Women have had a long history of being told what is expected of them in society, especially when it comes to what they should or shouldn’t do when it comes to outdoor recreation. A significant factor that influences what a woman feels like she can do comes from race/ ethnicity and culture.
Hispanic working women believe it is their duty, as women, to teach children songs, stories, religious rituals, and cooking skills, which reflect their native cultures Ho et al. (2005). Additionally, Mexican immigrant women believed that “the female role isn’t simply a female role; it is a part of a cultural tradition .. . to the traditional, it seems that only women can carry on this tradition Ho et al. (2005). An excellent example of this comes from China:
Ancient China viewed the world as the product of two interacting complementary elements: yin and yang. Yin was the attribute of all things female, dark, weak, and passive. Yang was the attribute of all things male, bright, strong, and active . . . Building on such ideological foundations, an endless succession of Chinese male moralists worked out the behavior pattern of obedience and passivity that was expected of women. These patterns subordinated girls to boys from infancy and kept die wife subordinate to her husband and the mother to her grown son (Fairbank & Goldman, 1998, p. 20).
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Studies have been done to see how being of a different ethnic class (i.e., not White) changes your park experience. In addition to that study, they have also studied whether gender among other race groups is a factor. In the study by Ho et al. (2005) there was no reason to conclude that the difference among ethnic groups varied by gender. But there have been reports that women are more likely than men to view the forest environments as threatening and prefer that park managers be present (Virden & Walker, 1999), which was consistent across cultures.
Many factors can contribute to why women find forest environments to be threatening, especially when you look to find that from boyhood men are taught how to survive in the outdoors through Boy Scouts or taught how to be tough and masculine through sports. Participation in athletics has historically been related to the socialization of masculine gender identity (Kramer 2001). Sports maintain hegemonic masculinity (the culturally idealized form of masculine character). Wesely & Gaarder (2004) found a study that states that boys learn hegemonic masculinity in their childhood by performing acts of masculinity using their bodies in skilled, forceful ways, while girls learn to restrict their movements and limit their strengths.
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To challenge the gender roles five California girls pushed to becomes members of Boy Scouts in 2015, their interest came from a skills-building course that was open to boys and girls. Several of the girls had tried Girl Scouts and found it didn’t give them the experience they wanted outdoors (Nelson 2015). The reasons for this are simple, when you cross-compare the Boy and Girl Scouts handbooks, we find messages for boys stressed self-oriented activity and heteronormative masculinity, while girls are influenced by gendered messages promoting other-oriented activity and femininity, and at the same time are exposed to messages promoting more progressive feminist identities, thus adding doubt to gender role identity negotiations in the outdoors for young women. (Warren 2015) p.3 If you think about it, the fathers are the ones who lead the Boy Scouts, and since they grew up with the hegemonic masculinity and the past experiences of being in Scouts and living in the outdoors, they are more likely to do those kinds of experience with the Boy Scouts. Mothers are typically the ones who run Girl Scouts, and since they grew up with the typical gender roles for females, they aren’t used to all of the outdoor activities so it’s natural that they wouldn’t try to introduce the girls to activities like that.
There have been some outdoor programs that try to challenge the typical female role. The National Wild Turkey Foundation made a program called Women in the Outdoors. The mission of this program is to get more women outdoors in a supported environment. Their specific mission is based on getting women to feel more comfortable hunting, but other outdoor programs can help motivate women to get outside, such as hiking or walking groups on platforms like GroupMe.
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