How did my gender affect me as a child? That’s a difficult question to answer because it feels like a lifetime ago. The more that I think about it, gender didn’t affect me at all at school as far as I can remember. The only thing that I remember about gender roles was when we did sports day. The girls would be separated from the boys and the boys did different races from the girls. I remember quite clearly a boy in my class saying to me “it’s because the boys are faster than the girls!” when I had questioned it to my teacher. I also can remember the teacher explaining to me that it would be fairer if the girls did separate races from the boys. I couldn’t understand this because I knew that I was just as fast as the boys in these races and that I could beat them fair and square. In the playground at break and lunch time, the girls would play with the girls and the boys would play with the boys. Which, at the time, I didn’t question because that’s just what we did. I would now question as to why we did that. Working in a primary school for two years I can now see a change in all of these things. Girls and boys play together and the sports days are mixed with boys and girls races. It seems that since I was at school things are progressing with gender and how it shouldn’t affect a child’s learning and opportunities