How Students View Gender Equity in the Classroom

As previously stated, it is important for students to feel that the classroom is a safe and fair environment.  The students need to feel like they can be themselves if they are going to be high achievers.  The issue of gender is long-standing in education and is not going to go away any time soon.  The issue is: are students of either gender treated fairly?  A study was done to examine the way students felt about this issue, to see how they perceive the level of gender equity in the classroom.

What the study determined is that teachers bring in their own beliefs to the classroom and let them color the way they teach.  The study found that teachers see boys as lower-achieving students and girls as higher-achieving students.  “Boys are perceived as a problem, while girls are increasingly being constructed as the ideal student. Teachers speak of boys dominating their teaching time and attention within the classroom,” (Myhill & Jones, 2006).

The students seemed to believe that the way the students were treated was based on how the students did in a particular subject, based on gender stereotypes.  One student, Sarah, said “Sometimes in science the boys will be treated better because they know more about it, or in say art, girls can do better art and they like get better treated,” (Myhill & Jones, 2006).  She seems to believe that the way teachers treat their students and their levels of achievement seems to be in direct relationship to their academic expectations determined by gender.

Another thing the students seemed to agree on was that teachers were more lenient on the girls. A student, Lucy, made the observation that “Some teachers are really sexist…they will tell off a boy just like that, but girls not so easily,” (Myhill & Jones, 2006), and Natasha seems to agree with her in that “teachers do tend to be lighter on girls…I think it’s because they think that girls are more sensitive, and therefore can break down in tears or something,” (Myhill & Jones, 2006).

Boys tended to be more blunt in their answers when asked about unfair treatment in the classroom.  “Abraham claims that ‘boys are given the hard end and girls are normally given the lenient end,’ while Alex complains that his teacher ‘tells us off more and she makes us do everything last, like after the girls’,” (Myhill & Jones, 2006).

The lesson from this article is obvious: students are more perceptive than teachers think they are.  Teachers must treat their students equally, even if coming in with any kind of a bias (which they really should not be, anyway).  If students begin to think they are being treated unfairly, they will start to think differently of the teacher and, as stated in previous posts, it is important what the students think of their teacher.

Myhill, D., & Jones, S. (2006). "She Doesn't Shout at No Girls": Pupils' Perceptions of Gender Equity in the Classroom. Cambridge Journal of Education. 36(1), 99-113.