a newfound identity of a female musician.
This term female musician has followed me around
for the last few years,
and I have a lot of trouble with it.
It feels like the world's opinion,
sometimes including mine, is that a musician
is already inherently a male term,
and we need to define and mark
when a female is attempting to identify with a career path.
This term is used to describe me
in almost every article, gig, and bio that I play.
A definer that is used to triumph my femininity
over a male arena of art.
Three years later, I've graduated from WAAPA.
I have a band, I play electric guitar, and I sing,
but my gender is still something
that is constantly coming between my art form and myself.
Sound guys often assume I don't know how to set up my guitar
or how to sound check.
Drunken men have yelled at me during performances,
and I often don't feel comfortable going to gigs
or carrying equipment alone.
My story, like many others,
is due to a lack of female representation within the arts.
What our society defines as masculine and feminine
discourages what younger women believe they're capable of
and able to pursue, which creates a cycle
of under-representation and stigmatisation
within artistic industries.
Feminist academics such as Pauwke Berkers,
Josephine Hoegaerts, and Diana Miller
have argued for extensive systematic research
on gender inequality in the arts
in order to address this lack of representation
and dismantle these gender constructs.
After all that I've learned over the years,
I try and remind myself that even though
it look me 17 years to learn that I can play an electric guitar,
hopefully, playing it now means
that it might not take other girls as long.
CHANTAL BOURGAULT DU COUDRAY: The last thing to discuss
is possible further study pathways.
So, obviously, I've talked about gender studies
as a second major enhancing students' employabilities
straight out of undergraduate study,
but this by no means exhaustive list of possibilities
does suggest some of the pathways
that articulate really effectively
with a gender studies major in undergraduate space.
So, it's a major that can support study
in a very, very, very wide range of fields,
but some of these ones are maybe
slightly more obvious pathways
that students might like to think about.
So, I hope you found this presentation useful,
and maybe I'll meet you in one of my classes.
Bye.