The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

212 Chapter 6

and boys receive more criticism from teachers.

Teachers, especially male teachers, seem to be

reluctant to criticize girls because they fear up-

setting girls. This is unfortunate because there

are benefits to criticism. Teachers’ lack of at-

tention to female students is depicted in the

cartoon shown in Figure 6.13.

One reason girls do not receive as much

attention as boys is that girls behave well in

school and do not demand as much attention

as boys do. Part of the sex difference in chil-

dren’s grades has been attributed to the person-

ality factor of agreeableness (Hicks et al., 2008;

Steinmayr & Spinath, 2008). That is, girls get

better grades than boys because they are more

agreeable and teachers perceive them as less

disruptive. However, while the girls are behav-

ing themselves, the teachers are spending time

with the “difficult” boys. In other words, these

girls suffer from benign neglect. Meanwhile,

the boys’ bad behavior is reinforced because it

receives the teacher’s attention. Conduct your

own observational study of a classroom in Do

Gender 6.4 to see if gender bias exists.

Feedback. The different kinds of atten-

tion girls and boys receive for behavior (girls

for good behavior and boys for bad behavior)

America’s Schools Cheat Girls. In this book,

they documented the results of extensive ob-

servational studies of teacher-student interac-

tions in rural, urban, and suburban settings

across the United States. In 1995, Brady and

Eisler reviewed the literature on teacher-stu-

dent interactions in the classroom, examin-

ing both observational and self-report studies.

Both sets of investigators reached the same

conclusions: From elementary school through

graduate school, teachers interact more with

boys than girls and give boys better feedback

than girls. Teachers call on boys more often

than girls, ask boys higher-level questions, and

expand on boys’ more than girls’ comments.

In college, professors give men more non-

verbal attention than they give women: mak-

ing greater eye contact with men and waiting

longer for men to answer a question. Since

those reviews were published, two observa-

tional studies of student-teacher interactions

showed that teachers initiate more interactions

with boys than girls (Altermatt, Jovanovic, &

Perry, 1998; Duffy, Warren, & Walsh, 2001).

White male students, in particular, seem to

be given more “wait time”—time to think and

respond to a question (Sadker & Zittleman,

2007). Girls are interrupted more than boys,

FIGURE 6.13 Cartoon illustrates how teachers pay more attention to boys than girls, referring to the

lack of attention to girls as a “girl’s education.”

Source: DOONESBURY ©1992 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS

SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.

M06_HELG0185_04_SE_C06.indd 212 6/21/11 8:10 AM