A good topic for discussion in TOK classes is ‘prejudice’. Students can look at the factors which give rise to prejudice such as upbringing, cultural background and experience and consider ways of identifying prejudice and strategies for combating it. Of course, prejudice is what other people have! It is difficult to identify your own prejudices with any sort of impartiality. If we are aware that we have a particular prejudice then we can at least try to counteract it – the most dangerous prejudices are those we are unaware of.  As chemistry teachers we might claim that we treat all students equally but this is not true. Students are individuals and we need to respond to their individual wants, needs, abilities and circumstances in a sensitive and professional way. We need to take into account relevant factors such as educational background or personal factors such as bereavement in the student’s family when dealing with them but we must also strive to ignore completely irrelevant prejudicial factors such as the colour of their skin, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.

I’ve been fortunate to teach in three mixed sex schools and although the ratio might fluctuate a little from year to year essentially my classes contained roughly equal numbers of male and female students. I can honestly say that I have never felt that the gender of a student has made any difference to the way in which I treat individual students and the same is also true of my colleagues. I have never heard of a male or female student complaining that a particular teacher had discriminated against them due to their gender. It would seem that it is not a problem. However a wider look at the societies I operate in gives a different picture.

My last school is currently celebrating its 50^th anniversary. During those fifty years there have been seven principals – all of them male. Our examination system – the International Baccalaureate - will also soon be celebrating fifty years of existence. During that time all the Director Generals have been male. In my country less than one quarter of our elected Members of Parliament are women. In business also the gender imbalance is obvious. Of the top FTSE-100 companies only five currently have female chief executives. Could it be that many teachers do actually have a gender prejudice that they are completely unaware of?

Recent work by a team of researchers from Yale University in the US led by Jo Handelman tends to suggest that such a bias does actually exist. Their work is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They asked 127 science faculty members from research-orientated universities to rate the applications for the post of laboratory manager. Identical applications were randomly assigned a male or female name. The faculty members rated the male applicant as significantly more competent than the identical female candidate. What was interesting was that both male and female faculty members exhibited the same bias against ‘female’ applicants. Analysis showed that the female applicant was less likely to be hired as she was deemed less competent than the identical male applicant. Male applicants were also offered a higher starting salary!

The results of this work should lead us to consider afresh whether we do unintentionally exhibit bias against female students in our own chemistry teaching. Perhaps when you are next observed teaching by a colleague you could ask him or her to look specifically at whether you deal equally with, and use the same body language etc. with, all your students irrespective of their gender.