Yet another round of research telling us what we already know. It made me think immediately of @mindysan33, but of course it affects a lot more of us than ‘just’ female professors, as they point out at the end of the article:
Note that it was for a business school. I would not be surprised if the same did not hold for some other subjects, but I suspect that business schools and economics (along with comp sci, maths and physics) would be particularly bad.
I dunno man. We’re a bachelor of Arts. The comments I see from students about our female faculty vs. our male faculty is amazingly gendered. 
I really don’t think that’s accurate. If gendered perceptions of people’s competence develop before college starts (and we have every indication that even really little kids have gendered ideas about roles), we’d expect to see this across all fields.
I can offer this small anecdotal datum. I had the advantage of growing up in Southern California during the 1970s, when a fairly concerted effort was being made to erase gendered notions of superiority in professional roles. My parents, though fairly liberal Democrats, made no especial effort to help or hinder this cultural movement, but at least gave lip service to it. That is to say, they were older than the parents of most of my peers, and not activists by any stretch of the imagination, but both solidly believed that women could work and think and vote just as well as any man. At any rate, I was taught from infancy that women were the equal of men by every measure of competence imaginable, in any and every field of work there was. And so I never questioned it. The couple of times some lunkhead on the ballfield told me I “hit like a girl,” I was kinda flummoxed, as most girls I knew who were even slightly interested in sports hit better than I did, and a couple of them were like Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears.
Most of my teachers were women, including my high school calculus teacher (who struck me as having a better grasp of the topic, and a better ability to teach it, than the male math teachers I had). In college, the trend continued; with the exception of an English professor who had a curious resistance to writing that might be considered remotely entertaining to read, all my female professors were top-notch, and though I can’t speak for how anyone else treated them, I respected them. In my professional life, somewhat the same story. Although there has long been a boys’ club vibe to the positions of power in Hollywood, I have been fortunate to work on shows created by and run by women. On Pretty Little Liars in particular, the network execs were mostly female, the showrunner was female, the line producer was female, the post producer was female, two of the three editors were female, and fully half of the writers and directors were female… and it was one of the best work environments I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve never had a problem answering to a woman. Never has it occurred to me that one of those women might have risen to her position of power and authority through any means other than luck and hard work and overcoming the inherent sexism of the culture and the industry.
But that’s the mindset in which I was raised. I didn’t come to such a progressive attitude through my own discovery; it’s simply how I was taught since early childhood, and because it happened to be true and correct, I was able to resist the cultural forces that occasionally tried to convince me that women weren’t as strong as men, or not as technical-minded, or were simply too flighty and emotional to be entrusted with serious tasks or responsibility. Such ideas were unsupportable nonsense in the family in which I was raised, in the community in which I was raised, and so I always mocked them, not learning until adulthood how common and deep-seated such ideas are outside my spheres. Now I know men who have trouble working for female bosses, but those men are insecure dipshits and I’m happy to let them know that.
My overall point is that yes, this is definitely a problem that is much easier solved by bringing up kids with the right attitudes. Once the damage is done, it’s much harder to change people’s minds. Early childhood education is key.
Funnily, it’s that kind of thing that kept me from seeing how bad things still are, for a long time. My mother has always had a large measure of financial independence and our parents expected us to do our share of the heavy lifting work, school required all students to take wood/metalworking and home-ec. Girls regularly excelled in math and science at my school.
It wasn’t until later that I started running into invisible walls that guys never seemed to deal with: fighting with doctors that there was really something wrong with me and that, no, a different antidepressant won’t fix it, because that’s not the fucking problem. Arguing with salespeople that no, I don’t need feature X on my VCR or TV and yes, I do know what I am talking about. Watching a coworker expect cookies and hero points (and getting them form many!) for leaving to pick up his daughter from daycare – while women are still told to figure out their priorities if they even consider doung the same.
So you’re right, it can work, but only if everybody is onboard and we don’t let it blind us (or worse, help us buy into bad messaging).
Oh, I see that sometime. I get a few dudes who think they don’t need to treat me with any respect. I will say, that given how much older I am than my current crop of undergrads, they seem to be less inclined to that bias.
On the first day of her new job as head of maths at her new school my daughter was asked, quite unironically, by a deputy head why she wasn’t in school uniform.
Based on my school experience, if I grew up with a gender bias it was that women teachers taught languages, English and biology while men taught maths,mechanics, physics, geography. Chemistry and history were gender neutral. So I guess I have simply expressed my own prejudice.
(Though my statistics teacher was a woman and she was so good at it that I rapidly drifted in that direction while doing research.)
I loved Pretty Little Liars. I thought it was so amazing to see teenage girls presented as smart, cunning, motivated. To me, the girls in that show were more like the people I knew, the ones who were heading to Ivy Leagues. They were worried about things, a lot, things that were grown up and not insipid. I like how the adults in their world totally impacted their lives with their own secrets, which also felt very true to high school.
From the Washington Post; I’m copying and pasting as this is behind a paywall
The firm that brought us ‘Fearless Girl’ was underpaying women, U.S. government says
By Mary Hui October 6 at 1:21 AM
Play Video 1:05
Statue of girl stares down Wall Street bull for Women’s Day0:00
Placing the diminutive, grade school-aged girl in front of the massive bull on the eve of International Women’s Day was a way of calling attention to the lack of gender diversity on corporate boards and the pay gap of women working in financial services, a spokeswoman for State Street Global Advisors said. (Reuters)
The financial services firms that introduced the world to “Fearless Girl” will pay $5 million to settle federal allegations that female executives were paid less than men in the same positions.The agreement follows an audit by the Department of Labor in which investigators say that State Street Corporation has discriminated against more than 300 female and 15 black senior-level employees since Dec. 1, 2010, paying them less in base salary and bonus pay per year than white male colleagues, even “when legitimate factors affecting pay were taken into account.”
These individuals will receive back pay with interest from the settlement fund.
Economy & Business Alerts
Breaking news about economic and business issues.
Sign up
In an email statement, State Street said it disagreed with the agency’s findings but “made a decision to bring this six-year-old matter to resolution and move forward.” It did not admit wrongdoing in the agreement.The deal marks a public relations blow to a firm that has been outspoken about its mission to increase gender diversity in corporate boardrooms.
This year, a subsidiary of the Boston-based firm famously commissioned a 50-inch bronze statue, the “Fearless Girl,” to face off against Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull, as part of an advertisement campaign on National Women’s Day.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio posed for pictures with the pint-size statue.
“Fearless Girl” was a potent symbol proving that women can — and should — be an important part of the financial sector, the firm previously told The Post.
Companies with diverse leadership teams perform better over the long term and make better investments, the firm said.
As part of its aggressive push to increase the number of women in prominent leadership positions, State Street has called on companies to add more women onto their boards. It also looked for ways to invest in companies that had women in prominent positions.
In its campaign for greater gender diversity, State Street has also had to come to terms with its own shortfalls. At the time “Fearless Girl” attracted international attention, the bank only had three women on its 11-member board of directors and five women on its 28-member leadership team.
Last year, the firm launched its SPDR Gender Diversity exchange-traded fund. The fund, known as SHE, tracks a basket of stocks of 100-plus companies that the firm judges as industry pioneers in putting women in leadership positions.
However, Bloomberg News reported that the firm has more often than not voted against gender pay shareholder proposals, according to Fund Votes.
As part of the settlement, State Street must also conduct an analysis of pay for current senior-level employees and make salary adjustments for “any statistically significant compensation disparities.”
Renae Merle contributed to this report.
There’s a bit of a contradiction in the article – it mentions near the top that women avoid pelvic exams because it’s such an unpleasant experience, and then at the end they talk about how the current speculum is working gone for doctors. Um, if your patients are actively avoiding you, it’s not working fine.
Pet peeve: doctors who think asking the sexual activity/number of sexual partners questions during the pelvic exam is totally fine (yeah, 'cos I totally want to recall my assaults while this hunk of metal is inside me).
Has this writer never heard of “the dose makes the poison”? All of the behaviour she describes is what gets taught as masculinity, to some degree or another.
Nor, most women can tell you, is this year any different than any other. Even when there wasn’t a Harrasser-In-Chief, men have always managed to engage in and get away with this behaviour. And it is primarily men. Sociopathy crosses gender lines, unrestrained ids cross gender lines, but it’s men who seem to be the ones pulling out guns or expecting women to worship at their bodies, whether women want to or not. And if you listen to their excuses like “locker room talk” they’re pointing to the lessons taught on “how to be a man”.
So, yes, let’s do call it toxic masculinity, because masculinity doesn’t ride in on the Y chromosome, but it’s decided by our culture in what it values as markers of that social role. Which means, no, all men don’t have a core of it – though most do simply from existing in our society – and it can be unlearned. But until we face the root causes, it won’t go away.
This reminded me of something that actually I think about fairly regularly, for whatever reason - my freshman year of high school my English teacher was a young woman frequently discussed by male students because she was “hot.”
I don’t really remember what I learned in English that year (edit to clarify - I am just forgetful) but I clearly remember one time her discussing in detail - including showing the math - how leasing a car was a rip-off.
Then another time, I don’t remember why but the topic of calculus came up as something stereotypically difficult and a student asked out of curiosity what a calculus problem looks like. The teacher - again, a 9th grade English teacher - paused just briefly, and without referencing anything, wrote an example calculus problem on the board, and solved it.
I did not specifically study math but I did earn a Bachelor of Science degree, which involved two calculus courses and then several higher-level math classes that build on calculus. I would struggle to even come up with an example of a calculus problem, much less solve it.
Anyway, the more women in any work or similar situation, the better literally everything about it is! Things go more smoothly and more actual work gets done, to a higher quality. You and I have discussed around this topic previously but though I’m a week late I wanted to chime in because my experience is very similar to yours, and it’s baffling how uncommon people with this sort of attitude really are. I see first-hand and hear about the sexist (and racist) micro-aggressions against my girlfriend literally every day, even here in the progressive bay area and even from people who would probably call themselves progressives, and I guess like you said it comes down in large part to how people are raised.
Man, that’s an excellent story, and one that really makes me think. I want to describe my mind’s first reaction, but I feel the need to couch it in terms that recognize my own prejudices based (again) upon my upbringing, as well as experiences. I have no way of knowing, based upon what you wrote, how happy or fulfilled your teacher felt in her career. What’s odd to me is not that she’s a woman who has the kind of mind that can pull calculus out of her pocket whenever the need arises, but rather that she’s an English teacher who can do that. My own SAT score balance aside, I’ve found it relatively uncommon to see people who are comfortable working in a language-arts-based career and a math-based one. It tempts me to wonder: was she a teacher who normally specializes in math, but was assigned to an English classroom by an administrator who felt such a class was more “appropriate” for a female teacher? (Ugh.) Was she perhaps such a teacher who ended up in that class not because her boss held such a retrograde view, but rather because that class had a vacancy, she was available and qualified and willing, and so she took the gig? Was she perhaps a teacher who specialized in English who also just happens to enjoy and have a facility for math? Was she simply a philosophically ambidextrous teacher who is fully comfortable in any kind of high school classroom?
Whatever the answer may be, my first thought was “that poor woman,” under the (very possibly erroneous) assumption that, with a mind like hers which she chose to devote to teaching the young, a choice that I consider as noble as can be, this choice very likely earned her painfully low pay and not nearly the amount of respect from society she deserves. (I’m inclined to put good teachers on pedestals.) I hope I’m wrong, and that she found her career very fulfilling indeed. And lucrative too, though that’s pretty damned unlikely.
Two of my math teachers, my 9th grade Geometry teacher, and my 10th grade Algebra II teacher, were middle-aged men who were also the school’s football and track coaches. Just about the most boring and unimaginative men I’ve ever spent time with. Not only that, but I got the distinct impression that they’d been teaching their classes at the same level, from the same old textbook, for a generation or more, and that they’d struggle to describe how to find a derivative just as much as I would today. And God help them if someone asked them how to compose a sonnet or diagram a sentence or what subtext could be found in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I remembered partway through reading your reply that the teacher in question actually became the principal of the school - not sure when but a few years ago at least, so not that long in career terms from when I was a student; I believe she was just starting out as a teacher at the time, so she made principal within ~10-15 years of starting out - that may at least partially answer your question!
(I wonder what my high-school English teachers would think about that sentence structure…)
That’s a happy outcome indeed. Thanks for the update! Helps me feel better.