The premise of that study might be depressing, but it seems to have been of a pretty small scope, with only four actors involved.
I love the first comment. Give up right now, ladies:
It is not "inherent biases" that cause students to prefer men speakers over women. Because of the high pitch and the softness of a woman's voice, it makes them very difficult to understand unless they are right up in your face, and the high pitch of a woman's voice makes their lecture seem more like a reprimand. A man's voice has more base in it and their words are clearer and easier to understand. It is not bias, it is the length of the sound wave.
It is not bias, it is the length of the sound wave.
Bias towards low voices isn't bias against women! It's just bias against women's voices. TOTALLY DIFFERENT THING.
Tommyrot, those of us who teach noticed that anecdotally years ago. The students perception of your intelligence is inversely related to how high your voice is.
One of my friends from grad school has a really high voice -- like, Minnie Mouse quality -- and it usually took forever for her students to trust that she actually knew what she was talking about. (She usually got assigned to the lower-level classes, though, because she had way more patience for them than the rest of us. She could explain 2+2=4 for an hour, and have a smile on her face the whole time. Nearly all of the rest of us would get too frustrated to continue long before she would.)
I remember (but can't hit the right set of Google terms to call it back up) reading an article by an MTF professor in (memfault) science, who was appalled to overhear remarks in the halls by colleagues gossiping about the new guy and how great his most recent lectures/publications had been, and that he seemed to be a lot smarter than his sister who'd been around the year before.
In case you need some cheering up after Tommyrot's post:
[link]
Baby pygmy hippo!
Really? That's the first comment? Oy
I do not doubt that, JZ. Because people are LITERALLY THE WORST.
I remember (but can't hit the right set of Google terms to call it back up) reading an article by an MTF professor in (memfault) science, who was kind of appalled to overhear remarks in the halls by colleagues gossiping about the new guy and how great his most recent lectures/publications had been, and that he seemed to be a lot smarter than his sister who'd been around the year before.
There was something very similar to that in some articles and a recent memoir written by an MTF English professor at Stern College. (There was a lot of talk about this in the Jewish press, since Stern College is the women's college of Yeshiva University, which is pretty much THE school for Orthodox students who want to get a good religious education as well as a good secular education, and some of them were really not comfortable with a trans professor.)
