Abstract:

Equality between women and men is a basic pillar in the transformation of today's society. Universities, as spaces of knowledge and innovation, must lead this transformative trend from a transversal perspective, that is, promoting the incorporation of the gender perspective in all policies and at all levels, including, of course, teaching. In this sense, we find that Spanish legislation itself makes specific reference to gender equality as one of the <<general principles that should inspire the design of new university degrees>>. However, in order to achieve real equality, it is also necessary to incorporate the gender perspective into the teaching of degrees that are already being taught. In this context, we sought to analyze the extent of inclusion of the gender perspective in several subjects belonging to Health Sciences Degrees: Human anatomy of the Degree in Nursing; Anatomy of the Degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics; and Human Visual System Anatomy of the Degree in Optics and Optometry. Since it is a core subject, Anatomy is always taught in the first year of the Health Sciences Degrees, which makes it an optimum subject for incorporating gender concepts at the beginning of the student's training. In order to carry out our objective, we reviewed the curricular contents, the teaching methodology and the assessment tests. Likewise, we carried out a quantitative analysis of the chosen illustrations to show anatomical features common to both sexes, in order to check if we tended to select images of one sex more frequently than the other. In this way we were able to identify certain biases introduced unconsciously into our teaching practices, which perpetuated stereotypes and were transmitters of gender inequalities. These include: a lack of recommended literature written by women; inclusion in our presentations of images in which a targeted comparison was made (male anatomy set the "normal" criterion against which female anatomy was compared); limited information on anatomical differences by sex of structures/organs not related to the reproductive system (e.g. not enough information on sexual dimorphism of the cardiovascular system or others, which is directly related to the higher prevalence or different symptomatology of certain diseases over the female sex); etc. The quantitative analysis of illustrations showed that there was no tendency to choose images of one sex preferentially over the other, but there was a balance instead. However, certain stereotypes were reproduced, such as the identification of the muscular system with the male sex or the endocrine system with the female sex. With all this, we are working on the modification of the teaching guides and redesigning the contents of the subjects to reinforce the quality of the Health Sciences Degrees of the University of Alicante by including the gender perspective in our teaching.

Keywords:

Human Anatomy, health sciences, gender.