Catherine G. Krupnick
Women and Men in the Classroom:
Inequality and Its Remedies
Reprinted from On Teaching and
Learning, Volume 1 (1985)
Few topics generate as much interest or disagreement as
the nature of differences between women and men. In
colleges, particularly, these differences are discussed with
reference to the ways women and men communicate. Because
teaching consultants at the Harvard-Danforth Video Lab are
often asked about gender's influence on classroom
interactions, I gathered a research team to see what we
could discover. We wanted to know how gender affects the
quality of teaching and learning at Harvard College.
Specifically, we wanted answers to the following questions:
What are the differences, if any, between male and female
students' participation in classroom discussion? How does
the gender of the teacher affect the students'
participation? In other words, we wanted to devise an
objective study of a controversial issue on which almost
everyone has an opinion.
We spent a year reviewing videotapes volunteered by
twentyfour instructors at the College: twelve women and
twelve men -- a group that included Teaching Fellows and
faculty members. Their teaching experience ranged from eight
weeks to thirty-six years. We concluded that male students
talked much longer in the predominant classroom
circumstance: i.e., the situation in which the instructor is
male and the majority of the students are male. Of the six
classes (one quarter of our sample) in which this was the
situation, male students spoke two and a half times longer
than their female peers (Wilcoxan, P=0.046). This finding is
noteworthy, since the male teacher/predominantly male class
situation is common not only at Harvard but also at most
other coeducational colleges.
On the other hand, the presence of female instructors
apparently had an inspiring effect on female students. They
spoke almost three times longer under instructors of their
own sex than when they were in classes led by male
instructors (Kruskal-Wallis, P=0.025). This led us to
speculate about the importance of same-sex role models, but
the enormous diversity of personalities and behaviors in our
sample made it impossible to derive firm conclusions on this
question. The data suggest that a teacher's gender can play
a role in classroom discussion, in the sense that it appears
to influence the extent to which male students dominate
classrooms. The advantages of classroom discussion, long
considered to be an integral part of education in sections
and tutorials, are unequally distributed between the
sexes.
The finding that male students tend toward greater
talkativeness than female students led us to question
whether male instructors might be more talkative than female
instructors. They are not. Both sexes talk about the same
amount of time: that is, instructors occupied 42% of the
class hour on average, speaking about 4500 words. Modes of
verbal behavior that are allegedly gender-based, such as
self-subordination (supposedly a female trait) or
competitiveness (supposedly a male trait) depend less on an
instructor's gender than on particular personalities and the
number of years that instructors have taught. Contrary to
popular notions, no speech characteristic we examined
revealed itself to be typical of either gender.
The male tendency to dominate in some classes did not
surprise us, since talkativeness studies in general have
concluded that men dominate mixed discussion groups
everywhere -- both within the classroom and beyond. What did
surprise us was the degree to which male domination appeared
to depend on gender demographics: when the teacher was male
and the students in a particular class were predominantly
male, then male students dominated the discussions. In none
of the demographic circumstances studied did women students
talk as much as men.
Why don't women students talk as much as men? One
explanation is that women prove to be exrremebly vulnerable
to interruption. Numerous studies have demonstrated that in
mixed-sex conversations, women are interrupted far more
frequently than men are. This was remarkably visible in the
Video Lab's sample: the comments of women students often
were confined to "bursts" lasting only a few seconds, while
male students typically kept on talking until they had
finished. Moreover, once interrupted, women sometimes stayed
out of the discussion for the remainder of the class hour.
Thus there were considerably more one-time contributors
among women than men.
Our discovery that women students are interrupted more
frequently than their male counterparts differed from the
results of other studies in one surprising respect: although
other research has repeatedly shown that women's speech is
most often cut off by men and/or "authority figures"
(instructors, for example), our video tapes reveal that
female students were interrupted almost exclusively by one
another.
Close observation shows how this comes about. Like male
students, female students often tend to cluster their talk
in "runs." A run means that during a given period, the
conversation is dominated by one gender or another. We found
gender runs in about half of the Harvard classes that we
observed. A gender run usually operates so that long periods
of predominantly male talk are followed by short bursts of
all-female talk, which is characterized by a relatively high
proportion of overlapping comments. Over the course of a
class hour the tendency of men to speak at length (and the
lesser likelihood that they will be interrupted) leads, in
the case of male-majority classes with male teachers, to a
male-dominated hour -- a phenomenon that is reinforced by
the tendency of women to speak less frequently, more
briefly, and to overlap one another's comments.
What we have, then, is a situation in which we find
female students at the bottom of the conversational heap --
some passive, others competing for the scarce resource of
conversational space. This picture is scarcely news to
social scientists. Erving Goffman, for instance, commenting
on women professionals in hospital settings, concluded in
1961 that women did not say as much in male-dominated
situations as men did. Rosabeth Kanter, studying women in
corporate settings, also observed this, as did her
collaborator, Elizabeth Aries, when writing about discussion
groups she had studied at Harvard in 1972.
Aries noticed something else as well when observing
single-sex groups: she found that groups composed entirely
of women students tended to have a "rotating," participatory
style in comparison with male groups. In other words, in
these groups women took turns in an egalitarian way, and
each spoke for more or less equal amounts of time throughout
the class hour. Male groups appeared more contest-like, with
extremely uneven amounts of talk per man. They competed by
telling personal anecdotes or raising their voices. In
dividing the hour unevenly, they established hierarchies of
access to the discourse. All these characteristics remained
stable over the course of several months. And what happened
in mixed groups? Unsurprisingly, the male competitive style
won out. Apparently, it's as hard for men to give up the
habits of competition as it is for women to learn them.
* * *
The news in our investigation is not that men and women
behave differently as speakers, or that male and female
students do, but that at Harvard male and female students
do. It is sometimes thought that the admissions process
evens out the differences, and every teacher can cite
examples of extremely articulate female students. But since
the general pattern conforms to power imbalances in the
world beyond academia, it should be monitored carefully by
those who care about providing equal education.
If instructors want to help women develop strong
participatory skills, they need to be aware of the tendency
of women to underparticipate when the classroom setting is
primarily male. This is particularly important for
instructors who teach sections and tutorials. The
pedagogical need is clear. Active participation is generally
thought to encourage learning. Both tutorials and sections
have evolved out of the premise that engaging in discussion
is an integral part of mastering the vocabulary and thought
processes of a discipline. In an ideal world, students'
gender would bear no relationship to their likelihood of
participation. Women in a group would generally talk in
proportion to their numbers in that group, and so would men.
Every student would have equal access to the conversational
floor and an equal opportunity to master a discipline. Small
classes would be, in essence, short-term communities of
shared learning. Why is this at odds with what happens in
many classes?
So far we have isolated four factors which contribute to
giving women students less access to discourse than men:
their demographic status as members of a minority in the
classroom; their inability or unwillingness to compete
against men; their vulnerability to interruption; and the
fact that men and women talk in runs, which tends to keep
female participation low.
Other causes of inequality can be found in classroom
teaching. At Harvard and elsewhere, instructors often
confuse ends with means in their desire to produce "a good
class." Forgetting that sections and tutorials have a
different purpose than lectures, they feel justified in
keeping the flow of discussion going by getting most of
their contributions from the first students to volunteer. As
a result, classroom discourse is biased toward assertive
students who have the quickest response time. Participation
becomes based on quick thinking instead of deep or
representative thinking. Further, the best predictor of a
student's making substantial contributions to a discussion
is that student's level of participation earlier in the
class session. By allowing conversational space to be
monopolized early on by those who formulate the quickest
responses, instructors aid in the creation of dominant and
subordinate conversation groups. At Harvard, the dominant
places in a discussion are ordinarily occupied by those
males who are highly verbal, while the subordinate positions
tend to be occupied by women and, as our videotapes showed,
by other minorities of either sex.
Teachers often defend the practice of calling primarily
or exclusively on volunteers by saying, "I don't want to put
shy students on the spot." Empathetic as this sentiment
sounds, it usually backfires. After a few predictable
talkers have made most of the substantial contributions at
the beginning of the class hour, other students become
particularly hesitant to join the discussion. Segregation of
participants and nonparticipants soon extends beyond
individual class periods, and becomes a structural feature
for the duration of the course. Most of the students are
learning -- as in lecture -- by listening, while a small
minority have the advantages of the teacher's attention: the
questioning, correction, and praise that come better from
being "on the spot." Students at the bottom of the
conversational heap frequently prepare less thoroughly for
class, and listen only half-heartedly. Thus they disqualify
themselves further as serious conversational contenders, and
their apathetic disenfranchisement becomes yet another
factor in classroom inequality. Doubtless, a few
nonparticipating students are naturally shy, but it seems
implausible that most of them are. In short, the classroom
environment is a likely factor in women's less than equal
experience of coeducation. Sections and tutorials are meant
to be about something deeper than a lively volley of quick
responses. Nonassertive participation styles are
gender-related under some conditions. These two facts
suggest that instructors who are serious about providing
equal access to scholarly dialogue must direct classroom
conversation with the aim of encouraging each student to
think and to speak.
Classroom environment, the development of self-esteem,
and, later on, self-confidence in a profession, may be
linked. The extent of students' involvement in class is a
major factor in shaping their self-concepts, because the
college years are a time of important developmental change.
Current research on the social development of men's and
women's lives has determined that both female students and
female professionals tend to have lower self-esteem than,
their male colleagues.
In recent years, more than a dozen studies have provided
evidence of women's lower self-esteem in coeducational
colleges than in single-sex schools. Recently Kathleen
Welch, at Yale, compared assertiveness in discussions, as
one measure of self-esteem, in classrooms at Yale, Brown,
Wellesley, and Smith. What she found was that women at both
of the mixed-sex institutions were verbally less assertive
than men, in the sense that they were more likely to use
hedges, qualifiers and questioning intonations. By contrast,
women at Smith and Wellesley were not only more assertive
than women at Yale and Brown, but also -- most surprisingly
-- more assertive than men at the coeducational
institutions.
The effects of low self-esteem carry over into graduate
school and professional life, even in settings which might
be thought to confer feelings of high self-efficacy. For
example, Zappert and Stansbury at Stanford have found that
female graduate students experience low self-esteem in
comparison with male graduate students. Self-depreciation is
especially pronounced in fields in which women are present
in the lowest numbers. These women, the authors reported,
have less trust than graduate men in their own judgments,
and a greater fear of making mistakes -- both feelings
associated with keeping a safe and silent distance from
classroom discussion. Even female trial lawyers are uneasy
about speaking in mixed-sex settings: according to a 1984
report by sociologist Bettyruth Walter-Goldberg, female
trial lawyers express much less satisfaction with their
summary speeches to jurors than male lawyers do. Since both
law schools and graduate schools recruit women and men with
equal abilities, it is logical to conclude that these
settings are themselves responsible for providing women and
men with an unequal sense of their real or potential
efficacy.
* * *
What can instructors do to make coeducation equal
education? First, they need to keep in mind that their own
gender may influence classroom dynamics. More specifically,
they need to become close observers of their own classrooms
by keeping notes on who contributes to discussions -- at
what length, at what depth, and in what order, as well as
what kind of response these students got (especially if they
were interrupted). For accuracy, these notes should be made
immediately after class, so that dominant and subordinate
contributors can be identified as they change from meeting
to meeting. Teachers who find they have a poor memory for
classroom interactions can get a videotape made at the
Harvard-Danforth Video Lab, or they can ask a colleague to
sit in on a class and take careful notes. The point is to
cultivate a memory for, and an internalized sense of, the
participation of individual students, so that inequalities
can be avoided.
In addition, there are certain guidelines which may
reduce the likelihood of inequalities developing. These will
provide a learning situation in which all class members have
an equal opportunity to develop confidence, judgment and
ability. Teachers should hold all students responsible for
assignments, and be willing to call on them directly even if
they don't raise their hands. In order to increase the
chance that students will raise their hands, however, the
teacher should allow a significant pause -- not a pause of
.5 seconds, as is typical of many teachers, but a pause of
two, three or even four seconds, counted silently to oneself
while looking around the room. Looking around the room has
valuable pedagogical functions: it enables teachers to
solicit the involvement of students who, at that moment, are
likely to make valuable contributions. It also permits
teachers to choose contributors with an eye towards gender
equality.
Further, teachers should listen to all students with
equal seriousness, challenging when appropriate, correcting
or praising when correction or praise is due. Teachers
should learn each student's name and make sure to use names
frequently, so that all students know they are recognized
members of the class. Teachers should be careful to ask male
and female students the same kinds of questions: not, for
instance, reserving all abstract questions, or all factual
questions, or all hard questions, for one gender. Teachers
should sequence participants' responses, so that neither
gender develops a monopoly. Moreover, they should take pains
to prevent interruptions, and intervene when comments occur
too rapidly to permit individual students to complete their
contribution to the discussion.
Instructors who decide to monitor and direct their
classes with the aim of giving each student equal education
can do so if they keep these general guidelines in mind. In
so doing, they will not only prevent inadvertent
discrimination against women, but they will also create a
richer and more equal learning environment for all
students.
References
Aries, Elizabeth. "Interaction Patterns and
Themes of Male, Female, and Mixed Groups," in Small
Group Behavior, 7 (1976).
Goffman, Erving. Asylums. NY: Doubleday,
1961.
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. Men and Women of the
Corporation. NY: Basic Books, 1977.
Walter-Goldberg, Bettyruth. "On Summation Speeches to
Jurors." Paper presented at the twentieth annual meeting
of the Law and Society Association, Boston, Ma., June 10,
1984.
Welch, Kathleen. "Sex Differences in Language and the
Importance of Context: An Observational Study of
Classroom Speech." Yale University, undergraduate thesis,
1984.
Zappert, Laraine, and Kendyll Stansbury, as reported
by Diana Davis in "Campus Report" (Stanford University),
November 14, 1984.
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