Gender stereotypes and legal practice

Abstract

As the opening of this first panel of the Workshop on Gender Stereotypes, it is necessary to ratify the relevance of the gender perspective in the legal field. Gender, as a possible category of analysis of legal practice, allows –among other discoveries– to warn of the incidence of gender stereotypes in the creation, interpretation and normative application. Previous research has shown how acquired preconceptions –internalized without analyzing their truth value or moral correctness– condition our experiences and understanding of the social world. In particular, gender stereotypes, such as "structured group of beliefs about the personal attributes of women and men" operate as transmitters of the dominant gender ideology in our cultures of patriarchal origin and, in this way, sometimes inadvertently, reproduce it in constitutional and legal norms, in the academic activity dedicated to interpreting and rebuilding the normative system, and in decisionmaking on individual cases, where the preconceptions of the different operators work silently. Hence the need to discover and discuss gender stereotypes, to proceed to the critical analysis of normative statements, doctrinal proposals and decisions made to reject the influence of stereotyped views that affect fundamental rights of people.