Dr. David Sadker came to Purdue this afternoon and gave a short seminar on gender bias (among other things) this afternoon. He and his late wife Myra co-authored a book entitled "Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls", which was published in 1994. In 2009 he published a revised version of this book "Still Failing at Fairness: How Gender Bias Cheats Girls and Boys in School and What We Can Do About It." This includes recent statistics and most importantly, the inclusion of the male gender as a group that is harmed by gender bias.
Dr. Sadker is a very charismatic and engaging speaker. He opened the talk with the book "I'm glad I'm a boy!: I'm glad I'm a girl!" by Whitney Darrow (1970). The book depicts images of gender roles (boys are doctors--girls are nurses, boys invent things--girls use the things boys invent, etc.) that were prevalent in the 70s. You can view images of the book (which is now mercifully out of print) on Amazon.com. While your there, I highly recommend you check out some of the customer ratings. I was shocked to see this book had a customer rating of 4 stars, but in the comments you will see that this book is many of the higher rating are from customers using this book as a teaching tool, both to show how children are influenced by media, and also to capture a piece of history in how gender roles were defined in the late 60s/early 70s when this book was written.
This fits very well with the conversation we were having in class today: where it is one thing to be completely appalled if something like this was published today, but we should consider that at the time, this was how gender roles were perceived. It is important that we take this into consideration when critiquing work published in this era. More importantly, that we consider how this is shaping the education and/or engineering cultures in this era.
This was the first time I have seen this book, or anything like it. I think I take for granted the environment my parents created for my sister and me. I never heard "girls do..." or "boys do...", at least not at home. I did have an exploratory music teacher in 4th grade tell me that girls can't play drums. Girls play wind instruments or strings, but not brass and not drums. I did end up playing the clarinet for 7 years, so apparently I was not completely immune to gender bias as a child. My point is that my mother was a very self-actualized woman and was hell-bent on making sure that my sister and I did not cheat ourselves by assuming that because we were girls we had to have certain interests or skills and on the most part I think she succeeded, so thanks Mom.
Further on in his lecture, Dr. Sadker made several points, again, about the inclusion of males as a gender group that also suffers from gender bias. When we hear the term "gender bias" we assume that women are being cheated and that men are the beneficiaries of this in some way. While there are far too many circumstances where this is still true, the same could be said in the opposite direction. When assumptions are made that men are active, aggressive, emotionally closed off, mechanically minded, logical, etc. we are in a way saying that it is not OK for them to be passive, sensitive, expressive or intuitive.
The topics discussed by Dr. Sadker have significant implications of how we as educators interact with our students in the classroom and influence their experiences, as well as having impacts on long-term health and welfare of both genders. Laurie also attended the seminar so I hope she will have some comments to add.
No comments:
Post a Comment