Category Archives: teaching

Writing reference letters & avoiding gender bias

Today we borrow from the news section of the Yale Women Faculty Forum. ‘Tis the season to write letters of recommendation, and the data show that gender bias in letters is common, the gender of the writer and the strength of the candidate notwithstanding.

Letters for men tend to be longer and stress their accomplishments (they are four times as likely to mention publications, for example, than letters for women). Meanwhile, letters for women tend to be shorter, are seven times more likely to mention their personal lives, and stress qualities like effort and helpfulness. This one-page resource suggests quick, useful advice based on research: for instance, tilt toward insightful rather than compassionate; use words like resourceful, independent, or skilled rather than diligent. Also, Yale WFF links to this gender bias calculator, which will apparently scan your letter for what it considers flag words (among them teaching and students . . .).

Lyell Asher, “Your Students Crave Moral Simplicity. Resist.”

jhu-stormy

You may have seen this essay in The American Scholar or in the Chronicle. Here’s an excerpt (full essay is here):

I didn’t like bewilderment when I was in college, and my students don’t either. Their lives are chaotic enough without any help from books. So they’re just as inclined as I was to bypass complication as a way of preserving the clarity of their judgments, which is precisely what Tolstoy’s characters do [in Anna Karenina]. Anna needs to construe her husband as an unfeeling machine in order to withstand her own guilt, just as her husband needs to construe Anna as a thoroughly depraved woman so as to sharpen his own hatred. It’s one of the book’s many indelible patterns: The easiest way to streamline your feelings is to simplify the people who provoke them.

A college ought to be the ideal place to help students learn to resist such simplifications — to resist them not just inside the classroom, in the books they read, but outside in the lives they lead. Rightly understood, the campus beyond the classroom is the laboratory component of college itself. It’s where ideas and experience should meet and refine one another, where things should get more complicated, not less.

Image: http://www.wbal.com/article/160491/3/tuition-going-up-at-johns-hopkins-homewood-campus