There’s a piece at Inside Higher Ed today about everybody’s favorite topic, gender bias in science, that opens with an anecdote about a student who showed up to every office hour, and brought her friends. This is familiar to every faculty member, though the author apparently thinks it isn’t:
I wonder if Tahnee, as much as she was a leader, would have parked outside my office if she attended a co-ed college. In the single-sex environment, women (students, faculty and staff) have high expectations for each other and help each other live up to those expectations.
I can answer the question in the first sentence: yes, she would. Almost every term I’ve taught an intro class, I’ve had at least one good student who has parked outside my office for every office hour in the term, and over the years, there have been as many women as men. Which probably means that women are significantly more likely to do this than men, even at a co-ed institution, given that our intro physics classes have a very high male:female ratio.
Single-sex education may provide some advantages, but the phenomenon described is not a unique result of single-sex education.
The more relevant factor is the size of the institution, and the level of emphasis placed on teaching. At a SLAC, students of all genders consult with teachers all the time. At large research universities, only grad students and undergrad students involved in research projects will usually be found talking to professors (yes, a gross generalization).
The more relevant factor is the size of the institution, and the level of emphasis placed on teaching. At a SLAC, students of all genders consult with teachers all the time. At large research universities, only grad students and undergrad students involved in research projects will usually be found talking to professors (yes, a gross generalization). So a single-sex SLAC will see “office hour parking”, but so will the co-ed SLACs that Chad and I teach at.
There is a lot more to that article than the second paragraph. For example, does that young woman come to the office because she is not comfortable asking a potentially dumb (but not dumb) question in class or checking publicly whether something a guy told her outside of class is simply well-articulated BS? The female professors who went through a single-sex undergrad program consistently say that that is where they learned to speak up for themselves and “talk science” with confidence that they were correct.
At Williams and Union, what is the ratio of physics majors to chemistry majors? What is the ratio of female physics majors to female chemistry majors? What fraction of each group goes on to earn a PhD?
My wife, a Physics professor, went to an exclusive all-girls school, and speaks highly of the experience. She’s taught in both all-girls and coed high schools, and says that she preferred the single-sex classroom.
The point is, there are differences between men and women, and those differences have an effect on interactions in the classroom. I am not going on a tangent about pervasive sexual stereotyping and gender bias in Science, which I think is real, though I believe that the Title IX approach being contemplated in Congress for attempting gender balance in Math, Science, Engineering, and Technology could have unintended consequences.
When I went to High School — Stuyvesant, New York City — the school was all male. As a heterosexual, albeit with several openly gay friends, I was mostly unaware of the who-slept-with-whom network.
While I was at Caltech, it made the fascinating phase change from all male to Coed. Cooperative phenomena were embedded;)
I was now very aware of the network.
Indeed, circa 1971 I drew on print-out paper a graph with one color edge for had-sex-with, another for is-friends-with, another for from-same-home-town, and
so forth. I realized after drawing 50 vertices and about 500 edges that one needed computers to do this.
I was doing Graph Theory in class (I had Combinatorics from Herbert Ryser, King of Combinatorics!) and solo. I was hooked early on Social Network Theory.
I give papers at some conferences such as CASOS where there is a lot of it. I have a database on Asimov Number, with Saint Isaac as the bridge between the Science Fiction Coauthorship graph and the Biomedical
Coauthorship Graph, but have not entered it into any of the Social Network analysis software packages. There’s at least one publishable paper hiding in there someplace.
Alan Ginsberg once described some of his Sexual graph. Wish I’d taken notes, though that would have been rude. One path went Alan Ginsberg – X [= JVP doesn’t recall] – X – X – President of the United States (male). Was it Grover Cleveland? Need to check my old archives.
I wrote a novel in college, which I’d started in High School, that said (ahead of its time) that when you sleep with someone, you sleep with everyone they slept with, and described that as ghosts in the bedroom. Now, in the AIDS era, that is part of common knowledge in the developed world.
I found teaching slightly easier in schools that enforced a dress code, too, even though I rebelled intensely against that in my own undergraduate days.