How Does Gender Affect The Teaching Profession?

Great question. For many years gender has been a controversial topic in many parts of the world, and it has never stopped “cough cough Texas”, but our focus of this week's blog is, how does gender affect the teaching profession? From what I have gathered to speak upon this topic is that gender in the U.S is mostly viewed to be in two categories, boy or girl, in other words, there is binary visibility everywhere that we go in America...public restrooms, the toy section, when we look through the clothing racks, etc. There is no way we can deny that we have constructed over the past years this social and cultural identity among human beings. Now my concern is how has it affected and how is it going to affect these new groups of students? 

 

 

Well, if we go back to when Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher worked together to help women have an opportunity to be teachers instead of just being housewives. We can see that there was an enormous wave of change when becoming a teacher turned into a “women’s job.” Although at the time it was a great benefit for women to get out of the norm, it created more consequences. Not saying that the consequences were completely negative, some were positive because if it weren't for the two to bring out the topic to the table we wouldn't be where we are now. Anyways, going back to how the teaching profession primarily became a “women’s job,” this change not only did it gradually accentuate women’s rights but continued to separate the binary views of women and men. At present time, as I walk into my major required classes I see that gender and education have indeed become insidious, as Kathryn Engebretson mentions on a podcast called VisionsOfEd in Episode 21. Can’t y'all believe that we think this controversy of gender is over when it has been laying around this whole time subtlety? In the book, The Teachers Wars by Dana Goldstein Susan B. Anthony mentions, “Do you not see that so long society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? And this, too, is the reason that teaching is a less lucrative position, as here men must compete with the cheap labor of women?” (37). Although the controversy is not as intense as it was back then, are we still teaching generations after generations that it is normal to have binary views and to have men and women be separate when it comes to choosing their pathway? How does that make all children feel when they “have” to choose an identity and at the same time “fit” the social norm of a job, so they wouldn’t be seen as unusual by their peers. Gender affecting the teaching profession goes beyond seeing only women pursuing that pathway, it also has slowly emerged into the standards of an education system. Noting how students are perceiving everything according to the way we are presenting gender in the classrooms. So what are y'all thoughts, how can we teachers break the binary views and the separation of women and men when it comes to the teaching profession and education itself?

 

 

 

Reference list:

Episode 21: Gender and education with Kathryn Engebretson – Visions of Education 

Goldstein, Dana. The Teachers Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. First Edition, Doubleday, 2014.