I can only respond to from a personal perspective, but I find these proposals published on https://www.strategie.gouv.fr in 2014 are what I’m aiming for:
Proposal 1: Offer courses on childbirth and parenting that are more inclusive of fathers by adapting the content and schedules of these programs to encourage more men to attend.
Proposal 2: Make it easier for fathers to balance work and family life through flexible labor policies like job sharing or working from home that give employees greater control over their schedules. The government should test these policies with its own employees. Businesses, public offices and the service sector should be encouraged to adopt a “flexibility charter”.
Proposal 3: Draft a handbook for child care professionals with suggestions for getting fathers more involved when their children are in day care, for example by participating when parents are needed for special activities or being present during discussions about the child.
Proposal 4: Initiate a national action plan for narrowing the gender gap in the child care professions. The plan should: set a five-year goal for increasing the number of men being trained as child care professionals; encourage job counselors to propose child care careers to men; reach out through publicity to men who are between jobs; create appropriate training programs.
Proposal 5: Using other countries as a model, get families involved in educating girls about primarily male professions, and vice versa. Develop publicity campaigns that make it appear more routine for men to hold jobs viewed as female and for women to hold jobs viewed as male.
Proposal 6: Modify the orientation process in 9th and 10th grades (ages 14-16) to help students consider career paths that are atypical with regard to their gender. In particular, for students likely to go straight from 9th grade to vocational school, promote dialogue among families, guidance counselors and professionals in order to raise awareness about the key fields where steps are being taken to close the gender gap, and the consequences in terms of employment.
Proposal 7: Include gender equality data in national and regional monitoring of youth training programs.
Proposal 8: Draw up a government list of strategic sectors for narrowing the gender gap. Focus on vocations that lack gender equality but have good overall hiring potential and strong youth employment possibilities. Inform job counselors and unemployment offices about new hiring possibilities in the key sectors. Use the list in negotiating with regional and local partners to develop a comprehensive plan to work toward greater gender equality in the key sectors. This would involve using various levers, as described in Proposals 9-12.
Proposal 9: Use previous campaigns about “girls and the sciences” as the basis for new campaigns about “girls and technology” (including information technology).
Proposal 10: Get school authorities involved in government programs for promoting gender equality. Inform teachers, principals and guidance counselors about employment prospects in strategic sectors so that they can provide boys and girls with more diversified career orientation. Launch a publicity campaign for middle-school students and their families to help them take advantage of mixed-gender career discovery programs in their region.
Proposal 11: Negotiate with professional and employers’ organizations to set targets for greater gender equality in apprenticeships and youth training programs.
Proposal 12: Develop apprenticeships and work-study contracts in predominately female professions, where such programs are rarely on offer.
Educational Practices
Proposal 13: Draw up contracts with the publishers of school books to ensure that the books portray an equal balance of males and females and an even distribution of social roles.
Proposal 14: Establish teaching methods that benefit all students by compensating boys and girls for their respective weaknesses, for example by using computers in language classes. Get fathers more involved in reading activities, as is done in other countries. These measures primarily concern schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. ( Note: in my country, boys are currently suffering from our current school system while it apparently benefits girls and I don’t think that’s a solution, either )
Proposal 15: Students should be graded not just on classwork but also on skills valued in the workplace: community involvement, public presentations, teamwork, taking responsibility.
Proposal 16: Work groups and pairs formed in class should be mixed, with equal numbers of boys and girls if possible.
Proposal 17: School principals, guidance counselors and rectors should be trained to develop greater gender equality in the various paths of study – literature, social studies, science – and to show more neutrality in their expectations of students. This should include refresher training for education professionals at all levels, from primary school to high school, with an initial course on gender equality mandatory at teacher training colleges.
Proposal 18: Create resource centers that can provide tools for improving girl-boy equality at school – advice for teachers, books, and so on. Set up a Frequently Asked Questions site on the Internet. Appoint a representative for gender equality in every school. Include the subject in discussions at teachers’ meetings.
Proposal 19: Study improvements in school architecture that have been made in other countries in order to combat unequal use of school recreation areas by boys and girls. Raise awareness about good practices in the mixed-gender use of sports and leisure facilities at schools.
Proposal 20: Penalize sexist verbal and physical violence at school, whether directed at students or teachers, inside the classroom or out. Identify such behavior as sexist. School rules should include mention of the notions of equality and mutual respect between girls and boys.
Sports and Cultural Activities
Proposal 21: Parents, teachers, doctors, schools and clubs need to be made more aware of the issue of gender inequality and the benefits of sports for all. This means combating the view of sports is “a boys’ thing” and the split between “male” and “female” sports. Awareness campaigns in clubs, schools and communities should stress the social and health benefits of sports.
Proposal 22: Awareness campaigns targeting the general public should introduce the idea of gender neutrality in sports. The message can be tailored differently for girls and boys. Television ads, brochures and posters should portray equal numbers of boys and girls, women and men, practicing all types of sports. The campaigns can be evaluated through impact studies.
Proposal 23: Research on childhood and adolescence should include the issue of gender. Most data currently focuses on age group, activity or social class. More could be learned from: longitudinal research, in which the same children are followed over time; pluridisciplinary research across the social sciences; and transversal research looking at gender in sports and culture in parallel with gender at school, family relations and health.
Proposal 24: Change the practices of sports clubs by: checking their progress toward gender equality before awarding public funding; making gender equality mandatory in the regulations of all sports clubs, for children of all ages; teaching sports instructors about gender stereotypes and girl-boy inequalities during their initial training; offering activity guidelines that stress the social role and health benefits of sports, and not just competition.
Proposal 25: Promote mixed-gender use of municipal sports facilities. Publicize health issues like the benefits of sports in fighting the effects of a sedentary lifestyle. ( Comment: I’ve experienced both mixed and sex-separated P.E. classes throughout my school years and from experience, it really makes no sense to separate girls and boys if it’s “just” about being active / promoting and active and healthy lifestyle in children and teenagers. We were rated differently for our stamina bc there is a difference in boys and girls, in strength usually too, but the only course where we were all girls was our “dance class” and that definitely had to do a lot more with gender roles and homophobia - “boys who dance are gay” - than the necessity to separate girls and boys. I completely support the Olympics being sex separated though. )
Proposal 26: Test the use of warning messages in advertising campaigns or alongside photos published in the press to indicate that images of bodies have been retouched.
Proposal 27: Evaluate the efficiency of prevention campaigns of various types to determine which communication strategy works best with young people.
Proposal 28: Test the use of preventive health checks for childen in 6th and 9th grades (aged 11-12 and 14-15). The checks should be performed by doctors with special training.
Proposal 29: Raise the awareness of health professionals: include a course on the links between gender and health in their initial training; bring the issue of gender into recommendations issued by top health authorities; ask scholarly organizations to mention the subject in their publications.
Proposal 30: Create documents to explain to parents that, although they may not realize it, the way they bring up their children can create risks to health.
… I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for? Cordelia Fine has also thematises truly gender neutral parenting (a lot more complicated than most articles make it look like) in Delusions of Gender and I can add that bit once I’m back home. If you’d rather I come up with some personal suggestions on my own, I can try to do that once I’m no longer on campus. But considering that I’m also on a completely different continent than you, I think some of my personal suggestions might differ from what you’d expect a radfem in the US or other parts in America to say.
