Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Eyebrows & Eyelashes: Investigating Australian Primary Teachers’ Implicit Beliefs about Creativity and Gender: Using AI to Isolate Gender as The Singular Changeable Variable
Keren Moran, Jacqueline Ullman & Nida Denson
ABSTRACT:
Embracing feminist post-structuralist theorisations of gender as ‘performance’ in which subjects ‘do girl’ (or ‘do boy’, ‘both’ or ‘neither’)” and integrating these with the concept of ‘intelligibility’ that deems certain kinds of “identities” “cannot exist”, this study takes a critical attitude toward ‘post-feminist’ claims of women and girls’ emancipation and equality that are not borne out by the material conditions of their lives even in relatively equitable societies such as Australia. Specifically, the study seeks to probe Australian primary teachers’ implicit beliefs about gender and examine them at the intersection with their [implicit] beliefs about creativity (increasingly considered a fundamental requirement to prepare children for citizenship in the 21st century) to understand if and to what extent a gender-creativity stereotype is present amongst Australian teachers. To measure participants’ implicit beliefs – distinct from self-reported beliefs, given previous research has shown that individuals may be subject to biased beliefs they are unconscious of, and yet are more likely to rely on in high-stress situations (such as a classroom) – a new methodology has been developed and will be presented. Broadly, the methodology employs A.I. and manipulated images to isolate gender as the single changeable variable in a series of videos. Participants are randomly allocated to watch a single video and use a creativity evaluation rubric to assign ‘their’ video a ‘creativity score’ which is then analysed in correlation to the gender of the presenter in the video. Subsequent interviews with a subset of participants will be conducted to provide additional rich data.
keywords: Gender, Creativity, Stereotype, Bias, Education