Gender Equity

I held up the front page of our college newspaper and asked my first-year journalism students if any questions came to mind as they looked at the photographs of candidates running for president and vice president of our student government.

It’s a multimedia storytelling class and the assignments for the week were about analyzing and taking photographs.

Recently I suspended a seventh-grade boy for publicly calling his former girlfriend a “slut” and a “whore.” Our rules on slurs are clear. But as I learned again, talking about something in class doesn’t always affect student behavior, especially if the unwanted behavior isn’t corrected or condemned outside of the classroom.

When the Dallas Texas Public Schools District decided to show its fifth-graders Red Tails, an action-adventure film based on the Tuskegee pilots who formed the country’s first black aerial combat unit, it was a tremendous idea. The district felt students would be inspired by the story of these men who fought segregation, integrated the Army and were trained as combat pilots for the United States during WWII.

Historian Carter G. Woodson established the first Negro History Week in 1926—a celebration that later became Black History Month. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History, a group founded by Woodson, selects a new theme for Black History Month each year. This year’s theme is "Black Women in American Culture and History."

For the past two years, I have taught in classrooms where the boys outnumbered the girls by a ratio of 3-to-1.

At my elementary school in Guatemala last year, soccer fields, basketball courts and baseball diamonds were dominated by boys and a handful of brave, tough girls.

As the final Space Shuttle mission touched down last month, ending NASA’s 30-year space shuttle program, I wondered what would come next for women in aerospace. Without a clear, defined mission from NASA, I questioned where that leaves girls and young women who dream of becoming astronauts.

When our school decided to give single-gender classes a try, the first thing teachers wanted to know was whether or not they had to take the boys. I know folks who would rather take extra duty than have 25 boys in one room. But boys shine when they don’t have to worry about girls. I had a “boy homeroom” this past year and loved it.

I distinctly remember watching the very first space shuttle blast off on April 12, 1981. I was 8 years old, and I watched it while eating breakfast before school. Awe-inspiring, everyone talked about it for days. I recall watching the astronauts board the shuttle that morning and wondering, “Where are the women astronauts?”

Going to graduate school at New York University was often a literal walk through American history. A row of brownstones facing Washington Square housed school offices, and it was hard not to think of Edith Wharton each time I passed. The urban campus, which spread out along the blocks surrounding the square, included converted early 19th-century stables and one-time factory lofts refashioned into classroom and office spaces.

The most infamous of those lofts was the Asch Building. Today it’s a science center with a bronze plaque that lets you know it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On March 25, 1911—100 years ago—it was the site of one of the worst workplace accidents in American history, the Triangle Waist Company fire.