Yesterday, I shared with my faculty during our teaching conversations* my research and thinking on gender equality in the classroom. How do we handle gender in the classroom? My guess is that most of us teaching honestly strive to achieve and believe that we create a gender-neutral, or more accurately an equally-facilitative classroom environment. You can image the horror I felt when I received voluntary, anonymous student feedback last spring that said “you may not mean to or know you are doing this, but you treat men and women differently in class.” From whose perspective was this coming? How differently? And who gets the better treatment? I was baffled. As a female law professor, I was hoping that I got a pass on thinking critically about gender because I am female, right? Wrong.
This feedback launched my research into the area and a self-audit of the ways in which I may be explicitly treating students differently, implicitly reinforcing gender norms, and unintentionally creating a classroom environment that is different from my ideal.
Below are some observations and discoveries about my own behavior and a summary of some relevant research.
- While I use surnames when I cold-call students, I will call on male volunteer or answer male questions with a “yes, sir” acknowledgment where I don’t give an equal “yes ma’am” for women, but simply make eye contact and say “yes” or otherwise invite the question.
- Male students participate more in my corporations class than do female students on questions and on volunteer participation. The same pattern was observed in contracts, but to a slightly lesser degree.
- My corporations casebook features cases where almost all of the major players are male. Females, when they do appear are as the signing girlfriend, the divorced ex-wife with a stake in the company, or the woman that loaned her car for a high school football game.
- If I don’t assign roles in group work, female students are the default note taker for the work.
- I tend to call on the first few students to raise their hands, and at least 2/3 of those early volunteers are men.
- I sometime start class or refocus the conversation with “okay, guys let’s….”.
- Students asking me questions immediately after lecture are predominantly male.
These confessions may appall some of you and for some it may seem like no big deal. Well it turns out that what I was inadvertently doing is consistent with document gender-based disparities starting in K-12 (see also here) and continuing through law school. Yale and Harvard both conducted gender equality studies in the last decade. The bottom line of the education research is that men volunteer more than women and that these differences are greatest in the largest classes and lessen significantly in smaller class sizes and alternative classroom formats. The studies also points out that faculty simply give more attention to students who speak up quickly and that this is behavior that is displayed more frequently by men. Male students also have different types of interactions with professors—more feedback on in class answers, more follow up questions—and are more likely to participate in office hours, emails with professors and other forms of contact that deepen/reinforce learning, build professional networks and identity, and have other possible implications. Classroom discussions, management styles and even education materials tend to favor male students and reinforce certain gender norms.
In the law school context, diminished participation affects (the assumption is negatively) students’ ability to forge relationships with professors, to receive individualized feedback, to practice oral advocacy and analysis—all necessary components of a successful legal education. Participation disparities persist despite the changing demographic of law school classes where roughly 53% of the 1st year classes and total law school enrollment is male and roughly 47% female.
If you are interested in further exploring gender dynamics in the classroom, the studies linked to above are very interesting to read. They led me to the conclusion that the disparities are not intentional, but from a lack of intentional course design and classroom management practices that create an equally facilitative environment. [insert these observations in conversations regarding participation among students of color and other factors such as socio-economic status, cultural identity, etc.] If you want to explore more on this issue, below are some starting points:
- Read this blog post, the referenced materials and pedagogy-focused literature on inclusive classroom environments. For example, a new book, titled Building on Best Practices: Reflections on Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World, will be available next spring and includes a chapter on inclusive classroom environments
- Conduct a gender self-audit or have a third party observe a few classes/recordings for gender-specific issues such as
- Men/women addressed equally
- Gender-specific terms used in class discussion by instructor or students
- Gender-assumptions in discussion (i.e., using HE when discussing a corporate director)
- Participation distribution among men and women
- Instructor questioning practices of male and female students—equally demanding, engaging, and interactive
- Etc.
- Engage classroom management techniques that facilitate equal participation by genders such as
- Increased pause time when asking for volunteers to solicit broader range of participation from all students
- Balancing volunteered participation with cold-calling
- Challenging gender assumptions in class discussion
- Counter-weight male-dominated actors in cases with gender-balanced hypotheticals
- Model gender inclusion by addressing students the same way
Please use the comments to suggest resources or classroom management techniques that you have found helpful. I am interested to learn from the experiences of my peers.
**Teaching conversations at GSU occur during an informal faculty coffee on Tuesday mornings where a colleague shares a teaching topic.
-Anne Tucker