Help women have a say in class discussions

While women may dominate the college population, we are a quiet majority.

Frequently, I leave a classroom as the only woman — or one of the only women — that spoke that day. Though our academic universities are meant to be a progressive learning space, they are still rife with implicit sexism and biases that mute female students.

While women now obtain 57 percent of undergraduate degrees, according to a Columbia University Teaching Center study, this percentage isn’t at all proportional to women’s participation and treatment in classrooms.

But encouraging women to speak up isn’t enough. We need to take the extra steps to assure women feel comfortable in our universities by training instructors and male peers to recognize their implicit gender biases during discussions.

By implementing programs to teach professors, assistants and graduate students how to facilitate discussions and manage classrooms to dispel implicit sexism, we can clear the air for female dialogue.

On that same note, by asking students to step back when they feel they are dominating discussions and choosing women who may only raise their hands halfway, instructors can make the classroom a more comfortable place in which women can participate.

I’m not alone in my classroom observations. According to the Columbia study, male students not only talk more, but also receive preferential treatment in the classroom.

Instructors call on male students more frequently than female students, ask them more abstract questions, use their names as points of reference more often and elaborate on their points more, as well.

On the other hand, instructors and peers often cut off women more than their male counterparts and ask women more basic, factual questions.

Yet, this doesn’t mean that the instructors and male students in classes are necessarily bad people — sometimes they are overtly sexist but, often, they are just expressing implicit sexism.

Harvard’s 2013 Implicit Association Test demonstrates our biases.

The online psychological analysis, designed to reveal prejudices people are unwilling to discuss or are unaware of, measures unconscious associations between concepts. The test revealed that 70 percent of men and women across 34 countries associate science with men instead of women.

According to the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, instructors have a significant role in how much women participate during class. When the instructor of a classroom is a man, male students in the classroom substantially dominated the discussion more than if there was a female instructor. When the instructor was a woman, female students spoke three times longer, but male students still dominated the conversation.

The study also found that in groups comprised of entirely women, they took turns in an egalitarian manner, each speaking for more or less equal amounts of time. Meanwhile, a group of entirely men appeared to speak more contest-like, raising voices and splitting speaking time unevenly amongst the group.

While it will take years to eliminate every drop of implicit sexism in society, there are concrete, immediate steps that we must take to fight back against sexism in the classroom.

Our University needs to implement a program to teach professors, teaching assistants and graduate students how to facilitate a discussion and manage a classroom while keeping implicit sexism in mind.

This means, instead of simply calling on people who raise their hands the highest, taking a more thorough and thoughtful approach.

Often, the ones shooting their hands in the air are white, cisgendered men. While women and other students in the room might also have a response to contribute, they usually do not offer it quite as quickly. To address this issue, instructors can facilitate and call on students based on non-verbal cues and body language as well.

Women often give non-verbal cues, such as eye contact with the instructor or mouthing an answer, which indicate a wish to respond. If facilitators give more weight to these cues, more women will be included in classroom discussions.

Additionally, universities should teach instructors to be mindful of their own biases. If instructors are made aware of the fact that they cut off girls more than boys or use boys’ names more frequently than girls’, they can all put in the personal effort to combat their own sexism.

We cannot sit by and allow implicit gender biases to affect our classroom experiences. We must demand more from our University and more from our professors, then all work together to try to shed implicit sexism and change the dynamic in our classrooms.

Alyssa primarily writes on social justice and political issues for The Pitt News.

Write to her at aal43@pitt.edu.