Global Gender Regimes Online

Course Assignments and Grade Breakdown

Click on photo for story on the pandemic of violence against Mexican girls and women.

Course Grade comprises 100 pts total (NOTE: There are NO exams or quizzes for this course – woo hoo!)

1. Posts to Classwide Discussion Boards – 20 pts

2. Posts to Regional Group Discussion Boards – 20 pts

3. Power Point Presentation on Your Country’s Gender Regime – due Week 5 – 20 pts

You will each create a Power Point Presentation depicting the Gender Regime of your country. There is no fixed requirement in terms of length, but 15-20 slides is a good goal. See my example of the China’s Gender Regime here.

You will choose one of the following regions and countries as the subject of your Gender Regime Course Project:  W Europe (France, Sweden or Italy); post-Communist Europe (Poland, Ukraine, or Russia); Asia (India, Indonesia, Malaysia); Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, Cuba or Mexico); Middle East/North Africa (Egypt, Iran, Iraq or Morocco); sub-Saharan Africa (Rwanda, Nigeria or Zambia).

As we will learn throughout the course, a gender regime consists of the gender repercussions of each region’s dominant religious beliefs, family life, and its economic and political systems. Click here to see the Gender Regime Table a tabular description of several kinds of political-economic regimes (listed in the first column). The first row describes a country with a liberal political-economic regime such as the US. The rest of the columns would be filled by you if the US was your country to research describing each element listed across the top: ideals, as an example, filling all of the columns across it.

You will produce a Gender Regime Table for your country, i.e., each table will have the top row and then a second row naming the political-economic regime of his/her country, then filling in the rest of the row to describe each aspect of the regime.

Note that the table begins with descriptions of several different types of political and economic regimes such as Liberal-Individualist, Social Democratic and Marxist-Leninist, etc.  You can invent your own name for the political-economic regime if you find none of those listed quite right. You may combine modifiers found in two or three of those listed here (e.g., state-building transitional regime) to best describe your country’s regime. Please feel free to solicit my input as you are working through what labels fit best. You will include your Gender Regime Table in the Power Point Presentation you post to the Presentations Discussion Board for Your Count in Week 6.

Here’s a list of the bases you should be sure to cover:

1. The predominant religion(s) in your country and how their beliefs and authority structures have shaped the status of women.

2. Demographics and description of family life, women's power/status within the family. Data to include here include: average age of women and men at first marriage; fertility rate (births per woman); contraceptive accessibility, most commonly used methods and rates of usage; abortion rate/laws; sex ratio; other health concerns that disproportionately affect women (some may put information about violence against women here); life expectancy rates for women and men. You may not find all of these data for your country but make an effort to find them. Good sources are the Paxton and Hughes book, the World Values Survey; the World Health Organization, UN Women, UN, Gender Stats at the World Bank and WikiGender.

3. A description of and statistics on women's participation in the economy. Look for data on GDP PER CAPITA, women’s workforce participation (part-time, full-time, formal and informal; in what sectors of the economy; women in entrepreneurship, gender pay gap, hours worked per week by women vs. men (paid and unpaid). Data can be found at : CIA World Factbook, ILO, Gender Stats at the World Bank.

4. A description of and statistics on women's participation in politics. You MUST state the PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN SERVING IN YOUR COUNTRY’S LEGISLATIVE BRANCH (LOWER HOUSE OR SINGLE HOUSE) AND COMPARE IT TO OTHER COUNTRIES IN THE SAME REGION AS WELL AS THE US. See IPU site for the most current data. You should also determine if your country has PARTY-BASED QUOTAS or national QUOTAS for women in its national legislature. Rely on Paxton and Hughes for this section, as well. Finally, remember to do a slide or two on significant women politicians, current or former, from your country, describing their pathways to political power and what their participation in their countries’ politics reveals about the gender regime of that country and what difference their participation in politics made (nationally or internationally).

5. Regional context. It is helpful for the viewer/reader to put the data for your country into a regional and/or world context. You can do that by computing averages by region by using the countries listed after the name of each region to develop regional averages. If data is missing for one or more of the countries listed on a particular indicator, simply omit it from the regional average. You can use the countries listed for each region in the Paxton and Hughes text, p. 111-113, drawn from the World Values Survey, to compute regional averages. For variables they do not list, find the data for THE SAME SET of countries in the data sources listed in numbers 2-4, above. If data is missing for a country on a specific variable, simply indicate this in the endnotes for your project.

**You will be put into regional groups to develop your understanding of your county and regional context for weeks 2-4, and exchange information in an international group during Week 5.

6. Activism/Empowerment: What seems to be the most significant barrier (s) to women’s empowerment in your country/region? Is women’s activism/empowerment in your country/region on the rise? In response to what?

7. A final slide showing your Gender Regime Table for your country (again – just top row and row describing your country.)

8. Remember that since you are not going to orally present your work, your slides have to have all the information you want to convey to your “audience.” Don’t see this as a reason/excuse to clutter your slides with a lot of words – use MORE slides with FEWER words when in doubt. See my “China” example presentation as a guide.

9. Aim to make your presentation both informative AND visually interesting, stream-lined and easy to interpret. Use photos, graphs, maps, etc. The occasional video may be helpful but these should be SHORT (under 5 minutes).

10. DON’T FORGET to use COURSE TEXTS as sources – The Atlas of Women of the World has a wealth of data. Use the glossary, on-line dictionaries, Wikipedia, other encyclopedias to learn and reinforce your understanding of key terms, definitions and indices.

11. Your last few slides should be your Works Cited.

12. You will post to your International Discussion Board Group comprising students studying countries in different regions of the world AND to your Regional Discussion Group at the end of week 5.

4. Integrative Comments on the Power Point Presentations of Other Students

-10 pts for your comments on the presentations of students in your regional group

-10 pts for your comments on the presentations of students in your international group

– 20 pts total

5. Final Reflective Essay – about 5 pages - 20 pts - touching on these points:

a) What factors are affecting women’s status – for good and for ill – in today’s world?

b) What you will tell others about the lives of women in the country and region you studied most closely;

c) What are the strongest similarities about women’s lives across various regions of the world?

d) How your ideas about how gender structures the world have changed as a result of the course;