Not the complete story, of course, but here’s an interesting recent Slate article suggesting that female professors seems to have a positive effect at the university level:
They measured, for instance, how often each student responded to questions posed by professors to the classroom as a whole. At the start of the semester, 11 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was male, and 7 percent of the female students attempted to answer questions posed to the entire class when the professor was female. By the end of the semester, the number of female students who attempted to answer questions posed by a male professor had not changed significantly: Only 7 percent of the women tried to answer such questions. But when classes were taught by a woman, the percentage of female students who attempted to answer questions by the semester’s end rose to 46.
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Finally, when Stout and Dasgupta evaluated how much the students identified with mathematics, they found that women ended up with less confidence in their mathematical abilities when their teachers were men rather than women. This happened even when women outperformed men on actual tests of math performance.
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These experiments suggest that subtle and unconscious factors skew the “free choices” we make. The career choices of men and women are affected far more by discrimination than by any innate differences between men and women. But it is not the kind of discrimination we usually talk about. We ought to assume that male math professors at the University of Massachusetts were just as committed to teaching young women as they were to teaching young men. And those professors were just as talented as their female counterparts. (The professors and students were not told the purpose of the experiment beforehand, so the female professors and female students couldn’t have entered into some kind of pact to boost test scores.)
This isn’t surprising, boys in elementary school do better with male teachers, which may be part of the reason why we are seeing such worrying figures about their performance in recent years.
Not the complete story, of course, but here’s an interesting recent Slate article suggesting that female professors seems to have a positive effect at the university level:
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. . .
This isn’t surprising, boys in elementary school do better with male teachers, which may be part of the reason why we are seeing such worrying figures about their performance in recent years.