Perceptions and Implications

If social confidence explains the greater contributions of women in some social contexts, it is worth asking why girls in school tend to contribute less than boys. Why should they feel unconfident in the classroom? Here is the answer which one sixteen-year-old gave:

Sometimes I feel like saying that I disagree, that there are other ways of looking at it, but where would that get me? My teacher thinks I’m showing off, and the boys jeer. But if I pretend I don’t understand, it’s very different. The teacher is sympathetic and the boys are helpful. They really respond if they can show YOU how it is done, but there’s nothing but ‘aggro’ if you give any signs of showing THEM how it is done.

Talking in class is often perceived as ‘showing off’, especially if it is girl-talk. Until recently, girls have preferred to keep a low profile rather than attract negative attention.

Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions.

The male tendency to dominate in some classes did not surprise us, since talkativeness studies in general have concluded that men dominate mixed discussion groups everywhere -- both within the classroom and beyond. What did surprise us was the degree to which male domination appeared to depend on gender demographics: when the teacher was male and the students in a particular class were predominantly male, then male students dominated the discussions. In none of the demographic circumstances studied did women students talk as much as men.

Why don't women students talk as much as men? One explanation is that women prove to be extremebly vulnerable to interruption. Numerous studies have demonstrated that in mixed-sex conversations, women are interrupted far more frequently than men are. This was remarkably visible in the Video Lab's sample: the comments of women students often were confined to "bursts" lasting only a few seconds, while male students typically kept on talking until they had finished. Moreover, once interrupted, women sometimes stayed out of the discussion for the remainder of the class hour. Thus there were considerably more one-time contributors among women than men.

http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/prejudice/women/
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic58474/krupnick.html