Alex Trelinski
A SPANISH government official says TV cartoons like Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol perpetuate gender stereotypes which stop women from applying for road construction and maintenance jobs.
The comment comes from Marta Serrano, the country’s head of Land Transport within the Ministry of Transport.
Serrano is a civil engineer and gave her views during a conference about the role of women within road building in Spain.
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She defended the need to have policies to promote equal opportunities and combat gender stereotypes.
“It is a social and cultural challenge,” Serrano said, who criticised cartoon series that show ‘all operators as giant and very muscular gentlemen’.
The Land Transport boss said that because of the depictions, even her daughter does not believe that women can be in sectors such as road construction, ‘no matter how much she sees me working on the other side’.
Serrano concluded that when girls are eight or ten years old, they ‘do not think about this type of work’.
“We are still far from reaching parity,” denounced Serrano, who said female positions are only around 11% in road construction and below 10% in road haulage.
She pointed out that even in the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility itself ‘we are lagging behind’ with the presence of women being 40% compared to 54% in other government departments’.
She warned that some sectors may end up have staff recruitment problems and that there should be a focus on attracting young women.
Marta Serrano also said that the ministry plans to publish a guide next month to improve the gender perspective in sectors linked to transport- something that was going to happen last month but was postponed due to the DANA.
