Gender image of a group of university students: advances or immobility?
Educational institutions can be spaces promoting gender equality as well as centres for the reproduction of discrimination, whose naturalisation is one of the elements favouring the longevity of patriarchy.
In Cuba, the institutional laws and policies favour the access of women and men to university, as well as professional work; but historic-cultural mandates prevail that determine different ways of socialising for one and the other based on what is conceived as feminine and masculine. The social and subjective changes are not on a par with the implemented laws and policies. After working for five days with a group of young university students it was possible to reveal a gender image that, while inheriting traditional ways of conceiving gender relations, attempt to incorporate innovative ideas and seeks referents – non-existing – that distance themselves from what is understood as inequalities, which is why they are constantly submitted to contradiction and to a way of conceiving reality in tension, typical of contemporary times.
