https://zjuintl-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/xiaomin_19_intl_zju_edu_cn/EUglM5IxLKlIr6NXtfmxXpABEZj0f38DX7juLBRjDcYMGA?e=K2ETpw
On the surface, the target audiences of this project are the female high school students who will face the significant and nearly irreversible subject choices or major choices. Further, this project is for anyone who may suffer from stereotypes, the adverse effect done by gender stereotype which influence girls’ intention of choosing STEM majors and STEM ability is just an specific example.
This project is answered a lot of questions I had in the past, and I believe that my specific audience probably have the same questions like me. For example, “why my peers, teachers, parents continues to say girls are not competitive as boys in math and physics?”, “ why many scientists claim boys and girls have equal IQ but many girls still not good at physics as boys?” etc. This is the main similarity between me and my specific audience, we all have experienced gender stereotypes and been “hurt” in some degrees. But differences are also obvious. The reality is many girls’ learning foundations of physics have already been worse than boys and lost interest in physics in high school, this project does nothing for optimizing their decisions about choosing subject and may cause some people’s antipathy. But at least, they now realize the existence of stereotypes and get a chance to fight against negative stereotypes in many situations. There are too many decisions need to be made, subject selection is never the most important.
This project focuses on the phenomenon that women are underrepresented in STEM majors. Most of people would have resonate with this phenomenon and wonder why. Further, many people are familiar with the sentences like “boys are better at STEM subjects than girls.” Some of them acquiesce to the fact and haven’t realize the problem, some of them are still confused and never plan to figure it out. But stereotypes are everywhere. Today they say women are inferior to man and you stay silent for you are a man, tomorrow they say northerners are not as clever as southerners and you keep silent for you are a southerners, the day after tomorrow they say Chinese people are not as creative as Americans, now you wake up and want to hit back and argue for equality, but remember, even if you don’t believe it, the influence of stereotypes is still there. Only when the society realize the harmful effect of stereotype and start to avoid them consciously, could we achieve the real equality. Otherwise, this inequality will be embedded in our genes and ability, as a party of dominant position as well as inferior position. These are the use of ethos and pathos.
Video mode will be used to show my ideas. It’s true that I could make a poster to inform people the influence of gender stereotypes, but it’s not enough just to realize. I describe a rough logic in my project which shows the way I used to explore this phenomenon. Thus, there is a chance that audiences will try to analysis similar phenomenon like me. As I have mentioned, stereotypes is everywhere and sometimes deeply rooted, providing a explanation without evidence is hardly convincing so I use logos here.That’s why I made a video. On the country, this mode also has many limitations. People tend to be attracted by creative posters as they cost less time. A long video may dissuade many people at the beginning. That’s a problem so I add a “flash video” at the beginning to attract attention.