I would like to remind people that College Confidential is not a debate society, and if people want to have a private debate, they should take it to their PMs.
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Don’t parents want their children to be educated by the best professors, regardless of their genders or any other irrelevant characteristics? I know I would.
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I’m not sure how having a faculty where females are represented would sacrifice educational quality. On the other hand, a faculty made up mostly of men might, at least for some of the students.
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In S23’s English seminar class (I think the breakdown was 6 boys and 2 girls) the boys were continuously talking over the girls and “mansplaining” during one of the discussions. The (male) teacher failed the boys for that discussion. Kudos to the teacher for recognizing what was going on. What was the boys’ take away? They blamed the girls. If these were girls that loved the subject, I’m not sure you could get them to come out and join a club with these boys. I know it’s how the real world works, I know it would give both the boys and girls skills for the future, but I also think that these girls should get a chance to work to their full potential and concentrate on the subject and not all the outside BS if they want to. If they don’t get the chance during the school day, let there be a time after school.
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Single sex groups behave very differently, and teenage boys relate to one another in a way that is anathema to girls (eg being openly competitive and status oriented, even friendship is laden with insults).
I grew up in a system where single sex schooling is very common, particularly between 11 and 16, and is still heavily favored by many parents during the adolescent years, precisely because of those differences in behavior. However, the US system frowns heavily on single sex schools or even classes.
I can see pros and cons, clearly both sexes need to work with one another as adults, but does the classroom environment in early teenage years need to resemble an adult workplace?
This seems like an example of where boys are being forced to behave in a way that may be desirable as adults, but in the short term is just going to turn them off school (and could have been perfectly OK in a single sex classroom):
They’re looking for someone to teach their kids on an academic subject. I can understand if they were looking for personal physicians, even though personally I’d still choose the best doctor (of whatever gender, or any other irrelevant characteristics), if I have a serious health issue to deal with. If I’m lying on an operating table, I don’t care or insist on that the surgeon is of a certain gender, etc. If I did, I’d be taking a risk and sacrificing the quality of care and the surgery, wouldn’t I?
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Education is a bit more interactive than a medical operation. For one thing, the students are generally conscious. Different students have different needs, requirements, comfort levels, learning styles, etc. There is no single“best,” but a gender-diverse faculty may better serve the educational goals of the institution as a whole.
Also, professors at R1 institutions aren’t hired because they are the best teachers.
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Just an out-dated anecdote, but the faculty in my grad program at an R1 were very disproportionately male in comparison to our undergrad students, and then so were the grad students but a little less so. And the grad students did a lot of undergrad teaching.
And, of course, there was no evaluation of our teaching ability when we were selected as grad students, and no meaningful consequences even when grad students got poor student evaluations, because those teaching positions were part of our guaranteed funding. We also got some rudimentary training, which I think was around the level of training as your average first-time summer camp counselor, and of course several orders of magnitude less than the training you would need to be a teacher in, say, a K-12.
Of course the conceit has always been if you are very good at academic research or academic studies, surely you are very good at teaching too, right?
And that has never had any basis in reality.
As usual, I have no easy fixes for this. But I do wonder, in some of these fields with a lingering gender distribution gap between the undergraduate students and the grad students and researchers, would that gap linger so much if instead of grad students and researchers doing the teaching, the undergrad teaching was done only by people actually interested in being teachers, with serious training and evaluation as teachers.
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Personally, I think often the gender patterns we see in many non-physical professions are mostly about self-selection, feedback, and incentives, and not natural aptitude. Although there is a bit of a categorization problem there since of course over time those first sorts of things tend to lead to more developed aptitude. But I think often it is a mistake to then attribute developed aptitude differences to natural aptitude differences.
Anyway, to me the point is more just that research and teaching are really two quite different sorts of tasks. Through the secondary level, we are mostly using people who want to teach, who are trained as teachers, and who are evaluated as teachers. And then at the post-secondary levels, much more often we are using people who are not any of those things.
So whatever we see in terms of other attributes at the post-secondary level, we can’t assume that is some sort of unavoidable byproduct of selecting the best teachers. Because we often haven’t even tried to select the best teachers at the post-secondary level.
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And the conceit extends far beyond teaching. Those who think themselves and those like themselves to be the “best” don’t tend to limit their assumption to their narrow area of expertise.
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By the way, this is another concept I do not want to offer as a definitive theory, but just for consideration:
I believe the secondary school teacher population is somewhat more female than male. Not as much more as the four-year college population (as I recall). But I think it is plausible this could be contributing to some of the gender gap in college applications (or not, again, I don’t want to push this idea too hard).
I am pointing this out because if that is plausible, then it is also plausible that a field with a gender imbalance in the college teachers would then help contribute to any observable gender imbalance in grad students and other highly-selective next-step positions. Which would then plausibly feed through to later career phases as well. Which would plausibly all be self-reinforcing, given who teaches in college.
None of which is intended to suggest a concrete action plan. But things like this could help explain why there are not always consistent gender ratios at the point of college matriculation and then continuing on through all the career phases in every field.
And I definitely don’t think we should just assume the people who move on through those next phases are necessarily all the ones who had the most aptitude at the beginning of the prior phase. Indeed, the premise here is we should not assume the boys who don’t emerge from high school as college matriculants all lacked the natural aptitude for that. And to be consistent, we should not assume that sort of thing can’t keep happening in college as it pertains to the next steps after college–to women or indeed men depending on the field.
The younger the student, the more gender-skewed the teaching force is. Male teachers at a daycare or preschool are an extremely rare bird. At elementary schools, schools are often lucky if they even have 20% of their teachers with a y-chromosome, and more often than not, they’re the P.E. teachers, or maybe music. Getting into secondary school, you start seeing more males, but it’s still generally at least 60% female. The males are typically in administrative roles, P.E. teachers, or regular academic teachers who also coach a sport.
In case it’s not obvious, boys in public schools aren’t seeing many male educators as role models (and those that are typically are affiliated with a sport). So then the whole process of learning and academics can also start to be linked as a “gendered” idea since the vast majority of the teaching force is female. All of which can contribute to males turning away from higher education as well.
To get actual data, rather than just my impressions, 11% of public of elementary school teachers are male while 36% of secondary teachers are male (source).
Below is a key quote from this article on the effects of having a black teacher by third grade on enrolling in college.
Black students who’d had just one black teacher by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college—and those who’d had two were 32 percent more likely. The findings, led by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and American University, were published in a working paper titled “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers” today by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Now, imagine the impact that would happen if we switch the category to males. If boys had at least one male teacher by third grade, maybe they’d be 13% more likely to enroll in college, and if they’d had two male teachers, they might be 32% more likely to attend college. And that would pretty much make up the gap that people are observing with respect to college enrollment for U.S. males.
So, why don’t we have more male teachers, especially in younger grades? I suspect the top reason is probably the pay, and the second reason is that teaching students who aren’t even teenagers isn’t considered “manly” enough. Male teachers in elementary schools who aren’t P.E. teachers are usually very secure about their own identities. Those that aren’t might well be too afraid of the associations of joining a “feminine” profession.
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Interesting! I didn’t realize there was that much of an imbalance. My d’s first and 4th grade teachers were men. 1/3 of her teachers in middle school were male and well over 3/4 in HS, but she went to a STEM focused HS. She could count on one hand the number of women professors in college, although one of her deans was female.
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Yep, I forgot that at high schools, males show up as STEM teachers, too. So STEM & sports.
At my kid’s school (which has an international focus), there are male teachers in the younger grades, but those teachers are almost all from foreign countries (Europe & Africa primarily…the Latin American teachers are typically female). But with respect to elementary schools I’ve seen in a professional capacity, the numbers are more closely aligned to what’s seen in that IPEDS link of my earlier post.
Definitely yes! I was going to say that H’s school has been less than 11% but I did the calcs and roughly 3 teachers would need to be men. That’s about right, though often there are just 2 - one being H the PE teacher.
I would love to see a big push for men to be in the elementary school workforce, even forgiving all school loans if they work in a low performing school. The kids at H’s school overwhelmingly do not have any Dads at home. They attach themselves to H like glue. And he often has the best rapport with the roughest kids.
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I think ideas like this are interesting, but I also know if you were instead talking about big pushes for women to be better represented in various post-secondary fields (at least as teachers), including giving only women certain economic incentives, there would be a lot of push back.
Of course maybe we should do both, not neither. But that would require accepting that teachers in part have value as role models, and accepting that identification issues like this can be relevant to a teacher’s role model value.
That is definitely true and probably why it’ll never happen. But I think having good strong male role models in at-risk kids’ lives early on could make such a difference for so many.
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In today’s online version of the NY Times Magazine (hard copies coming out on the 10th), this article was published (gifted link):
It addresses some of the ways that colleges try to attract more males and how that ends up impacting the culture on campus. Remembered this thread and thought that others might want to read it as well. Comments, too.
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It seems hugely ironic that colleges prefer to attract more boys by emphasizing non-academic pursuits (sports) rather than the academic areas where boys are acknowledged by the article to do relatively better (standardized tests).
I definitely noticed that my kids’ college classes also de-emphasized high stakes testing, especially during Covid, in favor of take home/open book/untimed assignments. In S’s major there was also a strong contingent of activist students who objected vehemently to any quantitative assignments or testing. So it’s hardly surprising to me that the overwhelming majority of high achieving students were female (13 of 14 summa cum laude in his major).
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