Gender-aware helping

 Gender-aware helping

Gender-aware helping goals

Where gender role issues are involved, it is possible to state helping goals for both sexes and for each sex. Gender-aware helping for bos sexes involves general goals that include assisting individual clients to use their strengths and potential, make appropriate choices, remedy poor skills and develop positive and flexible self-concepts. In addition, helping goals relating to gender roles can often involve both male and female partners: for example, learning to deal with demand/withdraw interaction patterns in marital conflict and handling the numerous issues confronting dual career couples in a time of rapid technological and economic change.

Essential goals for feminist counselling and helping are women valuing themselves on their own terms and women becoming free of sex-role stereotypes. Statements of goals that take women's sex and gender issues into account can focus both on women's life span issues and on problems that are much more commonly faced by women than men. For example, gender-aware and feminist helpers can counsel mid life women to cope with the menopause constructively. In addition, suitably trained and qualified helpers can assist women to address issues such as insufficient assertion, eating disorders, domestic violence and sexual harassment.

Helping goals for men can include addressing excessive need for success, power and competition, restrictive emotionality, and restrictive affectionate behaviour between men. Other helping goals for men clients include stopping being physically violent both inside and outside of the home, dealing with work-related stress, overcoming tendencies to treat women as sexual objects and developing better healthcare skills. Since women are redefining their gender roles faster than men, many men are then put in positions of exploring, under standing and altering their own gender roles. Positive maleness combining tenderness and toughness and treating women with respect and as equals, is a desirable outcome from this change process.