It has been a massive month! First and foremost, thank you so much, to the ladies and gentlemen who contributed photos and articles and reviews and thank you, you amazing people who signed on to be contributors to the GPK News blog. I sincerely hope that this will removes the barriers to letting people directly express what's going on in their local community.
Recently I came across the term "Stereotype Threat", which was first used to describe the results of experiments where black college freshmen and sophmores performed more poorly on standardized tests than white students when the subject's race was emphasized. Ok, cool, but what does this have to do with women and parkour? Well, a related study showed that stereotype threat also can also affect sports performance. The experiment showed that when women were told that their gender was being tested, women reacted differently and the women also had different reactions to a male or female instructor.
In practise, blatant and subtle stereotypes cues are not so clear cut. A blatant stereotype is someone ranting that "women are worse at parkour than men" and a subtle one could be a team mate saying "oh, let's do some balancing, women are naturally good at balancing" Yes, we are and we can also do more than balancing? Poor guys, no wonder they are confused about how to treat women (here's a guide from Rafe Kelley, The Man's Guide to Women in Parkour)
So as you flick over this month's totally awesome gallery , I hope that you are inspired by the women all over the world and perhaps the next time you see something you'd like to try, like a 3m wall run, that cat to precision or 100 pushups and your first thought is "No way, I can't do that", remember what Stereotype Threat can do. And then look at it again.
Enjoy August :) http://www.girlparkour.com/page7.htm
ps: Here's a link to the GPK Forum Post if you want to discuss Stereotype Threat.
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