Hi folks! Happy Memorial Day. Here’s my take on Dan Grunspan’s talk, titled “Old Boys’ Club Starts Early: Males Under-Estimate Academic Performance of Their Female Peers in Undergraduate Biology Classrooms.” After I give my two cents, I’ll provide some cool links! Some notes: Dan’s research differentiated between people using the words “male” and “female.” In order to stay true to his analysis, I will do the same (even though gender is a spectrum and male and female are technically references to “biological sex,” whatever that is).
Why Biology Classrooms?
- At the undergraduate level, biology is dominated by women. In fact, 59% of biology students are women…
- But only 52% of graduate biology students are women. This number drops to 49% of postdocs and 43% of practicing biology researchers.
- This is something called a leaky pipeline. Somewhere, women are being discouraged from studying biology.
How do we know when we’re good at something?
- Two ways:
- Self-efficacy: advocating for ourselves and knowing our own strengths and weaknesses
- External feedback: i.e. people tell us when we’re good and bad at things
- (Fun note: my neighbor and I both said that things we’re good at we know because of external feedback and things we’re bad at we know through self-efficacy. Weird, huh?)
The study itself
- Dan went into three biology classrooms and at every midterm had each student nominate a student that they thought would know the material well.
- In all three classes, top three students were male
- In all three classes, the trend was for increasing confidence in male talent
- This study originally was meant to focus on study patterns, not gender bias, but the gender bias seemed to simply fall out of the data.
- Females nominated males and females equitably, but males enforced a 0.75 GPA gap between males and females (e.g. they’d nominate males with a 3.0 at the same rate as females with a 3.75).
Leaky Pipeline? More like Selective Filter.
We’re always super hopeful that sexism (and implicit bias and all the other -isms and -phobias) in STEM is on its way out because of this “older generation” that’s on its way out. But surprise, surprise! Today’s first-year undergrads have the same biases, so much so that females are discouraged from a field in which they were the majority.
What can we do????
- Random call (even lawyers are doing it so it can’t be that hard)
- Learn our own biases and how to respond to them
- Learn about how to be an ally to underrepresented populations
Cool Links
- Atlantic article about Dan’s research
- Washington Post article about Dan’s research
- UW Trends & Issues in Higher Ed (useful because it includes more about what instructors can do, also the handout we provided is from a link on this page)
- Structure Matters: Twenty-one Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity by Kimberly Tanner (paper referenced at the end of the talk)
- UW Biology Education Research Group with more resources
- WCS blog post on one of the background papers Dan talked about
- the other paper focusing on science faculty’s gender biases
- Dan’s paper
- https://depts.washington.edu/
anthweb/users/grunny Dan’s page.