[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Fri Nov 24 16:13:56 UTC 2006

On 11/22/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Puppy wrote:
> <snip>
> > *GENDER BIAS IN STUDENT/TEACHER INTERACTIONS*
> >
>
> Obviously you're not aware of the problems surrounding males in
> education then, and how they're falling seriously behind their female
> peers.

That's true, but they still get more attention  - in fact, they get even
more attention from male teachers because there is concern about male
achievement.  I'm in a field which is overwhelmingly female at the undergrad
level, predominantly female at the grad student level, and predominantly
male at the tenured faculty level.  And it isn't because the demographics
have shifted recently, it's because of retention of women in grad school and
in academia beyond grad school.  And a large part of it has to do with the
fact that professors are more encouraging to male students and junior
faculty.  While the best students are usually female, it's the one male
student who performs well who gets most of the attention.  Of course, it's
also the male students who are socialised to take the initiative and chat
with the professors.

I've spent a lot of time in classroom situations, both as a student and as a
teacher.  Over the course of the semester you get to know certain groups of
students who you can chat with as you wander around the lab.  Somehow there
are always more knots of male students who talk to you than there are groups
of female students (the lab I teach is mostly non-majors, and it's about
even in terms of gender ratio).