How Can We Deal With Gender Differences in Classroom Discussions or Meetings?

I consider myself a feminist in that I love women and believe that they ought to have all the same choices and privileges as men. Neither sex should be privileged over the other to the extent that it is not an inescapable function of human sexual dimorphism. Dimorphism entails some differences in capabilities and dispositions that may work to the advantage or disadvantage of either sex in any particular situation. The fact of sexual dimorphism does not have any particular normative implications, however, and I recognize that dimorphism may be abused as justification for policies that unnecessarily privilege one sex at the expense of the other. I also recognize that the plain fact of the matter is that males are privileged over women much more often than the other way around.

Armed with more or less this degree of feminism, I signed up several years ago for a course on feminist anthropology by a doyenne of the field, Sherry Ortner, MacArthur genius and apostle of the great symbolic anthropologist Clifford Goertz. Overall, it was a great experience, and I was exposed to some different schools of feminist thought from the “kill all the men and reproduce by parthenogenesis” school to individualist feminism. Sherry fell somewhere in between, but I’m not sure where since she did not seem to treat the class as a forum for promoting her personal views.

The class was a senior level course, and there were two male doctoral students (I was one of them) and about twenty female undergraduates. Discussion was invited and encouraged, but we male grad students contributed 90% to every class discussion for the first several weeks. Then Sherry announced that she was concerned that the discussions had become “gendered” and let it be known that she thought the guys should be quiet. We accepted that our participation might have intimidated the female students either because we were male or because we were older doctoral students or because of both, and we stopped participating in discussions. In fact, discussions stopped almost altogether for the rest of the semester.

At first, I surmised that the undergraduates weren’t intimidated; they just weren’t all that interested. They wanted to do what was necessary to get a good grade and class discussion, according to some I talked to, just seemed like too much of a chance to say something stupid and attract the negative attention of the professor. They were intimidated by Sherry, her godlike status, and her authoritativeness on the issues presented. They felt that they had nothing to offer to a discussion and had too little grounding in the field to articulate intelligent questions. The male grad students, on the other hand, were keen to get all they could out of their limited access to Sherry and weren’t intimidated by her nearly as much.

I concluded in the end that Sherry was partly right. The discussion was “gendered” in that the female undergrads were intimidated by Sherry while the male grad students were not. There were no female grad students or male undergrads so as to help to rule out age and experience as contributing factors in the different behaviors. In any event, silencing the males/grad students was not enough to solve the problem. That just left space for females/undergrads to speak up, but the intimidation factor was still present and apparently overwhelming.

In teaching and as a student, it had already become apparent to me that females on average spoke up less than males and that they tended to be more tentative in their assertions (except in law school). I don’t know why this is so or whether it is inherent or culturally conditioned or both, but there must be some way to make sure that the contributions of women in class or in any meeting for that matter are fully elicited.

I’m not sure that silencing males is the solution, however, especially in front of the women. That just validates their silence and makes for awkward relations going forward. I have never been sure that the women were intimidated by the men or that the men used up all the air in the room, so to speak. Rather, it seemed to me that the format and structure of seminars or other discourse were problematic and more suited to men than to women. It is, I think, incumbent on instructors to develop the skills required to provide more value to female students and encourage them to talk more openly about their ideas.

One method that I have been toying with is treating questions and tentative statements differently. Instead of providing an answer or confirmation, I examine the question/disguised question/assertion as a topic in its own right. How is it framed? What are the broader implications of framing the question in this manner? We are now discussing, often at length, ideas generated by the student herself and legitimizing those ideas. I have found that this, like any exercise in active listening, helps any student of either sex open up and speak more freely. Moreover, to the extent that the instructor can position himself as a facilitator, I have found that this helps students open up more than when the instructor acts as an authority figure. Also, the instructor should pay attention to the ground rules of civil discourse and help to insure that speakers are not interrupted or cut off, that common courtesy is observed.

I would welcome suggestions about how to deal with this issue in teaching, training and in business meetings.