Research shows that boys lower their sights if they think their work is going to be marked by a woman because they believe their results will be worse. It also shows their suspicions are correct - female teachers did, on average, award lower marks to boys than unidentified external examiners.
It also revealed that girls tried harder if they had a male teacher because they believed they would get better marks.Their suspicions were not borne out, though, as the male teachers tended to give them exactly the same marks as the external examiners.
Are we really shocked that teachers treat students differently depending upon their gender? It's clear that men and women have fundamentally different ways of relating to the world and to other people, and that gender is an important factor in how a person, the student in this case, is perceived. The interesting question to me is: Is this discriminatory a result of innate biological factors, or is it learned? Was there a different pattern before the rise of the feminist movement? Is it amenable to correction?
Whilewaiting on a corner once for my friend, I was in front of a daycare. There was a lineup for a slide. As one boy started to climb up, a girl came along, pulled him away, and started to climb up. The other children started getting upset, and the boy came back and pulled her down. She the started hitting him. The teacher came along, grabbed the boy and sat him down, kicking and screaming. The girl? She was awarded the boy's spot in front of the lineup. I then remembered that male teachers are being ousted from posiitons, on the grounds that males are bad predators. I then wondered, is this sort of like a conspiracy, just razz the boys until they drop out or give up? How can this ever be measured? Women's groups would surely feel threatened by a truth such as that, if that is indeed what is occurring.......
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