Preview

Gender Bias in the Classroom

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
837 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Gender Bias in the Classroom
Leobardo Alfaro
Mr. Lewis
English 1301-005
16 July 2012
Gender Bias in the Classrooms In the essay “Hidden Lessons,” this appears in the textbook From Inquiry to Academic Writing, Mayra and David Sadker stands content that gender bias in classrooms damages female students. They lose their self-esteem, attitude towards teachers can change and their education is compromised. When teachers were being observed in their classroom settings it showed that they tend to gravitate more toward male students than the female students. The male students seem to be getting the better hand in the classroom they would get more of the teacher’s attention, energy, and time. Female students are the majority of our nation’s school children, but are given less teacher interaction. Until this is changed more than half of the children’s education will be shorted and society will be lost on their gifts. “Dateline chose to show a segregated math group: boys sitting on the teacher’s right side and girls on her left. After giving the math book to a girl to hold open at page of examples, the teacher turned her back to the girls and focused on the boys, teaching them active and directly. Occasionally she turned to girl’s side, but only to read examples in the book… had unwittingly transformed the girls into passive spectators, an audience for the boys.” (Sadker 54) Girls in this classroom are of the examples of how their teacher favors the boys and the girls get the short end of the stick. When these girls get denied their time in the classroom what is their left to do? Maybe in this certain classroom there aren’t as many girls as boys so; the teacher focuses more on the boys. Maybe the teacher feels that the boys in the class need more attention because they are more behind in their education. Either way girls shouldn’t have to have their teacher’s favoritism towards the boys. When the girl’s education is compromised that means their future is in jeopardy, when they don’t get the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In the essay, “How schools shortchange boys,” by Gerry Garibaldi, I agree on boys tuning out in a “newly feminized classroom.” Girls may out number boys in graduating from high school with a diploma, but boys give up on school, because they don’t want to be like girls. “Girls are calm and pleasant,” while boys are aggressive and are rationalists. Since girls just do what they are told and write what they need to, for example a project. While girls turn in their assignment days in advance, boys demand when they were given the assignment and act in a disruptive manner. A female teacher might take this as being disrespectful. The disapproval of a female teacher “has a powerful effect on male psyche.” Males squirm from the disapproval when they…

    • 248 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The gap is sometimes small, but over time slight advantages accumulate into big ones.” Girls are most likely to succeed in schools over boys. Many say this is because our educational system has become over feminized. Meaning, many teachers are more sympathetic to girls because they are quite and sit still for hours on end. Where many boys are asked to sit patiently for hours on end in classroom environments where boys struggle to…

    • 750 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Hidden Lessons” is an excerpt taken from Myra Sadker’s and David Sadker’s book Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls. Education is highly affected with sexism and favoritism of boys over girls. It is said that teachers and their gender bias are the main cause for most of female students’ problems. The authors share a study about evidencing those unconscious scenes of sexism which came up with expected but sad results. These behaviors were extremely elusive at plain sight yet definitely existed. Dateline, a TV show from NBC, helped spread the mentioned study and raise…

    • 349 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    There is great debate in society today in regards to whether our school systems should reintegrate a gender segregated education system. In the article “If Girls Can Succeed Only at the Expense of Boys, Maybe We Need Segregated Schools,” Link Byfield proposes that by reintroducing segregation into our educational structure it could eliminate the declining performance of male students and allow both sexes to achieve greater scholastic success. Although Byfield presents some valid points to support his argument, upon close examination many biases become evident which weaken his case. These generalizations of why girls are achieving higher success opposed to boys fail to persuade the reader to accept his standpoint.…

    • 628 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Rebecca Ropers-Huilman and Kelly T. Winters discuss how a lack of understanding about the bias towards the male gender in education may correlate to the underrepresentation of explicitly feminist research in popular higher education academic journals. They define feminism as a theory on currently existing injustices with a focus on the analysis of gender. Ropers-Huilman and Winters point out that gendered identities are ascribed, but they develop differently in various cultures that have their own definitions on what is means to be women or men. When people speak for women, Ropers-Huilman and Winters argue that they assume that all women have gone through similar experiences when that is not the case. Because of this assumption, women are unable to develop their full potential despite having something truly valuable to contribute to society.…

    • 979 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In this classic piece of feminist research, Michelle Stanworth highlighted the way in which sexual divisions and gender discrimination were reproduced in the school environment. She carried out individual, in-depth interviews with teachers and pupils (both male and female) in seven A-level classes in the Humanities department of a sixth form college. Her aim was to explore the extent to which gender affected the way teachers thought about their pupils’ career prospects, and consequently how male and female pupils might have different experiences of classroom interaction. Stanworth concluded that boys demanded and received more of their teachers’ attention than girls, who felt that they were marginalized in classroom encounters. Teachers also had lower expectations of their female pupils’ career prospects, because they expected them to get married and adhere to traditional stereotypes of domestic femininity. We can classify this project as having a case study research design, in that Stanworth was focusing on the social processes at play in one specific setting and at one moment in time; she did not want to compare the school to any others or to measure any changes in her participants’ attitudes over time. This was a qualitative research strategy, which Stanworth employed by using her detailed observations of one case to develop a more general theory of gender and education. It is likely to have been high in trustworthiness (if not validity), because the researcher used quotations from the interviews to support her arguments, and so seems to offer a genuine insight into how teachers and pupils perceive classroom interaction. She also provides a clear account of her methodology, which means that it would be easy to replicate the study. However, the personal and subjective nature of Stanworth’s observations mean that this piece of research would be low in reliability and external validity, for if the study were…

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Deborah Tannen

    • 490 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In “How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently” by Deborah Tannen illustrates the day to day gender differences in institutions. Tannen is an author and professor that researched the difference in genders in school. Tannen successfully enlightens her colleagues about men and women differences in education institutions by, establishing her credibility through research, observations and using her logic.…

    • 490 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In today’s world, more than ever, women are encouraged to pursue careers. Celebrity campaigns, such as one I saw recently on television, with Mckenzie Westmore encouraging young women to join S.T. E. M. fields, to Hillary Clinton being the first female democrat nominee. Yet in school, biases still roam the halls. Girls are generally assumed to be good at language arts and boys are generally assumed to be good at maths and sciences. When I was in grade school I remember teacher’s pairing up boys and girls for the specific reason of “closing the gap”, or more specifically so boys could help girls with math and girls could help the boys stay on track reading. Another instance of this divide in what women and men are capable of would be the instance a friend of mine experienced. She is studying molecular genetics, and tells some of the struggles she faces in a science field simply for being a woman, one being at her lab study job. When she first started working there, her boss would not allow her to have her own lab, he cited needing to know she was competent first. For over a year she sorted and filed papers, but when a new male was…

    • 1333 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Item A suggests that how male and female pupils and teachers act towards each other has a major effect on pupils’ experiences of education. From my knowledge, I feel this is not true as pupils should take ownership of their own work, despite what teacher they have. On the other hand, a teacher may affect a pupils achievement in school as it is what the teacher teaches the children, and how they do this which refers back to how much the children in the class learn, meaning…

    • 574 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Gender bias is a major issue across the globe. It refers to favoring either of the genders anywhere, in the society, workplace, school, college, etc. Gender Bias normally is a term put forward to signify the authority that is taken away from a gender, which is normally a truth for females.…

    • 306 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sexism In Classroom

    • 916 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Sexism is another stereotype that is created in the classroom that can have social and academic effects on individuals. Research shows that an oppressive classroom environment impairs learning and academic performance for students oppressed with identities (Pitman, 2010). Sexism in education occurs at an early age. While children of both sexes typically play together, as they get older they spend less and less time playing with children of the opposite sex. When students are lined up according to gender, teachers are stating that boys and girls should be treated differently. When different behaviors are acceptable for boys and not girls because boys will be boys, schools and administrators continue the oppression of girls. Teachers tend to associate girls as being feminine and are praised for being calm, neat, and quiet, whereas boys are encouraged to be self-thinkers, participate, and speak up. By the time students have completed 12 years of schooling, the achievement gap has widened. Females, who generally outperformed the males in their early school years, now trail on all subsections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American College Testing Program Examination (ACT), with the greatest discrepancies surfacing in the math and science areas (Dauber,…

    • 916 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    competency significantly for leadership ratings. The findings do not support the bulk of previous findings on…

    • 6021 Words
    • 25 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    used by teachers were monitored for gender bias in order to ensure ‘girl friendly schooling’. The monitoring…

    • 1690 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    It is interesting to look at the history of gender differences in education to see how it has developed in order to gain greater understanding of the current situation. Boys and girls were taught together for the first time in the 1960s, with the development of new comprehensive schools. However, opportunities were not equal for both genders in society at this time, and these values were reflected in the school environment. For…

    • 4009 Words
    • 17 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    schools have gender equality policies. As a result, pupils and teachers may disguise their real attitudes towards gender and this may make it difficult for the researcher to get at the truth.…

    • 332 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays