Education – February 27, 2002
The educational experiences of female and male students – from elementary school through graduate school – are different and more importantly, unequal. Although females now constitute a slight majority of students, they continue to confront a number of structural barriers.
Renzetti and Curran speak about the difference between the formal curriculum and the hidden curriculum. Formal curriculum is the set of subjects officially ad explicitly taught to students in school. The hidden curriculum is the value preferences children are taught in school that are not an explicit part of the formal curriculum, but rather are hidden or implicit in it.
Using David Sadker’s article April 1999 article in Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, let’s examine some of the structural barriers in education
Despite the fact that Title IX – the provisions of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 that forbid sex discrimination in any educational programs or activities that receive federal funding.
Segregation still thrives in U.S. Schools – sometimes in blatant discrimination – sometimes in what Renzetti and Curran call micro-inequities : subtle, everyday forms of discrimination that single out ignore, or in some way discount individuals and their wok or ideas simply on the basis of an ascribed trait, such as sex.
Categories of micro-inequities:
Student- teacher interaction – both quantity and quality of the interaction.
Curriculum – who is depicted; what is discussed.
Organization: how students move through their environment; who are the staff.
Examples of Student-teacher interaction inequities
From grade school to graduate school, girls receive less teacher attention and less useful feedback.
Girls talk significantly less than boys do in class. In elementary and secondary school, they are 8 times less likely to call out comments. When they do, they are often reminded to raise their hand while similar behavior by boys is accepted.
Not only do male students interact more with the teacher but at all levels of schooling they receive a higher quality of interaction. Praise, remediation, and critics provide more useful information to students than the neutral acknowledgment of an “OK” = these clear, more precise teacher comments are more often directed to boys.
Boys more often perform 79% of all student-assisted demonstrations. Also, teachers teach the skill to boys, boys learn the skill; girls learn to ask for assistance. Example of focusing a microscope.
Examples of Curricula Inequities: Girls rarely see mention of the contributions of women in the curricula; most textbooks continue to report male worlds. Examples, science books use the male body as the model for the human body.
Examples of Organization Inequities: Not only are females hidden in the curriculum and quiet in the classroom, they are also less visible in other school locations.
Examples – the playground, playing fields. Not only in sports, but guidance counselors and teachers continue to harbor lower expectations for girls and are less likely to take advanced classes in math and science. It is only later in life that women realize the price they paid for avoiding these cores as they are screened out of lucrative careers in science and technology.
Elementary School
Classroom interactions between teachers and students put males in the spotlight and relegate females to the sidelines.
The interactions differ in at least two ways: the frequency of teacher-student interactions and the content of those interactions.
With respect to frequency of teachers’ interactions with their students, studies show that regardless of the sex of the teacher, male students interact more with their teachers than female students. Boys receive more teacher attention and more instructional time than girls do. Of course, this may be due to the fact that boys are more demanding than girls. Boys, for instance , are more likely than girls to call out answers, thus directing teachers’ attention to them more often. Research shows that when boys call out comments in class without raising their hands, teachers, usually accept their answers, whereas teaches typically correct girls who call out answers by telling them the behavior is “inappropriate.”
The content of the teacher-student interactions also differs depending on the sex of the student. Teachers provide boys with more remediation; for example they help boys find and correct errors. They pose more academic challenges to boys, encourage them to think through their answers to arrive at the best possible academic response.
Teachers’ comments to boys are more precise than their comments to girls. Even at very young ages boys get more praise for the intellectual quality of their work, whereas girls are praised more often for being congenial and neat. Black students, regardless of their sex, are more likely to be reinforced for their social behavior, whereas White students are more likely to receive teacher reinforcement for their academic achievements. Black girls in particular, though, are rewarded for nurturing, mediating, and keeping order.
At the same time, while boys generally engage in more positive intellectual interactions with teachers, they are also more likely than girls to incur their teachers’ wrath. Boys are subject to more disciplinary action in elementary school classrooms, and their punishments are harsher and more public than those handed out to girls.
Golombok and Fivush conclude that, “From this pattern of praise and criticism, boys may be learning that they are smart, even if not very well behaved. Girls, on the other hand, are learning that they may not be very smart, but that they can get rewards by being good.’”
Middle class children receive more favorable evaluations from teaches than lower-class children.
Textbooks - The gender message that teachers send to students are often reinforced by the traditional curricular materials available in elementary schools. Regardless of the subject – English, math, reading, and science – females and minorities continue to be underrepresented in textbooks. There is evidence that children’s readers have improved significantly with respect to the use of gender-neural language and the inclusion of females. However there continues to be imbalances in favor of males with regard to rate of portrayal and types of roles assigned to males and females in the stories (e.g. girls need to be rescued, more than boys; boys are more adventurous than girls; women work for men, but not vice versa).
Kimmel points out that there has been no comparable change in the depiction of men or boys in children’s books, no movement of men toward more nurturing and caring behaviors. As in real life, women in our storybooks have left home and gone off to work, but men still have enormous trouble coming back home.
The organization of school activities also gives children messages about gender.
Many teachers continue to use various forms of sex separation in their classrooms. Form separate lines – organize teams. Assign different chores.
Consequences – sex separation in and of itself prevents boys and girls from working together cooperatively, thus denying children of both sexes valuable opportunities to learn about and sample one and other’s interests and activities. Second sex separation makes working in same-sex groups more comfortable than working in mixed-sex groups – a feeling that children may carry with them into adulthood and that may become problematic when they enter the labor force. Theirs, sex separation reinforces gender stereotypes, especially if it involves differential work assignments.
Finally , children receive messages about gender simply by the way adult jobs are distributed in their schools. Although approximately 87% of elementary school teaches and 83% of teachers’ aides are women, women are underrepresented in the upper management of school administrations. For example, 40% of school officials and administrators are women; 43% of principals and assistant principals are women.
Sexual Harassment:
In 1992 the US Supreme Court ruled that sexual harassment in school is a form of educational discrimination and that schools that fail to address the problem may be held liable for damages to victims. In 1998 the US Supreme Court severely narrowed the circumstances under which schools may be held liable for sexual harassment of students by teachers. In a 5 to 4 decision, the Court ruled that students who are sexual harassed by a teacher may sue their school district for monetary damages only if they can demonstrate that school district officials knew about the harassment and deliberately did nothing to stop it.
In addition, the guidelines stress that in order for a behavior to constitute sexual harassment, it must be severe and repetitive; a single inappropriate act is not considered sexual harassment.
Nan Stein’s interesting article on “Sexual Harassment in K-12 Schools”
The antecedents of peer-to-peer sexual harassment in schools may be found in “bullying” behaviors, children learn, practice, and/or experience beginning at a very early age.
Dan Olweus (psychologist, Norway) definitions of bullying seem interchangeable with definitions of sexual harassment in the United States.
Boys bully both sexes, often in physical ways while girls only bully other girls, often in indirect ways, for example, name-calling, gossip, rumors, secret telling, refusing to be friends, refusing to allow someone to play, shunning ad playing tricks on someone.
Eder found that boys and girls alike used sexual put-downs towards girls, and that girls’ use of words like “sluts” or “whores” helped to maintain a hierarchy with male-oriented, tough, and sexually aggressive boys at the top.
Stein’s research Girls as young as 9 and 10 knew about sexual harassment.
The responses and attitudes of the adults had more significance on the extent of bullying that occurred. In addition the tone and climate that the teachers set in the classroom had an impact on the incidence of teasing and bullying that we observed. Some teachers tended to use authoritarian measures, such as yelling at student; saying comments that embarrassed them or demeaned them.
Parents and teachers doubted the veracity of what the children would reveal to stein; the adults assumed that the children would invent events or distort reality.
Based on our observations and interview with the children, it seemed that the students were asking for better and/or more effective skills (what to say; models of conduct) o manage their problems on their own, and secondly for support, authority, and belief in their attempt to deal with the offending peer. What Stein found particularly disturbing about this cycle was that it echoed exactly what her research found with other students about their experiences of sexual harassment – that it happens in public; that adults were often watching, and when students reported the sexual harassment to the adults, the adults either did not believe the students, trivialized it, or dismissed the events entirely.
Is Bullying Sexual Harassment – yes- repeated and long-term nature of the behaviors targeted against an individual.
Strategy – If educators and advocates pose and present the problem as “bullying” to young children, rather than labeling it immediately as “sexual harassment,” we can engage children and universalize the phenomena as one that boys as well as girls will understand and accept as problematic. Hopefully such an approach will go a long way towards developing compassion and empathy in the students.
Secondary school
Entering middle school, girls begin what is often the mot turbulent period of their young lives. According to a national survey sponsored by the American Association of University Women, 60% of elementary school girls agreed with the statement “I’m happy the way I am,” while only 37% still agreed in middle school. By high school, the level had dropped an astonishing 31 points to 29 percent, with fewer than three out of every 10 girls feeling good about themselves. According to the survey, the decline is far less dramatic for boys; 67% report being happy with themselves in elementary school, and this drops to 46% in high school.
Research points to the relationships between academic achievement and self-esteem.
For teenage boys, the single most important source of prestige and popularity is athletic achievement, What contributes most to a teenage girl’s prestige and popularity is physical attractiveness.
Girls who behave in ways defined by their peers as gender-inappropriate are likely to be unpopular and ostracized. Boys who behave in gender-inappropriate ways are also ridiculed and ostracized by their peers, but they do not consistently lower their academic or career aspirations as a result.
Teachers, parents, and students themselves usually attribute boys’ academic achievements to ability; whereas girls’ achievements are attributed to effort or hard work the implication being that those with lesser ability must expend greater effort to succeed.
Like elementary school teachers, high school teachers tend to offer male students more encouragement, publicly praise their scholastic abilities and be friendlier toward them than they are toward female students.
Curriculum materials – recent reviews of high school textbooks, found both subtle and blatant gender biases including language bias and gender stereotypes, omission of women and a focus on “great”, white men.
School personnel may also contribute to making girls feel that they will be unable to fulfill their aspirations. For example, research indicates that school counselors provide little useful career information to girls. Studies also indicate that school personnel may channel male and female students into different fields and activities, with female student’s in particular being discouraged from pursuing fields as mathematics, engineering, construction and pharmaceuticals.
Courses –
During the 1990s, female enrollment increased in many math and science courses. Honors as well as advanced placement courses showed enrollment gains.
Girls are more likely than boys to take biology and chemistry whereas physics is still a male domain. Boys, however, are more likely to take all three core sciences – physics, chemistry, and biology
Tests continue to reflect a gender gap, particularly high-stakes tests like the SAT. Although the gap is decreasing.
Several factors have been argued. Improvement in gender bias in tests have narrowed the gap. Several other social factors also appear to be related to the gender gap in mathematics. One factor is the extent to which math and math-related activities are oriented to males rather than females. Observers have noted, for instance, that math word problems are often framed in terms of traditionally masculine-typed areas and interests.
Much computer software, especially computer games, in also masculine in its orientation. Boys enter school with more computer experience than girls, and girls know it. Girls rate themselves significantly lower on computer ability.
Stereotyping is alive and well in the tech world. Girls are more likely to enroll in word processing and clerical course, whereas boys are more likely to enroll in advance computer science and computer design classes.
In their classic study of gender and mathematics performance, Fenemena and
Sherman discovered that the major difference between male sand females with regard to mathematics is not math ability per se, but rather extent of exposure to mathematics. Through out elementary shock, when boys and girls take the same math classes, there is little, if any difference in math achievement. It is not until around seventh grade that the gap begins to appear. As the years progress, girls become less likely than boys to taken any math courses beyond those required by their school for graduation. Yet, among girls and boys with identical math backgrounds, there is little difference in performance on math tests.
Kimmel suggests that too many boys who overvalue their abilities and remain in difficult math and science courses longer than they should; they pull the boys’ mean scores down. By contrast, few girls, whose abilities and self-esteem are sufficient to enable them to “trespass” into a male domain, skew female data upwards.
Two factors appear to be critical in influencing girls’ and boys’ decisions to enroll in math courses: their interactions with teachers, and encouragement of their parents.
A recent study of 14 school-to-work programs revealed that over 90 percent of females cluster in a few traditional careers: allied health careers, teaching and education, graphic arts, and office technology.
The School as Gender Workplace : Who are the teachers? Although elementary school girls can identify with tier teachers, who are almost always women, it becomes more difficult to do so in high school, whereas about 43% of the teachers are men. In vocational courses, female teachers are concentrated in subjects traditionally considered feminine: occupational home economic (92%), health (90%) and office occupations (69%)
School administration has remained largely a masculine arena.
More likely to have a male teacher for their math courses (58%) and for science (65%)
Sex composition of the labor force is related to its salary structure. Within the educational field, women continue to earn less money than men doing the same jobs.
Hostile environment – sexual harassment –
Too frequently female students become targets of unwanted sexual attention from male peers and sometimes even from administrators and teachers. Hostile Hallways found that 76%of male students and 85% of female students in the typical high school had experienced sexual harassment.
Most victims don’t report it. Even when victims choose to report incidents of sexual harassment, administrators may downplay it and, are usually dealt with informally.
Peers perpetrate most sexual harassment in educational settings. The negative impact is that it may affect their school work, certainly affects their self-esteem.
Colleges and Graduate Schools
Teacher not only call on male students more frequently than on females; they also allow boys to call out more often. This imbalance in instructional attention is greatest at the college level.
Women and men continue to be in different fields of study. More male student pursues degrees in engineering, computer science philosophy and religion, architecture, and the physical sciences. Female students are heavily concentrated in nursing, library science, social work, psychology home economics, and education.
This imbalance persists and worsens at the graduate level. Graduate degrees of men and women tend to be concentrated in different fields. For example, men earn about 88% of the Ph.Ds in physics, but less than 7% of the PhDs in nursing.
The majority of females major in English, French, Spanish, music drama and dance, whereas males populate computer science, physics, and engineering programs.
Although almost half of medical and law students are female, they are concentrated in a few “female friendly” (and lower paying) specialties.
Other facts: the number of female degree recipients declines dramatically. Consider that although women represent more than half of all bachelors’ and master’s degree recipients, they constitute slightly more than one-third of all doctorate recipients. More importantly, male PhDs outnumber females PhDs in several fields that have either a higher concentration of women undergraduates or a relative balance between the sexes at the undergraduate level.
In addressing the first question, we must consider not only when women are largely absent from certain fields, but also why there are so few en in fields such as nursing, home economics, social work ad library science. We can say with some certainty that the scarcity of men in the female-dominated fields has less to do with discrimination against them than with their unwillingness to pursue careers in areas that typically have lower prestige and lower salaries than the male-dominated fields.
Professor – Student interaction
Male students are called on more than female students, are interrupted less when they are speaking, and, in general, their comments are taken more seriously Btu the professor.
Professors may use sex-stereotyped examples when discussing men’s and women’s social or professional roles.
References are made to males as “men” but to females as “girls”
Comments are made about female student’s physical attributes or appearance.
Comments/actions are made that disparage women in general.
Other barriers to equality for women in higher education: the lack of mentors and role models.
Women faculty and administrators: still too few.
Women are 40 % of administrators at US colleges and universities; 84% of these women are white.
Women represent just 33.2% of full-time college and university faculty. In general, the more prestigious the institution or department, the fewer the women. For example, at doctoral granting institutions, women are 27.4% of the faculty, whereas at two-year colleges, women are 45.9% of the faculty. Similarly, the higher the academic rank, the fewer the women. At Ivy League school about 10 –15% are tenured professors. Men continue to dominate in sciences, where teaching loads are lower and the number of research and teaching assistants is highest; women dominate in professions such as nursing, social work, education, an those fields that require significant classroom contact, like languages. When ranked by quality of school, women made up less than 10% of the faculty at high prestige colleges, but nearly 23% of community colleges. Women at all ranks receive lower salaries than do men at the same rank, in the same field, in the same department. Women dominate the ranks of the most populous arena of college teaching: adjust lecturers and instructors.
Tenure rate at all school for women is 58% compared to 75% for men..
17% of full professors
30% of associate professors
42% of assistant professors
49% of instructors
Regardless of rank or tenure status, women faculty are paid less than men and, the gap is widest at the highest academic rank. Indeed, even though the number of faculty who are women has increased substantially during the last fifteen years, there has been little change in the ratio of female faculty salaries to male faculty. The gender gap in faculty salaries has remained fairly stable in the last ten years.
Mentor – a net result of the imbalance of university faculty is a lack of mentors for female students and students of color.
Sexual Harassment exists at the college/graduate school level in both quid pro quo harassment and in hostile environments – for both females students and female faculty.
Researchers have also documented contrapower sexual harassment which “occurs when the target of harassment possesses greater formal organization power than the perpetrator.”
As is true at other educational levels – reports tend to go unreported to school and campus authorities. There tends to be a downplaying of it. Few universities have dismissed perpetrators, especially tenured faculty members. Despite widespread concerns among faculty regarding the possibility of false accusations, evidence indicates that these are rare. In fact, in their survey of 668 US colleges and universities, Robert and her colleagues found among the 256 administrators who responded to a question about how many false complaints of sexual harassment they have ever received, only 64 complaints were identified as proven to have been intentionally fabricated, - that is less than 1%.
Victims report declines in their academic performance, discouragement about studying a particular field, lowered self-esteem, emotional disturbance, and physical illness.
Structuring more positive learning environments.
Question of single-sex institutions.
Studies do show that for girls, single-sex education is highly beneficial. Girls who attend single-sex schools have, on average, higher levels of self-confidence and greater success in obtaining high-status, high-paying jobs after graduation. They get to study non-traditional female fields without the discomfort of being in the minority and without discouragement from male peers and faculty.
But the oft-quoted study by Elizabeth Tidball (1973) is highly flawed. She assumed that attendance at the Single-sex College led to wealth and fame. Actually the correlation between social class and attendance at all female colleges.
In short what women often learn at all-women’s colleges is that they can do anything that men can do. By contrast what men learn is that they (women) cannot do what they (the men) do. In this way, women’s colleges may constitute a challenge to gender inequality, while men’s colleges reproduce that inequality.
But many, the Sadkers included,believe that while it may help girls learn more and better, it does not address the problems of gender inequality and discrimination that characterize the institutions of our society. Sadker says It can not be a substitute for ensuring equitable public education for all our students. Dr. Kenneth Clarke argues that separate is never equal. (African-American psychologist whose work help to eliminate school segregation.
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Many school districts are currently experimenting with single sex schools or single-sex classrooms, especially to teach math and science to girls. There have been notable experiments with single-sex schools for black boys in Detroit and Newark and for black girls in NYC to teach math and science. The evidence to support such innovations is inconsistent and discouraging.
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