skyler@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Patricia Roberts) (12/09/88)
Teaching at a predominantly women's college is really interesting. One thing I have noticed is that students tend to be much less willing to take risks, to start papers before they know exactly what they want to say, to write rough drafts, or play around with writing. They want a clear and specific assignment. They want to know what their thesis is before the put pen to paper. They want things very certain and very predictable. Now, I'm not sure if this is because they are women, because I'm in the South, because these are the students who were at the bottom of the honors classes or top of the medium classes in high school (and have taken that categorization _to heart_) or what. But it certainly seems true. I _suspect_ that it has to do with gender. Over and over, studies have shown that if a girl answers a question incorrectly, the teacher will go on to someone else whereas if a boy answers a question in- correctly, the teacher will help reason him his way to the correct answer. The message to the children is that it a boy can still have the teacher's attention and approval even if he gets an answer wrong. In thinking about this, I vaguely remembered reading a psychological study a long time ago which suggested that some parents encourage their kids to experiment and allow kids to make mistakes. Other parents get obsessed with correctness in kids--they would rather have a kid do nothing at all than do something wrong. As I remember, the study went on to point out that the latter child-raising method leads to kids who are less "intelligent." Here we get to wild speculating. People who wouldn't make a move unless they were certain it was right would make lousy hackers. Obviously, this isn't true in every case, but I started to wonder if girls are scared away from hacking due to the inherent uncertainty.