So far our project is off to a really good start. Through our survey created by google docs we have gotten over 155 responses and a wide range of people from different ages, majors, genders, political backgrounds etc. We hope to get even more people to take the survey before we start drawing conclusion but the good thing is we are already beginning to make many interesting observations. I am surprised how many people clicked “I don’t know” when answering the “are you a feminist?” question. Even stranger despite many people clicking that answer only a handful of people asked me to define feminism. Should we have written on the survey our definition of a feminist? How would that have changed the way people answered that question? These are interesting questions to consider. Our observation/interview side of things is going really well as well. We have already observed a STEM class and done a few more interviews and we plan to do a few more class sit ins and interviews. We are getting some really interesting and different perspectives in our interviews and these primary sources I believe will add a lot to our project. One interesting observation we had from one of our class sit ins was that only girls wrote homework problems they wanted to go over on the board while boys just raised their hands and asked to go over it during class.
Like I said before our project is off to a really good start. My partner and I are working really well together and we already have a lot of interesting data and observations. Our project is super interesting and we are both really passionate about it. We already have a lot of info and I wish we had more time on this project to dig even deeper. But despite time limits I think we are going to learn a lot through this project!
Feminism is a term that most of society does not have a clear understanding of what it is. That is why I urged you in my email to clearly define your parameters. That is also a good way to link in the question “how can feminism help” because a good chunk of society does not understand both sides of that question.