• Question: Are animals aware of gender stereotypes?????? like bows and boys etc

    Asked by springonion to Carrie, Cedric, Ellen, Ines, Rupert on 8 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Carrie Ijichi

      Carrie Ijichi answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      Probably not which would be really great. Stereotypes are a human product and then we project them on to other people. You can forget about it too though – what the stereotype about you says really doesn’t matter. The best thing in the world is succeeding in something when people assume you can’t!

    • Photo: Ines Goncalves

      Ines Goncalves answered on 8 Mar 2017:

      No, I don’t think so. Which is not to say that we don’t label them with stereotypes anyway. It’s hard even for scientists, aware of these sort of things, not to express themselves using stereotypes. For example, species where males try to attract females and females tend to be the choosy sex are referred to as having conventional sex roles, which females where males invest more into reproduction and so females need to try hard to attract males are referred to as being sex-role reversed.

    • Photo: Ellen Williams

      Ellen Williams answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      I wouldn’t have thought they are. The thing I love most about animals is their readiness to accept everything as it is. They live a more basic life in that sense, it would be a dream if humans too could live the same way. As Carrie says though stereotypes shouldn’t be a factor in human lives either, they are unnecessary and can often be unkind. Everyone and everything is put on this earth to be an individual, from humans to bugs, and everything deserves to be treated equally and with respect.

    • Photo: Rupert Marshall

      Rupert Marshall answered on 10 Mar 2017:

      Animals respond to what’s in their environment. If one animal behaves boldly and seems too know where to go, shy ones may follow it. If one animal is aggressive, others may avoid it. Animals have personalities: not all lions behave in the same way. So yes, animals respond to differences in the behaviour of others. But they don’t label them as they don’t have language like we do.

    • Photo: Cedric Tan

      Cedric Tan answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      Very very interesting question! It is also a sensitive area for many of my students and colleagues at Oxford. Nevertheless, I’d think that most animals will acts on their instincts of pursuing a female while being a male and reacting to a pursuing male when being a female, I don’t think they are aware that males and females should behave in a certain manner.

      On a related note, did you know that in some species of birds and fishes, there is a third type of gender in which the male pretends to be a female and sneakily copulates with females when the other males are not looking? Here’s an example:

      https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1016/191016-natural-creativity

Comments