1) Lack of Positive Encouragement –

a. How classroom environment influences the way students feel towards the topic and towards themselves: I think the role of feedback is highly underrated when it comes to gender bias! For many students, especially women, it seems that a discouraging (or non-encouraging) classroom environment influences the way students feel towards the topic itself, and towards themselves as people.

b. Lack of encouragement – is it a ‘challenge’ or a personal failure? Perhaps the fear of math (itself) that many people have is somehow tied into fear of failure in the classroom. There are 2 types of learners, those who view a lack of encouragement as a ‘challenge’, and those who view it as a personal failure. It doesn't matter if they are women or men, we're still only catering to one of them. As a side note, more women correspond to the second category. (Ex. people say they ‘can’t’ do math, that is, it is a personal failure for them, that’s why they don’t do it, they don’t like failing.) Obviously both men and women feel both challenges and personal failures, but I think the general threshold is different so that women are more likely to feel like a failure than a man about the same event. Many women do not go into math because they think they are not ‘good enough’, where this does not seem to be a problem in other equally academic fields such as biology! Perhaps this is due to the classroom environment, because to me, ‘good enough’ should not be a consideration for most people; this is not the right factor to judge, because many people can make a contribution to math. So the fear of failure that most people use as an excuse for not going into math is a valid excuse, but in the classroom rather than in the subject.

c. Positive encouragement helps give student direction – Positive encouragement helps students find their way – it helps students to reinforce what is correct, which is necessary for learning new material. If no positive feedback is given, confusion abounds. This is especially true for female students, who may second-guess themselves more than male students. Eg, when you all gave introductions, 3-4 of you said you went into math because you did well in a competition. To me, that means that you used the positive encouragement you got from that test to give yourselves a direction in your lives, and to overcome your fear that you weren’t ‘good enough’. Many of you also said that you had mentors who helped you and encouraged you.

d. If this problem were fixed, and students were given more positive encouragement, it would help both male and female students, so perhaps some of you could give suggestions on how to give positive encouragement.

2) Competitive Atmosphere vs. Teamwork Atmosphere

a. Is competition a distraction from learning? Some of the literature suggests that it seems that women like to work as a team rather than as against each other in competition. To me, competition is a distraction from the learning, not only do you have to learn it, but you have to make sure you don’t lose because you’ll feel bad. Others might view it as something fun, and maybe they’ll win, and everything will be great! If the challenge isn’t there, it’s too "boring" or "easy". However, I think many women don’t respond well to that sort of competition.

b. We shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. Many classes are set up like a competition where students only ask questions to impress the professor rather than to try to understand the material. This hurts students who ask questions about the material – you look dumb if you’re the only one asking what just happened in that last step rather than saying something profound you saw in a textbook once that tangentially relates to the topic. But that’s what you should be doing! Why do you feel guilty doing it? Because it makes you look dumb! Some people like it that way, they like having the competition because it inspires them. But many people, especially many women, don’t like that at all.

c. The "front" – a lot of guys put on the front, so they don’t let others know when they are clueless.  Everyone are always clueless. That front fools me a lot, because I don’t do that. If I don’t get it, I say so, and promptly feel like an idiot. (men are taught to hide their feelings, everyone is actually afraid to ask questions).

d. Profs don’t respond well: Profs often don’t respond well to students who don’t understand something, to try and make the student learn it on their own, but that’s not a good way to do things, because it just discourages folks and it ruins any kind of teamwork atmosphere because students know no one will help them if they get behind. If I ask a question and don’t get a reponse, I tend to take it personally and think that the professor doesn’t care about me, rather than think that he’s (prolly a he) just got to finish his lecture. I try to view things in perspective, because it would ruin my career otherwise.

3) Cultural Biases

a. No one knows how to deal with women. People in these fields are not used to listening to and dealing with women in a professional setting, they can’t relate. I’ve had people come, this year, into a joint office I share with others (when I was working with another female), approach us and ask questions that were clearly meant for the secretaries. And these are the type of people we are expected to relate to in a professional manner, who have these preconceptions – not malicious, but biases nonetheless. Biases are especially common in some foreign-educated faculty - many from cultures where women are not held in high esteem – often pose problems for women in graduate programs.

b. Toughness – it’s just expected. A quote from Jenifer Tidwell's report on the Garden (1990) describes how men and women react differently to the same treatment, due to their expectations of communication styles: "The persons I interviewed did not believe that women were treated worse than the men were, nor vice versa, when I asked them directly. (`Everyone is treated equally badly,' said one male informant.) Yet some informants, both male and female, commented that women may not be able to deal with the Garden's harshness as well as the men do --- not because of any inherent weakness, but simply because they have not been brought up with the same expectations of `toughness' (in one man's terms) that men have. Furthermore, it seems more acceptable for anyone there --- male or female --- to try to solve all one's problems by oneself than to habitually ask for help. All of the women that I interviewed commented on this expectation of independence (whereas almost none of the men did);" [Widnall 1988] Anecdotal evidence suggests that women tend to be more sensitive than men to general obnoxiousness.

4) Cluelessness - No one knows there’s a problem! Tidwell also writes that ``[what could be construed as] harassment may just be social incompetence''.

a. Inexcuseable rudeness or just something to be overlooked? Quote from MIT website "A female computer science student told me that a male TA had been inexcusably rude to her in front of the class, I looked up the student evaluations of the TA and found this comment, by a male student: [He] knows his stuff cold, but he's too rude. Honestly, once you humble yourself and tolerate this, he is an excellent source of help. I owe a lot to him." A student unused or unwilling to being treated meanly would not be able to interact with such individuals.

b. habitual cluelessness – A lot of men haven’t dealt with women, not enough women have been around to change the male-viewpoint habits these guys have gotten into. Many of these men wouldn’t even know how to fix the problem, even if they knew what the problem was, and they usually don’t even know there’s a problem. These guys aren’t necessarily sexist, they might be good guys who just plain aren’t women and don’t happen to know how they would feel if they were women (with good reason!). There’s no one around to articulate the problem, let alone fix it. The guys aren’t intentionally sexist, and for that reason don’t even see a problem, even if all the signs are there. And they’d resist vehemently if they don’t see a problem, because they don’t see themselves as doing anything wrong, because they’re not trying to do such a harmful thing as excluding women from math, even though they unintentionally do. Many times with the female friendly profs, the classes somehow have a better male-female ratio, and the classes in general seem to be more responsive. Many profs don’t even consider that they might be discouraging towards women, and not even try to measure it or think about it. How can we make them do this?

5) Other questions and ways of improvement:

a. How do we let professors know (subtely, no accusations) that their teaching style might be somewhat harmful to female students? It’s hard to let people know this kind of thing, especially those who aren’t likely to be responsive towards fixing it.

b. How do we deal with the problem of feeling the cold of the chilly classroom environment? Recognizing its there is one important thing, but dealing with it is another.

c. How do we prevent this in our classrooms, as both students, and professors?