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Commissioned by The Women’s Foundation and conducted by a team led by Professor Stephen Chiu from the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, this study aims to better understand the influence of social media and mass media on the perception of gender roles and stereotypes among secondary students in Hong Kong. The study collected responses from 1,032 students from 8 secondary schools and 80 responses from 2 universities in total.
Key findings include:
- Secondary school students tend to be more gender neutral than university students, which suggests that gender socialisation is still on-going at university.
- Conventional feminine character traits tend to remain stereotypical as compared to masculine ones. Significantly more students considered the following traits to be feminine: understanding, sympathetic, shy, and gentle.
- In general, female students were more resistant to taking up traditional gender roles expected of women. Female students were less comfortable than male students with statements about women accepting less opportunities in education and career development, taking on more caring and household burdens and with subsuming women’s careers under expectations of marriage, family and society’s beauty standards.
- Secondary school students considered family members to be the most important source of gender socialisation, whereas university students considered conventional and new media, and family members as important sources of gender socialisation.
Gender Education on the Film "She Objects"
