Gender has always been an issue with common situations that we face. It is hard to say whether or not a boy is better than a girl or vise versa. Usually, it depends one’s opinion. It has been shown that since teachers are becoming more gender bias that more women are not as willing to have a leadership role in activities that they may participate in.
It has been noted that more boys are taking leadership positions in science and math class rather than females. A survey, taken by the National Education Association, concluded this when they interviewed 40,000 middle and high school educators. Newer teachers have been seen to have a gender-neutral view of leadership rather than educators who have been working for awhile. I think a study as to why this is the case would be great to find out. What is the reason for older teachers to have gender-bias views? It could be the way they were brought up or what they have seen happen around them. In the Huffingtonpost article, it stated that “confident” is a term typically associated with males, while “compassionate” is a term associated with women. I have to disagree immensely with this statement. I believe that girls can be just as confident boys. I think that in the past the science and math fields were not as readily accessible to females as an area of interest or a means of employment. A 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce found only one in seven engineers is female. Women have become more confident and comfortable in their abilities in these areas and are now able to stand up and do just as well or even better than the males. I think most words are gender-neutral. It is often just the way one person views the word themselves. Some common gender-neutral words to describe a leader are: Collaborative, intelligent, conscientious, problem-solvers.
When a group of people were asked to listen to a description of a person and told it was a male they used descriptive words such as aggressive and assertive. While the other group listened to a description of a person and was told the person was a girl, they commented saying, “bubbly” and “hard-working”.
I think the lack of attention that females are getting from their professors can hurt the confidence they may have in their ability to be successful. One of the reasons why men are more “confident” is because they are getting all the praise when women are doing just as much work. It is extremely hard to focus on being gender-neutral sometimes but all in all it would be for the better and the outcome’s benefits would help both males and females. Discrimination should never occur. Women and men can work extremely well with each other sometimes so don’t be afraid to ask the person of the opposite sex next to you to work on a class group project together!
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/nea-girls-leadership-study_n_5910944.html?utm_hp_ref=girls-in-stem
http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2012/06/20/stem-fields-and-the-gender-gap-where-are-the-women/