Thread on Educaton and the Influence of Stevenson High School, Lincolnshire

 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1525499568867184641.html

ED thread-
To be clear, @stevensonhs your assessment is not working and has not been working for years. #atAssessment@SolutionTreeAR This assessment (known as EBR at my school) has eroded study skills, and damaged work ethic while contributing to student stress. And this 

assessment has eroded trust in the faculty while burning us out. Faculty feel that their professional integrity has been compromised and ethically feel that they are going against what they have been trained to do and what they believe is right. #atAssessment #edchat 

I don't think that @stevensonhs upper admin wants to hinder students or teachers, but they have turned a blind eye refusing to dialogue with Ts about what works and what doesn't. This is NOT a professional learning community #atPLC and has strayed far from Dr.Dufour's school. 

I have fought for years trying to affect change and make the EBR system workable, upper admin refuses to acknowledge any of this. I documented a number of those complaints in my resignation letter which you can read here: drive.google.com/file/d/1k3SlU4… But,

SalituroResignV3.3.pdfhttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1k3SlU4JBmMG78ONMgTv74-bhwcfo_yIR/view?usp=sharing

upper admin refuses to acknowledge any of this. They continue to defend these detrimental policies. That is why I felt compelled to resign. After years of trying to work with admin I was frustrated and rather than hear WHY I was frustrated, 

admin told me that I must follow all directives without question. The stress of having to teach in a system that I ethically and pedagogically disagree with combined with the refusal of admin to be reasonable led to my resignation. And that has given me the freedom to speak up 

@mentionsAdmin still refuses to acknowledge this. Just YESTERDAY the principal defended it to me in person. But this is not just me. I have received so many messages of support from students, parents and faculty. I started documenting them here: 

Public Reaction to Resignation:Stevenson High School, Lincolnshire, IL Flawed Grading Public Reaction to Stevenson High School Grading policy aka EBR: This is a sample of the reaction that I have gotten to resigning because of th…https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aCkVRuv-HELUOEENtsOZN7zA6X1bHFMrrTVS6FH7WMo/edit?usp=sharing

All I am asking for, is the @stevensonhs board and upper admin to listen. Guarantee that teachers won't face retribution and listen. Give students a forum and listen. Give directors a guarantee that they can speak honestly and listen. That's it. Is that so hard? 

Everybody FEARS @stevensonhs - parents, students, faculty and dept directors all operate in fear and that insulates upper admin from reality. We are supposed to be a learning community - not a tyranny. Admin demands Ts gather feedback - what feedback does admin gather? 

The refusal listen to the people who matter most in your district - students and parents - is why I wonder about the books @stevensonhs published as early as 2016. Administrators tour the country and bring teachers and admin from all over the USA to SHS to see what we do. 

This is BIG$$ in education. @SolutionTreeAR is part of a million $$$ business. Many @stevensonhs admin have gone on to make lots of $ both during their SHS career and especially after. I don't begrudge people their $, but when it hurts students, it is time to speak up.And, 

because @stevensonhs influences schools all over the country, they have an incredible responsibility to speak the truth. The public reaction shows the frustration that teachers all over the US feel as well as the students and parents of SHS 

Public Reaction to Resignation:Stevenson High School, Lincolnshire, IL Flawed Grading Public Reaction to Stevenson High School Grading policy aka EBR: This is a sample of the reaction that I have gotten to resigning because of th…https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aCkVRuv-HELUOEENtsOZN7zA6X1bHFMrrTVS6FH7WMo/edit?usp=sharing

Will the D125 school board listen & charge the Superintendent to make this right? If you don't believe me & don't care that I am leaving the field at the height of my career as a leader in my discipline who is loved by students, at least listen to the students, parents & faculty. 

Will the @NationalEducat4 listen and stop the flood of teachers leaving the profession? Will @ISBEnews listen and start supporting students and teachers? #edchat 

But even after all of this, I still am afraid that admin will try to smear me and attempt to administer some retribution instead of simply listening and changing for the better. Big $$ is powerful. And power is intoxicating. They won't want to give up either. 

But democracy is more powerful than them. Our collective voice is stronger. The conscious will of a motivated people can bring change. So if you agree, if you are a student, or parent, or teacher, please speak up. Like this. Retweet. DM me. Email the board privately. You matter! 

Race Lesson 9: Effects of Racism on Americans Perceived as Black

Google Form Here

Racism and Segregation

Look at this analysis (from Patheos 2018) of the racial dot map.  

Segregation in rental market This 2018 research by economists Early, Carrillo, and Olsen finds that discrimination causes black renters to pay substantially more than whites for identical homes in identical neighborhoods; the amount of the exploitation is greater the more white the neighborhood.

2.  Hypothesize at least one way how segregation might contribute to economic, health or educational disparities.

Choose one of the areas below to focus on: Economics, Medicine or Law

Then examine the evidence and answer the question that follows.

Racism and Economics

As we have mentioned earlier in the semester, there are multiple audit studies that show that race is a factor in preventing some Americans from interviewing for potential jobs.

University of Chicago School of Economics and Labor Market
Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan published a study of implicit bias and the labor market in The American Economic Review (2004) called Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination?

Labor Market and Felonies
From the NY Times, When a Dissertation Makes a Difference shows not only how unconscious bias can play a role in hiring in a most inequitable way, but also how sociology can make a difference that influences policy.  

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Devah Pager studied the difficulties of former prisoners trying to find work and, in the process, came up with a disturbing finding: it is easier for a white person with a felony conviction to get a job than for a black person whose record is clean.

Pager's dissertation is called The Mark of a Criminal Record (2003) was an audit study of the Milwaukee area labor market.  She also published in a follow-up study (2010) in the American Sociological Review  which was a more qualitative study using fieldwork.

The Economic Policy Institute (2016) found that the wage gap among different races is growing more as the inequality, in general, grows.  The report lists key findings as well as policy suggestions.

The Guardian analyzes the EPI report here.  Some notable findings include: the wage gap is worse than in 1979, and that college graduation does not mitigate the disparity as black college graduates earn 10% less than their white cohorts. 

Inequality.org published a report on racial inequality showing that the disparity is not just income but also wealth and homeownership.

Racism and Health/Medicine
Social factors play an important and well-documented role in health outcomes.  Race is especially correlated to health outcomes because racial inequalities are so stark and have persisted for so long.  Please examine all of the evidence below that race affects health outcomes.

American Academy of Pediatrics (2019) published this statement about how childrens and teens can be harmed by racism and what doctors and healthcare providers should do to improve health outcomes.

Racism Impacts Your Health, a 2018 article from The Conversation documents a literature review of the myriad ways that racism impacts health outcomes for minorities including: higher systolic blood pressure, increased blood pressure and higher rates of hypertension. 

The American Journal of Epidemiology (2007) found a link between racism and breast cancer summarized by the National Institute of Health. 

The American Public Health Association study of hypertension/heart disease published a link between racism and heart disease in the American Journal of Public Health (2012) 

This study published in the journal of Ethnicity and Disease shows that African-Americans experience worse health outcomes than African immigrants!  Lower hypertension among 1st gen African immigrants compared to multigenerational Americans who are black shows that the stress of growing up in the United States where racism against Americans who are black has a real effect - it's not simply genetics (although possibly epigenetics). 

This 2010 fact sheet from the Center for American Progress shows disparities in health for all races including who has health coverage, chronic diseases and causes of death for African Americans/Blacks, Hispanics, Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Asian Americans.  

A 2016 report on life expectancy from PBS reveals that Americans who are black have a shorter life expectancy from the moment they are born.  The disparity continues throughout life so that African Americans live about 4 years shorter than white Americans on average.

NPR reported (2018) on a Center for Disease Control study published in JAMA Pediatrics of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the effects on health.  Those identifying as black or Latino and those with less than a high school education or an annual income below $15,000 were more likely to have more ACEs. 

 This article reported in the NY Times (2018) shows that Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery!

Racism and Legal System/Punishment

From the ASA an explanation about her ethnography on Youtube:

From Stanford University Press, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve published a scathing account of Racism in Chicago's Cook County Courthouse.  Van Cleve is a former SHS student who spent ten years researching the Cook County Courthouse, the largest courthouse in the United States.  She is currently a sociology professor at Brown University.

Embedded below is an interview with Dr. Van Cleve on PBS:

Here is a bookreview from the ASA:  

There are three central aspects to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s argument in Crook County: her focus on professionals, her detailing of racial abuses, and her critical analysis of racism and racial injustice as embedded within court culture. Perhaps the most essential is her inverted lens on the court professionals. Rather than focusing on the impacts of an unjust criminal system on the Black and Brown individuals who pass through it, Gonzalez Van Cleve instead highlights the ways these injustices are carried out by the very professionals tasked with upholding and administering fair and just due process. In turning the lens on criminal justice professionals, Gonzalez Van Cleve articulates how systemic racism is managed, perpetuated, practiced, and understood by those “doing” colorblind racism, particularly in how they carry out unchecked racialized court abuses.

From Amazon,

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to ""save"" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.

And here is an essay that Dr. VanCleve tweeted during the unprecedented pandemic of 2020-21:

https://contexts.org/blog/education-under-covid-19/ 

 

A 2016 Yale University study of discipline disparities in preschool found that implicit bias towards preschool students perceived as black resulted in teachers monitoring their behavior more closely and punishing them more often including in expulsion rates!

Vox shows racism at school from preK-12 in 7 charts (2015).
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9646504/discipline-race-charts

This article from the Sociology of Education (2017) shows that implicit bias results in black girls being punished harsher for subjective offenses.  In other words, when the offense is subjective, school officials are more likely to perceive black girls as being worthy of punishment.  You can read the article and use my annotations to answer questions about it.  Then see the data source from the article below to look up data on your own. 

US Dept of Education just released data on racial disparities in every school and school district in America (from preK-12). Here’s how you use the data to show if/how your school discriminates against black students and other marginalized groups. First, lookup the most recent year of data available for your school and/or school district. Right now that’s data on the 2015-16 school year. Here’s where you go: https://ocrdata.ed.gov/DistrictSchoolSearch#schoolSearchHere's a link to Samual Sinyangwe's tweet about this.Click on the Discipline Report on the right side and you’ll see which groups of students your school is most likely to suspend, expel, and refer to law enforcement. You can also see who’s more likely to be arrested at school using the “school-related arrests” tab.

Harsher treatment toward Americans who are black does not just occur in schools. This 2019 study from the Proceedings of the National Acdemy of Sciences of the United States of America concludes that, "people of color face a higher likelihood of being killed by police than do white men and women, that risk peaks in young adulthood, and that men of color face a nontrivial lifetime risk of being killed by police." African American men and women ... face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers... Risk is highest for black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.

The American Journal of Preventative Medicine explains that

Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites. Most victims were reported to be armed (83%); however, black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims. 

So, yes according to this study from 2009-2012, more whites have been killed, but a DISPROPORTIONATE number of blacks have been killed and that disproportionate number was much LESS likely to be armed. 

This 2021 Dept. of Justice brief explains that

In 2018, based on data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, black people were overrepresented among persons arrested for nonfatal violent crimes (33%) and for serious nonfatal violent crimes (36%) relative to their representation in the U.S. population (13%) (table 1).  White people were underrepresented.

This 2021 Washington Post study has detailed every police shooting since 2015.

 

Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White Americans

Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Although this is a more anecdotal bit of evidence, I saw this video from Youtube (Watch from 2:30-6:15 and 12:50-18:50) and thought what an amazing contrast to the videos of police stopping Philando Castille, Sandra Bland, Terence Crutcher, Levar Jones and the stopping of black men by police.

This 2019 Marshall project study details sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system (2019).  Not only are Americans who are black more likely to get stopped by police, they are also more likely to get a harsher punishment than the whites who are convicted of the same crimes.

The Equal Justice Initiative founded by Bryan Stevenson reports on sentencing disparities (2017) as well. 

 Vox reports (2017) on University of Michigan Law School report on sentencing disparities published by the United States Sentencing Commission.  Among the key findings is that, "Black male offenders continued to receive longer sentences than similarly situated White male offenders."

 For more on policing and racism, see:

Focusing 2020 on Protests for George Floyd

Whose Lives Matter? (A History of Black Lives Matter Movement)

A Knee into the Gut of America (Colin Kaepernick)

Ferguson

Why Don't People Protest When the Violence is Not Because of a Cop? (They Do!)

 

3. What was some quantitative evidence that racism affects Americans who are identified as black?

4. What was some qualitative evidence that racism affects Ameriocans who are idewntified as black?

5.  Comment on some of the evidence above in the disparities of how Americans are punished based on race.  What was compelling/surprising?

6.  Any questions about the effects of racism on Americans who are black?

Saving the turtles

One of my favorite memories from SHS was saving a couple of dozen turtles who crawled out of their nest and onto the blacktop in Lot A.

Evidence Based Grading is bad for students, confusing for parents and awful for teachers

 Hello colleagues and students,

I have truly loved teaching sociology and the students of SHS. And I have loved sharing that with so many of you. I feel that I have plenty more of that left in me. However, as some of you have heard, I am resigning effective at the end of this school year.


In short, I have been voicing concerns and frustration with EBR for years. Then this past winter I had 20 kids simply not turn in a final essay with only 2 weeks left of the semester. My frustration boiled over. Turns out that I had been walking around really high blood pressure - stopped into the nurses office and it was at 190 one day!! I think the high blood pressure was contributing to my irritability. Anyway, admin heard that I lost my temper about the kids failing and they decided to have a meeting and sanction me. I apologized profusely at the meeting, said that I discovered this medical condition and am getting treatment and that I am committed to getting better and not losing my temper again. But I also explained that this was not simply a one time frustration - instead, I have been voicing concerns about the grading to admin for years. And I documented that. Despite all of that, admin chose to give me a really harshly worded letter (harsh was even their own description of it). They said that I must follow all rules and directives of any kind without question and I must treat everyone in the SHS community - including admin, faculty, students, parents and even community members with politeness and respect in all circumstances. And if I violate any of these demands I will face sanction again including termination. So, not only am I being forced to teach and grade with a pedagogy and ethical standard that I disagree with, but now it is with disregard for my health and with a draconian ultimatum of threat hanging over my head. That is no way to teach and no way to run a school. So, with that, I have resigned. I'll attach the letter below.

Here is my official letter of resignation.

I sent the letter to the Board with this preface:

Dear District 125 School Board Members,

Attached is my letter of resignation.  I know it's tempting to ignore one letter of resignation in such a large district and the Superintendent told me that he has already spoken to the board members about this, but because I know that you care about the education of students in D125, I implore you to read it earnestly.  There are dozens of teachers who feel the same as I do but they do not have the means to take the step that I am.  This is NOT due to the pandemic nor is it because of another opportunity.  This is solely in the interest of students and the district.  The administration that you continue to empower is peddling a lie in their marketing of Evidence Based Grading.  The longer that you allow the charade to continue not only will more students be harmed but the fall from grace will be even higher for SHS.   Please read my letter and feel free to contact me to discuss further. 

I sent the letter to the union with this preface:

It is really annoying that I feel forced to resign and give up thousands of dollars of retirement money and the job that I have loved and devoted 25 years of my life to but I am still having to spend time on all of this.  Do you think there is any recourse here?  Can I suit? Can I demand to have my job back without the ridiculousness that is EBR?  My plan is that after the year ends, I will meet with Loyola and explain my ethical concerns and show them the emails.  It is wrong.  What SHS is doing is wrong.  It is unethical, has zero pedagogical research, and is bad for students.  My students all agree and I know that teachers all across disciplines agree.  And Student Services specifically, is a mess - they have no idea how to help kids and they have no idea what kids grades are or what kids need to pass. If you have a frank conversation with students they will tell you.  But I have heard nothing from Troy or Eric or Tony!  After 9 years of trying EBR and doing research and trying to be part of a professional learning community - nothing! And kids come up to me constantly and say, "I am so sad - because you are great and I wish you weren't leaving" and, "I agree with you".

The book

It is really hard to ignore that the administration wrote a book that not only outlined their idea of what assessment should be (EBR), but they published it BEFORE most teachers at SHS were even using it!  I tried to pioneer it as early as 2013, but I realized the many ways that it was flawed.  I tried to ask questions and give my professional recommendations but admin refused to listen.  Instead they published a book and subsequently told teachers from all over the nation that this is what SHS is doing and that this somehow might make their schools better.  Those are lies.  There is no evidence of this.  SHS did not even mandate that teachers switch to EBR until 2020, but the book was published in 2016!

It sure has the appearance that admin has published a book and so they are all in on what's in the book despite its flaws.  They do a lot of outside consulting and admitting that their publication is flawed would damage those side gigs.  I would be willing to bet that they have done more professional development with teachers from other school districts than they have done in their own district.

You can call it what you want, but Evidence Based Reporting (EBR), or Proficiency Based Assessment or Evidence Based Grading is untested, lacks research and was uncollaborative.  Their presumptuously published book is suspect.

Gender Lesson 3: Evidence Showing Gender Socialization

How does society construct the gender binary?

Here is the Google form for this lesson.

The construction of gender and agents of socialization

All of the agents of socialization help to construct gender.  Look for the claim and evidence supporting each of these agents.  How does each agent contribute to the socialization of gender?  What evidence does sociology provide that agents of socialization influence individuals' self-concepts about gender?

Family:

This article from Newsweek explains the research by neuroscientist Lise Eliot that shows parents begin treating infants differently from the moment they are born.   Parents talk differently to babies based on sex.  Experiments reveal this is true for strangers as well.  It can even be argued that parents treat babies differently before they are born!  For example, pink and blue, decorating the nursery, "gender" reveal parties, and choosing a name.

This research published in Developmental Psychology by Fausto-Sterling, et. al. shows, "measurable sex-related differences in how mothers handle and touch their infants from age 3 months to age 12 months."

Treating six month-olds differently:

• boys are given independence and encouraged to be active
• girls are coddled and ecouraged to be dependent and passive
• by thirteen months, each gender acts differently.

Also differences in toys; boys=action figures, weapons; girls=jewelry, dolls.  

Click here to see a post from the Society Pages that examines how the  Barbie above helps to reinforce lessons learned from teachers.  The toy does not just show up in a little girl's toy box.  Toys come from family which is trying to do right by the kid based on messages in the media. 

Peers

Girls and boys learn what it means to be a man or woman from friends.
See the book from Patricia and Peter Adler on preadolescent peer pressure.

This research by Patricia and Peter Adler published in Sociology of Education shows that values for popularity develop as early as fourth grade;

• boys: athletics, coolness and toughness, grades=lower popularity (think about how this shows up in the ratemyprofessor reviews from the other lesson).
• girls: family background, physical appearance (esp. clothing and makeup) and ability to attract popular boys, grades=higher popularity.          

CJ Pascoe's research 

One of the most important gender researchers is  CJ Pascoe, a University of Oregon sociology professor.  In a 2007 ethnography called "Dude You're a Fag", Pascoe studied high school peer groups and how they sanction gender norms. An excerpt is here.  Pascoe wrote about her research in an essay in Contexts here.   And, here is CJ Pascoe's micro lecture on bullying and masculinity.  Please watch the video below.

1.  What does Pascoe's research show about masculinity?

2.  Do you think Pascoe's research applies to SHS?

School

From the Society Pages, this post shows the latent lessons (hidden curriculum) that schools teach.  In this case, it starts as young as 8 years old.   (See the image below)

From the National Academy of Sciences this study shows that teacher anxiety about math affects their students. 

This research in the journal of Sociology of Education shows how high school begins to shape students' interest in majoring in STEM fields in college.

This research from Gender and Society shows that high school teachers' attitudes about females and math affect how teachers grade and teach female students.

This article from the NY Times shows that gender gap in math scores disappears in countries with a more gender-equal culture.

The Society Pages explain how cross-cultural studies provide evidence that the gendered expectations in STEM are a result of a social construction 

This 2007 study in Sociological Perspectives explains the  connection between core sports and homophobia finding that boys who participate in core sports (football, basketball, baseball, soccer) are nearly 3 times more likely to express homophobic attitudes.  Conversely, females who participated in nonathletic extracurricular activities were half as likely to express those attitudes as individuals who did not participate in those activities.

3a. After the evidence above, can you explain how the agents of socialization shape boys and girls experiences around STEM?  

3b.  If attitudes and outcomes about STEM can be shaped this way, hypothesize what else might be shaped similarly.

Concluding

To summarize, the agents of socialization play a pivotal role in helping each of develop a sense of self (remember the isolated kids, Genie and Danielle from the social structure unit?).  One of the ways that the groups influence us in thinking about gender.  And the influence is particularly strong because it happens from the time we are young (even before we are born) and then continues in a web of structure that perpetuates the construction of gender.  The web is a connection of parents, schools, peers, toys/marketers and media that all reinforce the gender binary.  

4.  Do you understand that gendered is constructed through the agents of socialization reinforcing gendered ideas?  

Sociologist Jill Yavorsky found that the polarization in gendered traits also shows up in hiring practices, especially when overlapped with social class, published in the Journal of Social Forces here. 


5.  Any questions about how gender, especially the binary, is constructed?




 (For more info, see Ferris and Stein pgs. 247-251)

How does society construct the gender binary?

 

Gender Lesson 2: The Socially Constructed Binary

What does society construct for gender?

HW:  C J Pascoe's Dude You're a Fag, background info is here.

Take a moment to think about where you have heard the various phrases on the handout "Socialization of Gender Roles (Click on the link and follow the directions for PART I).

Here is the Google form for this lesson.

1.  Which of the messages have you heard before?
Mark all the messages that you have heard - even if the message was not directed at you.

2.  What agents of socialization have you heard say those phrases from the link above? 
List all the categories of people where you have heard these.  Were they:  parents, siblings, friends, peers, teachers, coaches, actors/actresses, tik-tok stars, somewhere else?


3.  List the messages that the phrases convey for males.  For example, for "Boys will be boys," you might write, "There's only one way to be a boy," You can't change boys," or,  "It's ok for boys to be rough."


4.  List the messages that the phrases convey for females.



This activity should reveal that even though people actually exist on a continuum (lesson 1), our culture constantly promotes a binary.  We all hear these binary messages from all of the agents of socialization.  The messages start even before you are born.  So the idea of a binary is very strong and we are pushed to the ends of the binary from the moment we are born.



The boxes of the binary

Before going further, let me clarify about the biology of males and females.  On average, categorically, men and women are indeed different.  On average, males are taller, have more muscle mass and more testosterone and less estrogen than females.   However, none of these are at the exclusivity of each other.  Males and females both have testosterone and estrogen, they both have muscle mass.  Females can be tall and have a lot of muscle mass.  Males can be short and have little muscle mass.  People are complex and we all exist along a continuum.  

However, our society emphasizes the polar ends of the continuum.  Males are pushed to be only masculine and females are pushed to be feminine.  Society gives the appearance that there is only one way to be masculine or feminine.  Below are some of the traditional traits that dominant US culture has pushed for each gender.  Note that these are traditional in the sense that society has generally promoted them, even if they do not apply to you.  To be clear, I am not saying that men and women should be these ways, I am saying that society has traditionally socialized men and women to be these ways.

5.  Which of the traditional gender traits (above) resemble your answers to numbers 3 and 4 previously?  

PEW Research Center found similar gendered language in a 2017 study about gender expectations for men and women.  Click through the follow up analysis (2018), and look for ways that gender is constructed.

How Americans describe what society values (and doesn’t) in each gender? What traits does society value most in men and in women? What traits does society say men and women should not have?

You can click on the link above to explore their findings.  Here is a sample of their findings.  Gold is for women and green is for men.

Examples of data/evidence for the binary.
Please look at each of the links below.  Look for how the marketplace creates the binary between male and female  - especially in ways that are unnecessary.  When you are finished looking at each, answer question six.

• Gendered Products; See this post about products that are pointlessly gendered thus reifying the idea of traditional gender traits.  
• Gendered Halloween costumes.

6.  After reviewing the two links above (aren't those funny?), what product was the most pointlessly gendered?  What costume was the most ridiculously gendered?

Finally, one last bit of evidence that society pushes us to the binary is in the gendered language of teacher reviews.  This example shows how socialization shapes how American college students perceive their professors.  Sociology professor Ben Schmidt has gathered the metadata from ratemyprofessor.com at his site, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. The interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. You can enter any word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here. Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do.  Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.   For example, the word "funny" shows up in the chart below.  Notice that orange is female and blue is male.  For every single subject (in the column on the left) funny is mentioned more in reviews of male teachers.  Every single subject!  

After you have tried your own search for words, or if the website was not working, click here to see my analysis of the RateMyProfessor data.


7.  See how many words you can find that are completely gendered.  Make a list.
Go to professor Schmidt's website, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews.  See how many words you can find that are genderized.  What are the words?  List them in number 7.

8.  Any questions about how society constructs a gender binary?