Gender Fieldwork Observation Report

For my Gender Fieldwork observations, I planned on staying in one specific part of Dilworth Park in order to notice gendered actions of individuals. My chosen location was less populated than I had expected as I had forgotten that generally, city activity goes down during the night. This was not, however, the most surprising part of the fieldwork. I was prepared to find absolute evidence of constructed gender roles immediately. What I observed is less concrete than I had initially hoped. While there are still obvious differences between men and women, the smaller actions I was looking for such as how people were sitting or what they were drinking, appeared in both male and female individuals. This shows that while gender roles are overall still

strictly enforced, less obvious actions that people often attribute to exclusively one gender are not impossible or unnatural for other genders.
The section of Dilworth Park I chose to observe contained a group of park tables between a cafe and the northern set of fountains. I arrived at 7:30 just after an event offering reduced price drinks ended, so there were four groups still seated when I arrived, and all groups had both men and women. From where I was sitting I could see all of the groups very well, but could only hear bits and pieces from conversations which unfortunately happened to be in a language I did not understand. Therefore, the majority of gender I saw was visually based, but the majority of gender is visual, as classifying a stranger’s gender is often done in a matter of seconds without even realizing it, usually done without ever hearing that person speak.
The easiest observable piece of gender is a person’s clothing.

Certain colors are given a gender, and while women are generally allowed to wear every color on the spectrum without repercussion, men are steered away from pinks and purples. The men I saw on Wednesday adhered to this norm, and stayed mostly in greys, blacks and blues. While it is uncommon nowadays for women to wear exclusively dresses, this is a very telling sign of someone's gender. There were also several women wearing hijabs, and while two of the three wore skirts, the third woman wore loose fitting pants, proving that pants are not exclusively masculine, despite the fact that dresses and skirts are still seen as exclusively feminine. There were also two women in a different group wearing scrubs. To the vast majority of people, it would be an instant assumption that they were nurses, despite the fact that based on exclusively clothing it is just as likely that they were doctors. Through clothing we assign occupations, and often those occupations are more gendered than the clothing. Though I did not see it that night, a women in a suit would more likely be assumed to be a secretary than an office worker, despite the fact that alone, a suit in generally not gendered.
The objects surrounding people also hold heavy connotations about gender, but this is where my observations started to drift from the gender norm. While the majority of men were drinking beer, the majority of women were too. Both men and women were

drinking the same alternative, a pink seemingly fruity drink. If these people strictly adhered to gender expectations the men would drink exclusively beer and the women would exclusively drink something pink.