You Be You
Bilkis
Miah
Ceo/ Founder
Mission
Our mission is to inspire children in their limitless choices, particularly beyond their gender, race and class. We tackle this issue from a young age, where research shows the problem first arises. It remains vital to break these barriers down as soon as they emerge, where gender beliefs are less embedded and easier to change.
Category
Education and Skills
Additional Information
Our experience and market research have shown that many initiatives around gender stereotypes start too late, address the impact on girls but not boys, and fail to engage a diverse range of races, religions and ethnicities. Both founders are of South Asian backgrounds, and as such, are acutely aware of the failures of how gender parity is currently messaged. We believe our programme fills these gaps.
Our solution currently focuses on working with parents and schools. We have recently completed our pilot in London, and will be expanding across the borough of Tower Hamlets. Our pilot consisted of a series of cross-curricular lessons and assemblies, co- created with child psychologists, primary school heads and teachers, but delivered by the classroom teacher, who is most likely to have a strong relationship with pupils. Each lesson addressed a key theme where stereotypes embed, while also fitting into the national curriculum, so teachers didn’t need to carve out additional time to teach them.
Our impact has been positive and promising: we saw a 29% decrease in pupils agreeing that some jobs are only for men and some jobs are only for women and 38% decrease in pupils agreeing that boys will grow up to have more important jobs than girls. These are only two statistics— much more is available in our impact report.
We're now in an exciting phase of the business and developing a new product-- Be Me Boxes – our take-home activity kits – are reusable boxes for each pupil to borrow, do with an adult at home, and bring back to the class.