Teacher Biases Can Sway Girls

Joseph Felice

Analysis Essay #1 I want you to picture a firefighter in your head. I am willing to bet you pictured a male firefighter. We often place certain jobs, skills, and traits with gender. We gain this bias from our culture, and from other people unconsciously affecting our dispositions. How Teacher Biases Can Sway Girls From Math and Science by Clair Cain Miller is an article about how girls are under represented in math and science jobs, one of the fastest growing and highest paying fields. Miller wrote about how girls are under represented in these subjects, and how it is a result of the unconscious teacher bias, and overall discouragement from their surroundings. This article connects with the class in dealing with teacher bias

Miller wrote about how girls lack female role models in math and science degrees, and gave strong support for it too. “In college, women earn only 12 percent of computer science degrees.” (Miller) Girls are conforming to societies’ view on what they are good or bad at before they figure it out for themselves. Women are thought to be inadequate in certain areas compared to men with little exception. The Social Construction of Gender by Judith Lorber explains modern view on gender and is similar view to Miller’s article. “Whatever a “women” has to be “female” and man has to be “male”.” (Lorber) She also includes how one’s gender gives them characteristics that are feminine or masculine. This ties into Millers article because the girls are negatively biased of their science and math skills because in society it is a masculine dominant area. Lynn Webber also wrote A Conceptual Framework For Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality. She also included how our culture has gender roles, males are to be masculine, and females are to be feminine, and act accordingly. She gave an example of the Ku Klux Klan, and explained most people would think of the male members, and forget about the women members. Both Lynn and Lorber’s articles connect to Miller’s in that our culture is structured through masculinity and femininity, boys wear blue, girls wear pink. Computer science jobs are thought to be a job for men, so girls grow up thinking it isn’t for