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If men will be incentivized into becoming teachers, it must benefit teachers of all gender identities. Training to end internal stigma, significantly increasing teacher pay, and other equitable incentives are all present in current discourse.

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There need to be more male role models for children in early years education, the school leaders' union NAHT says, as only 3% of teachers in this field are men. The union says it is important for all children to have positive male role models and to understand that men can be interested in education.

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Young men experiencing male teachers embody a non-violent, non-toxic form of masculinity shows that representation matters in education. Men are needed as teachers to curb dangerous male stereotypes.

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Men play a critical part in improving education systems when they become teachers. In a profession where women are the majority, male teachers diversify the education workforce and make a significant impact as role models for children.

The teaching profession is expected to grow 4% or more in the next decade at all teaching levels. As such, there are many opportunities for men in education. However, recent data shows that while there is ample opportunity for male teachers, there's still a shortage in supply.

Gender Diversity in Education

Although the importance of men in education has been recognized, little has changed over the past two decades. Women held about 76% of all teaching positions in public schools in 2017-2018, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). At the elementary school level, male teachers accounted for only 11% of all teachers.

The NCES data also shows the number of male teachers dropped at both the elementary and secondary education levels between the 1999-2000 school year and 2017-2018.

Polly Manske, Assistant Professor in the Marian University Department of Education and Director of Competency Based Education, said that trend is ready to change in the coming years.

"More and more men are finding that a career in teaching is an opportunity to make a difference, not only in the immediate future of their students but also long-term," said Manske. "Serving as a role model, exemplifying active listening and empathy, and supporting the development of both critical thinking and effective communication are all key life-long impacts that a teacher can have on his students."

The Importance of Men in Education

Sometimes, the mere presence of men in the classroom can help students. According to studies cited by the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), having male and female teachers contributes to children's gender knowledge. Having men in the classroom is particularly important as they allow students "to observe men who are non-violent and whose interactions with women are positive."

Other advantages of male teachers in the classroom, according to the AARE, include the following.

Having both male and female teachers gives students the chance to learn from others they perceive as similar. This can foster a sense of belonging and reduce instances of disruptive behavior.

Some students will see teachers as role models to better understand how to interact with adults who are different from themselves positively.

A diverse workforce "can enhance decision-making processes and drive positive outcomes," according to AARE, because people from different backgrounds see challenges in different ways. A diverse workforce also can improve job satisfaction.

AARE also writes that the "presence of male teachers may help promote alternative, non-violent, and gender-equitable versions of masculinity," adding that men who work as teachers "can help to break down the polarized differences that foster gender inequalities."

The research suggests that both male and female teachers contribute to a well-rounded education and a child's social-emotional development. A number of factors contribute to the dearth of male teachers, especially at the grade-school level. "A big one," says Ethan Zagore in a USA Today article, "is that many people just fundamentally - consciously or subconsciously - believe the role of an elementary teacher is better suited for women."

Marian University Degree Programs for Teachers

Marian University offers undergraduate and graduate education degrees suited for both career-switchers and those launching a first career.

These programs include a Bachelor of Science in Elementary-Middle Education and a Bachelor of Science in Middle-Secondary Education. The university also offers an online Master of Arts in Education - Teacher Education and an online Master of Arts in Education - Special Education.

Marian University accepts master's applicants with any bachelor's degree. Men with math and science bachelor degrees are especially in demand to teach and thrive at Marian. Students learn how to become teachers through intensive classroom experiences in their hometown.

While the job is an attractive career choice for men, getting more of them to become teachers may require a change in how society and culture depict educators. Writing in EdSource, California teacher Josh Brown said he uses sports to connect with his male students. But he noted that male teachers need a more positive depiction in society.

"If we want to persuade more men to become educators," he wrote, "our society should celebrate and respect male teachers in the same way we idolize sports figures and celebrities."

Men who want to start changing the teaching profession can earn a bachelor's or master's degree in education. Becoming a male teacher not only provides them with a rewarding career path, but it also contributes to improvements for schools and students.

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Why We Need More Male Teachers in Education - Marian University

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Men play a critical part in improving education systems when they become teachers. In a profession where women are the majority, male teachers diversify the education workforce and make a significant impact as role models for children. The teaching profession is expected to grow 4% or more in the next decade at all teaching levels.

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Javier's Story – A Man Who Loves the Kids

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Javier's Story – A Man Who Loves the Kids

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This article tells the story of a childhood educator who wants to show his kids that men can be nurturing, loving authorities, not just absent, untrustworthy deserters.

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When Javier, a kindergarten teacher, leads morning meeting, he begins with a mindfulness exercise to prepare the 27 energetic and curious children in his classroom to be present with each other. Throughout the day, Javier's gentle demeanor balances and supports the exuberance of the children in his care.

Javier knows he is fortunate-many male early childhood educators are the only ones working at their sites, but Javier is one of several on the staff at his small public elementary school. When asked to reflect on what his role as a male teacher means for his students, Javier offers, "I'm showing them that not every man is scary or somebody that isn't dependable. That a man is someone who can say 'Good job! I notice how you did this.' Men can give you advice or can be encouraging or nurturing and give you, like, a hug. You know, a side hug."

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019), fewer than 3 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers are men-and this figure has not changed substantially in recent decades (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 1995). Male early childhood teachers like Javier find themselves and their work received in a variety of ways. Some colleagues and families offer affirmation and support, while others treat male early childhood educators with curiosity or suspicion. Wanting to understand the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that impact men's decisions to teach in early childhood, we spent two years studying the experiences of male early childhood educators in New York City.

We embarked on this research to learn more about the circumstances that impact recruitment and retention, including how professional development and mentoring experiences can support the growth of these educators' practice. To become excellent early childhood educators, male teachers require the same preparation and ongoing professional development as female teachers. However, because of their current scarcity in the field, male educators may also require intentional supports that address the particular circumstances they face related to bias and isolation. This article documents some of the joys and challenges that male early childhood teachers experience, and offers concrete recommendations for policy and practice that can be implemented to increase gender balance in the field.

As young children grow, they need to know that people of all genders have an important role to play in their care and education. Early childhood education plays a critical part in young children's gender identity development (Solomon 2016). When young children do not have relationships with male teachers and caregivers, traditional gender stereotypes are reinforced, particularly as they relate to children's understanding of who is responsible for their growth and learning (Aina & Petronella 2011; Brownhill & Oates 2016).

Children experience a range of models of femininity and womanhood though their exposure to a variety of female educators and caregivers. When young children do not experience a comparable range of models of masculinity, their view of what it means to be a boy or a man may be monolithic or incomplete (Giese 2018). As they grow, all children need to see and be part of relationships in which male children and adults are allowed to be emotionally expressive and deeply connected; this is especially true for children who identify as male, since our culture often discourages them from such expression (Way 2013). Improving the gender balance of the early childhood workforce would provide all children with a richer variety of role models at this critical time in their gender identity development (Drudy 2008).

A Note on Gender

Throughout this article, we refer to male and female educators and children as well as to notions of masculinity. We recognize that the labels of "male" and "female" suggest that gender is binary and do not encompass the range of gender identities that exist; we also acknowledge the complexities and contradictions such binaries reinforce.

When arguing for the need to increase the numbers of men working in early childhood education, we do not mean to promote an essentialized view of gender, as if only male educators can provide young children with models of masculinity. Our argument for the need for more male educators in the profession is grounded in a desire to offer young children a more multifaceted experience of gender throughout their care and education. The harms caused by a culture of toxic masculinity are increasingly visible (Clemens 2018; Giese 2018), and the effort to create a more gender- balanced workforce seems more important all the time. As we build the profession, we seek to offer all young children a healthy and supported environment in which to grow, learn, and become themselves.

A place-based study of male educators

The goal of our two-year study was to understand the conditions that support or constrain male early childhood educators. To create a detailed picture of their experiences, we collected data in various forms, including from a questionnaire, interviews, and focus groups. (All of the narratives in this article come from these sources.) Although our study was limited to New York City, we sought participants who worked at a variety of site types-NYC Department of Education schools, community-based organizations, and a few tuition-based programs-and who educated children in a range of neighborhoods with low, medium, and high levels of economic supports and resources. Our participants held a variety of positions-assistant teachers, paraprofessionals, coteachers, lead teachers-and they had a range of levels of experience working in the field: 10 percent of our participants were in their first year in the classroom, while 40 percent had worked with young children for more than 10 years.

We began our data collection by distributing a lengthy questionnaire to 81 male early childhood teachers. Although this sample size seems small, we had to reach out to 82 sites just to find this many male early childhood educators. Interestingly, though many of the centers we initially contacted employed no male educators, several of the sites employed a number of men, perhaps reflecting a hiring priority on the part of administrators to develop a more gender-balanced teaching team. The questionnaire was completed by 46 respondents and gathered quantitative and qualitative data about the educators' career trajectories, teacher preparation, compensation, professional development experiences, and mentoring.

After analyzing the questionnaire data, we began a series of interviews. We interviewed early childhood administrators, both male and female, to gain their perspectives on the experiences of their male staff and to gather their recommendations for increasing male participation in the early childhood workforce. Next, we completed interviews with 16 male early childhood educators who represented a cross section of our questionnaire participants. Interviewees provided more in-depth narratives about the topics covered in the questionnaire and their reflections on gender and masculinity in their work as male educators.

During the course of our outreach to identify research participants, we learned that one male administrator (the fourth author) working at a multisite agency had convened semiregular meetings of a cohort of male early childhood educators. In our analysis of the interview data, we learned that many of our participants felt isolated and would benefit from joining with other male educators to discuss the particular circumstances of their work as male educators. To learn more about how this support group functioned for the male educators, we conducted a focus group with the participants. In the final section of this article, we describe our recommendations for replicating this model.

Finally, we developed a draft of the implications for policy and practice that emerged from our study and convened a focus group of early childhood administrators to gather their feedback about our findings and implications. Their insights were invaluable in helping us to refine our recommendations to improve the recruitment and retention of high-quality male early childhood educators.

The pressure and promise of being a "male role model"

The participants in our study reported that they are frequently told their commitment to their work is especially important because they are serving as male role models. Many of the men expressed pride at this mantle-pride that can offset the disappointment of working in a profession that is not respected or compensated as it should be.

Some participants specifically felt positive about providing a male presence in the lives of children who do not live with their fathers. One participant explained that many of the children in his program

come from a socioeconomic background where the father is not present in many homes. . . . So I take on the role of a father. For example, I've had many parents come in and say, "I'm not with their father. The father is not in the picture. So I'm really happy . . . [my child has] a man for a teacher."

In the opening vignette, Javier similarly expressed satisfaction in being able to serve as a consistent and nurturing presence in the lives of young children, especially for young children whose primary early attachments are with women.

Male early childhood educators also often feel valued because of the assumption that their presence is a tool for classroom management. One male special educator recalled that a mother told him, "Use the male figure voice, because his grandpa, my father, does that to him and he listens." Other participants in our study echoed this sentiment, explaining that colleagues, families, and administrators expect that their presence will bring order and discipline to the classroom.

Yet, in the context of an early childhood classroom, many male educators are equally aware that their presence can be experienced as intimidating. One participant explained, "I'm not normally a person who raises their voice a lot. But when I do . . . I feel like I have to be more careful. I don't want to come off as being scary or scaring a kid." Remaining calm and caring when helping children resolve conflicts or responding to challenging behavior is, of course, best practice for all educators-but this male educator shows that even a small slip in his professional demeanor may be perceived as having serious consequences. Thus, male educators feel that they must walk a fine line, expected to deploy their masculinity as a tool of control while also providing a caring model of attachment.

Male educators under suspicion

While many participants find it highly gratifying to serve as a positive example, Javier's story in the opening vignette highlights a tension that many male early childhood educators feel. Javier felt gratified at being able to offer a hug to comfort a child, but he quickly self-corrected to explain that his affection would be expressed as a "side hug." Nearly all of the male educators we interviewed for this study reported that they had faced some amount of suspicion, sometimes leading to serious accusations, as a result of their decision to work with young children. One participant recalled being advised by his first supervisor,

You're amazing. You're good with the kids. But to protect yourself, just make sure if somebody needs to use the bathroom or needs changing to call somebody for help, or make sure that somebody's there with you. Because you're a male and you just want to avoid any issues.

Another participant shared his female colleague's caution that "if a child says I touched the child, the parent's not going to think anything. But if they hear that you did, then that would seem weird." Many of our participants reported facing this double standard. When working with young children, educators express their nurturance through positive, healthy touch. Yet when asked why more men do not enter the field, one participant explained, "A lot of these guys now don't want to teach because of all the bad things that are happening. Especially the little kids! They don't want to teach the little kids." When male educators attempt to express affection for young children, they may face scrutiny and suspicion that puts their livelihoods and reputations at risk.

Another participant hoped that his presence as a male educator could allow him to offer a more complex expression of gender, showing that men can behave in ways that are often thought of as feminine as well as in masculine ways. He explained,

They want to see that I am rough and I'll be tough on them if I need to, but at the same time, present this piece of tenderness. . . . So I'm playing two different roles here. I can be both of those things at the same time. I'll give you a hug to show what it means that I can be both sides, that any male can be both sides.

Ultimately, if we want men to join and remain in the early childhood workforce, we must confront the pressures that inhibit male educators from bringing their full selves to the classroom.

Supporting male early childhood educators

Many participants in our research cited inadequate wages and benefits as an explanation for why there are so few men in the field of early childhood. The low status of the profession and levels of compensation are endemic to the field and a problem for male and female educators alike (Whitebook, McLean, & Austin 2016). Nonetheless, the male educators we interviewed were all deeply committed to working with young children despite these challenges. In addition to addressing issues of compensation, however, several recommendations emerged from our study that would directly address challenges to the recruitment and retention of male early childhood educators.

Targeted recruitment

In New York City, programs like the NYC Teaching Fellows program have addressed high-needs areas in education (e.g., math, special education, bilingual education) by engaging in targeted recruitment and providing tuition remission and other supports for qualified individuals who make a commitment to working in these areas. The field of early childhood would benefit from programs like this to attract male educators.

Additionally, while our sample was small, we found that compared with their White and Asian American peers, far fewer African American and Latino male educators held the positions of lead teacher or coteacher; on average, they also had lower levels of educational attainment. Given recent research demonstrating the great benefits for all children in having a more racially diverse and representative education workforce (Cherng & Halpin 2016), development of the early childhood pipeline should prioritize African American and Latino male educators. New programs like NYC Men Teach seek to bring men of color into K-12 classrooms, but they have not yet focused on recruiting men into early childhood education specifically.

NYC Men Teach

NYC Men Teach was launched by the Office of the Mayor's Young Men's Initiative in 2015, with the goal of adding 1,000 Black, Latino, and Asian American teachers to public school classrooms across the city. In partnership with the NYC Department of Education, the City University of New York, and other local colleges and organizations, NYC Men Teach supports aspiring educators and offers mentorship, pathways to certification and other professional development, networking opportunities, and more. Learn about their programs at https://nycmenteach.org.

Professional development for administrators

The male educators we interviewed were best able to thrive when they worked for administrators who were sensitive to the particular pressures they face. Mentoring by both male and female administrators helped our participants to navigate challenging situations, such as when families expressed discomfort with their presence in the classroom. Many of the administrators we interviewed made a specific effort to hire and mentor male educators because they saw the great value of a gender-balanced workforce at their sites. However, the majority of early childhood sites we initially contacted did not employ any male educators.

While it appears to be true that few men seek to enter the field, administrators' unconscious biases about men who wish to work with young children may also have an impact. Professional development experiences could offer early childhood administrators opportunities to understand the value of a more gender-balanced workforce and to build the skills administrators need to mentor and support men working in the profession.

Support groups for male early childhood educators

To begin to address issues of racial justice, many institutions have developed race-based affinity groups to encourage people to explore issues of privilege and oppression in safe spaces (Parsons & Ridley 2012). As men are a distinct minority in the field of early childhood education, they may benefit from the development of support groups specifically for male educators.

The fourth author worked as an administrator at an agency that operated multiple early childhood sites. Because each site included only one male educator, he saw the need to create a structure that would allow them to collectively process some of the particular issues they faced as male educators.

Initially, the administrator created a cohort specifically for male educators of color, but later the group was expanded to include a White male educator who faced many of the same issues the others were exploring. The cohort began by establishing healthy norms for their discussions (see "Establishing a Support Group" on this page). They developed a sense of solidarity by sharing the narratives of their own educational and career trajectories.

As the meetings continued, the administrator facilitated the sessions to enable the male educators to talk through what he called "dilemmas of practice." Participants shared and generated strategies for dealing with issues such as what to do when children want to sit on the teacher's lap; how to respond to a parent who does not recognize a male educator as the teacher; and how to manage the expectation that male educators will do physical labor (e.g., moving boxes) that takes them out of the classroom.

Establishing a Support Group

Set norms that make group members feel supported and safe

Maintain confidentiality

Engage in accountable talk that is respectful of male educators and colleagues

Have the courage to be vulnerable; by sharing feelings and experiences fully and candidly, all participants have the opportunity to gain insight and support

Be generous and willing to take risks

Focus sessions on specific topics (including others suggested by group members)

Reflecting on personal educational and career trajectories

Sharing dilemmas of practice

Developing strategies for responding to challenges

Networking and career planning

Exploring intersectional identities (e.g., gender, race, sexuality)

After each meeting, the administrator distributed notes from the session, which helped participants to continue to reflect on their work together.

At our focus group with the men's cohort, participants shared that they had gained invaluable support from these sessions. As one participant reflected, "Since this field has mostly been more devoted towards women, they can't really relate to a lot of things that us men go through. So when we want to talk about it, we can't really talk about it to them because they haven't experienced those things." Another participant described the men's cohort as a "safe space" where he had the opportunity to be vulnerable and to learn how other male educators handled the specific challenges that result from being one of a few men working in the field. The primary obstacle the group faced was that their time for professional development was limited, and the men's cohort meetings could be seen as conflicting with their need to attend workshops with their female colleagues. Despite these challenges, the positive potential of this program should be explored further and replicated elsewhere.

Conclusion

Despite the obstacles, many of the men in our study described the great sense of pride and power that comes from contributing to this important field. One participant reflected,

Do I ever ask myself, "Why am I a guy teaching preschool?" Sometimes I do. But the positive feelings I get from this job outweigh any negative feelings. . . . I can't picture myself, like, working as a trader in a stock market. Because I wouldn't be working with people anymore. In the business world, the bottom line is how much money can you make for the company. . . . In education, the bottom line is how many children can you help? . . . In what other profession do you know that the work you do now will forever affect the students you teach into their future?

In order to increase gender balance, we must be intentional and proactive in how we recruit and retain men in the field-especially men of color. In this article, we have suggested some concrete actions that we hope will inform efforts to build the profession in ways that will benefit children, families, and educators.

References

Aina, O.E., & A.C. Petronella. 2011. "Why Does Gender Matter? Counteracting Stereotypes with Young Children." Dimensions of Early Childhood 39 (3): 11-19.

Brownhill, S., & R. Oates. 2016. "Who Do You Want Me to Be? An Exploration of Female and Male Perceptions of 'Imposed' Gender Roles in the Early Years." International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education 45 (5): 658-70.

Cherng, H.S., & P.F. Halpin. 2016. "The Importance of Minority Teachers: Student Perceptions of Minority versus White Teachers." Educational Researcher 45 (7): 407-20.

Clemens, C. 2018. "Toxic Masculinity Is Bad for Everyone: Why Teachers Must Disrupt Gender Norms Every Day." Teaching Tolerance. www.tolerance.org/magazine/toxic-masculinity-is-bad-for-everyone-why-teachers-must-disrupt-gender-norms-every-day.

Drudy, S. 2008. "Gender Balance/Gender Bias: The Teaching Profession and the Impact of Feminisation." Gender and Education 20 (4): 309-23.

Giese, R. 2018. Boys: What It Means to Become a Man. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins.

Parsons, J., & K. Ridley. 2012. "Identity, Affinity & Reality." Independent School 71 (2): 38-47.

Solomon, J. 2016. "Gender Identity and Expression in the Early Childhood Classroom." Young Children 71 (3): 61-72.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor. 1995. "Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey." https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa1995/aat18.txt

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor. 2019. "Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey." https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm.

Way, N. 2013. Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Whitebook, M., C. McLean, & L.J.E. Austin. 2016. Early Childhood Workforce Index 2016. Berkeley, CA: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California at Berkeley.

Note: This study was funded by a grant from the Foundation for Child Development. The authors would also like to acknowledge the invaluable feedback and support of their colleagues in the NYC Early Childhood Research Network-a project of the NY Early Childhood Professional Development Institute.

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Building a Gender-Balanced Workforce: Supporting Male Teachers

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When Javier, a kindergarten teacher, leads morning meeting, he begins with a mindfulness exercise to prepare the 27 energetic and curious children in his classroom to be present with each other. Throughout the day, Javier's gentle demeanor balances and supports the exuberance of the children in his care.

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Better curriculum on feminism and women's topics is a pathway forward to make the narrative more equitable for all genders.

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The Top 8 Reasons Why We Need Feminism in Our Schools - Everyday Feminism

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In 2002, a group of high school girls approached their male teacher and argued that his course needed to include a study of gender. After all, it was titled " Citizenship and Social Justice " and included an intensive study of race and racism. Predictably, this White male teacher responded defensively.

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Unions have been employed to reduce school related gender based violence in the US and across the globe.

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Before the mid 1800s, Men dominated the teaching field, but during the Civil War Era, America saw more women become teachers.  The men were busy in wars and industry so someone had to do it. Besides, women are nurturers, right?  This section looks a little more deeply into what teaching was like for women in early America, as well as some notable women  who had an impact on their communities.

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The life of a teacher was not an easy one but teaching was the only respectable position open to women.  This short video gives an overview of what a teacher's life was like in a one room school house in Iowa.

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Teaching in an Iowa One-room Schoolhouse | Iowa's One-room Schoolhouses

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Behind every great Mann... read this enlightening article about the life of Horace Mann's 2nd wife, Mary, who was an activist and a teacher, and founded the first kindergarten in America.

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Activist, Educator, and Wife of Horace Mann

Mary Peabody Mann was a teacher, author, and wife of education reformer Horace Mann. Mary carried a passion for education, especially of young children, in her breast from her youngest days. She was well educated by her mother and role model Eliza Palmer Peabody, who ran a school from their home and was an early advocate of women's rights.

Early Years
Mary Tyler Peabody was born November 16, 1806 in Cambridge and grew up in Salem, both in Massachusetts. Her parents, Nathaniel and Elizabeth Peabody were schoolteachers when they married; after the wedding, they reserved one room in their home as a classroom.

Mary's sisters were Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, reformer and pioneer in establishing kindergartens in the United States; and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, artist and wife of author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her three brothers, Wellington Peabody, George Francis Peabody, and Nathaniel Cranch Peabody did not achieve greatness like their sisters.

Mrs. Peabody had urged her husband to become a doctor, but he studied dentistry instead. Unfortunately, rather than tending to patients, he wrote pamphlets about how to care for teeth and experimented with herbal remedies. Therefore, Mrs. Peabody's teaching salary supported the family, and Mary and her siblings grew up in genteel poverty, as defined in The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography:

More than once I saw my mother without any money or any definite prospect of any. The lack of money never impressed me at all. Not only were we used to it but in the literature we fed on - Louisa Alcott, Mrs. A.D.T. Whitney [Adeline Dutton Train Whitney], the Youth's Companion, etc. - the heroes and heroines were almost always poor and good, while the rich people were generally bad. It was many years before I was wholly assured that rich people could be just as good as poor ones.

Horace Mann
Mary later moved to Boston to help her sister Elizabeth Peabody run a school for young children. The sisters moved into a Boston boarding house in their mid-twenties. Education reformer, Horace Mann, moved into the same establishment in 1833. Mann promoted free public education for everyone and establishing schools to train teachers.

The Peabody sisters became supporters of his philosophy of free education and traveled throughout Massachusetts promoting his ideas. Mary Peabody took a liking to Horace Mann almost immediately, but Mann was still grieving over the death of his wife Charlotte Messer in August of the previous year. Mann did not return Mary's affections, certainly not romantically, for almost a decade.

Horace Mann's early life had not been easy. His preliminary education was lacking, but he managed to enter Brown University and graduated with honors in 1819. He studied law and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823. Mann was elected to the state legislature in 1827 and Speaker of the Senate in 1835.

In spring 1835, Mary Peabody moved in with her brother George and worked for a while tutoring students in Italian, and then returned to Salem. In 1836, Mary and her sister, Elizabeth Peabody, founded and operated one of the first private schools in Boston to admit girls as well as boys.

Horace Mann was appointed secretary to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837; Mary served as his assistant and contributed lessons to his paper, Common School Journal. During his twelve years on the Board, Mann raised public awareness and gained support for increasing teachers' pay and establishing normal schools to train young people to be teachers.

During this time, Mary also wrote a children's book, The Flower People: Being an Account of the Flowers by Themselves; Illustrated with Plates (1838). This was a collection of tales about a young girl who was introduced to plants in her garden and had imaginary conversations with crocuses, violets, and geraniums. It became very popular with children and their parents.

According to this excerpt from American National Biography Online, Mary was an innovative teacher:

By the time of her marriage to Horace Mann in 1843, Mary was an experienced teacher with a repertoire of original methods, many of which featured the outdoors: She took her pupils to the Boston Common to narrate the history of the city's founding and to observe the growth of trees and flowers through the seasons. She believed in individualized reading instruction for beginners, and her Primer, which employs a whole-word rather than phonetic method, reveals a philosophy of education as guided nurture.

A series of letters written to a novice teacher at about this time ... exhibits a confident, even radical frame of mind. She writes of her schoolroom as "my own little free republic" and asks, "What do men know about the needs of little children just out of nurseries?" Her answer: School committees should be "formed of women."

Marriage and Family
On May 1, 1843, Mary Peabody (age 36) married Horace Mann (almost 46); within an hour the newlyweds had set sail for Europe on the Hibernia. They spent their honeymoon traveling throughout England, Scotland, Germany and Holland visiting schools and studying teaching methods, bringing the newest and most innovative ideas home to America.

Image: Peabody House
53 Charter Street
Salem, Massachusetts

Antioch College
Founded in 1852, Antioch College was committed to coeducation and equal opportunities for African Americans. In 1853, the new institution appointed Horace Mann as its first president and professor of philosophy and theology, and the family moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Mary filled the role of president's wife and campaigned to change the American habit of overeating. In her book Christianity in the Kitchen: A Physiological Cookbook (1858), she warned her readers against consuming rich and fatty foods and spices and to abstain from alcohol.

Horace Mann died of typhoid fever in 1859 while still at Antioch College. He would forever be known as the Father of Public Education.

Widowhood
Heart-broken, Mary Peabody Mann returned to Massachusetts and rented the home known as The Wayside in the village of Concord. The home was owned by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, and the following year they returned from Britain, where Nathaniel had been serving as United States consul.

Mary then purchased a house for her family and her sister Elizabeth. The sisters opened another school together, and Mary began writing a biography of her late husband, Life and Works of Horace Mann.

Horace Mann Jr.
The oldest of Mary Peabody Mann's three sons, Horace Mann Jr. had completed his first year of college at Antioch. Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau mentored him in botany; in May 1861, Jr. went with Thoreau on an expedition to Minnesota, where they hoped the climate would benefit Thoreau's tuberculosis. However, his disease continued to plague him, and the pair returned to Concord two months later.

The following fall, Mann Jr. took classes in zoology from Louis Agassiz at Harvard and studied botany under Asa Gray. In 1867, Mann Jr. wrote his thesis on the topic of Hawaiian flora and graduated from Harvard. Mann Jr. wrote his thesis on the topic of Hawaiian flora and graduated from Harvard in 1867.

Asa Gray hoped Mann would take his place at the Botanical Garden and in the botany department at Harvard University in 1868, but Horace Mann Jr. died of tuberculosis November 11, 1868 - the same day he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is credited with discovering more than 100 species.

First American Kindergarten
Elizabeth Peabody's new passion was for German educator Friedrich Froebel and the new concept he called kindergarten, or children's garden. Before Froebel's creation, children under the age of 7 did not attend school. It was believed that young children did not have the ability to focus or to develop cognitive and emotional skills before this age.

In 1863 Mary and Elizabeth Peabody published Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide, explaining Froebel's ideas. Further influenced by Horace Mann's belief that public education would create good citizens, Elizabeth became particularly interested in the idea of establishing free public kindergartens in poor neighborhoods.

Image: Horace Mann
Politician and Education Reformer

Elizabeth raised funds to establish the first school, and then traveled and lectured throughout the Northeast advocating kindergartens and recruiting and training teachers. Mary saw to the business details behind the scenes, also editing and writing for the Kindergarten Messenger.

In 1871, their sister Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, whose health was never robust, died in London at age 61.

Sarah Winnemucca
In their late years, the remaining Peabody sisters were active in various reform movements including women's suffrage, world peace, and Native American rights. Mary worked with Elizabeth on several projects, including raising money to help Princess Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute woman, build schools for her people and promoted Winnemucca's speaking career.

Mary Peabody Mann also helped by editing Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) by Sarah Winnemucca [Hopkins], the first Native American woman known to publish in the English language. This is the Editor's Preface written by Mann:

My editing has consisted in copying the original manuscript in correct orthography and punctuation, with occasional emendations by the author, of a book which is an heroic act on the part of the writer. Mrs. Hopkins came to the East from the Pacific coast with the courageous purpose of telling in detail to the mass of our people, "extenuating nothing and setting down naught in malice," the story of her people's trials. Finding that in extemporaneous speech she could only speak at one time of a few points, she determined to write out the most important part of what she wished to say.

In fighting with her literary deficiencies she loses some of the fervid eloquence which her extraordinary colloquial command of the English language enables her to utter, but I am confident that no one would desire that her own original words should be altered. It is the first outbreak of the American Indian in human literature, and has a single aim - to tell the truth as it lies in the heart and mind of a true patriot and one whose knowledge of the two races gives her an opportunity of comparing them justly.

At this moment, when the United States seem waking up to their duty to the original possessors of our immense territory, it is of the first importance to hear what only ... an Indian woman can tell. To tell it was her own deep impulse, and the dying charge given her by her father, the truly parental chief of his beloved tribe.

Mary Peabody Mann died February 11, 1887 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody lived on until January 3, 1894.

SOURCES
The Peabody Sisters
Wikipedia: Horace Mann Jr.
Wikipedia: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann
SimanaitisSays.com: The Peabody Sisters
Salem Women's History: Mary Peabody Mann
American National Biography Online: Mary Peabody Mann

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Mary Peabody Mann | History of American Women

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Activist, Educator, and Wife of Horace Mann Mary Peabody Mann was a teacher, author, and wife of education reformer Horace Mann. Mary carried a passion for education, especially of young children, in her breast from her youngest days.

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Catharine Beecher may not have been as well known as her sister Harriet, but she made some profound contributions to women's education, and not far from Xavier.  She had clear ideas on the role of women as nurturers but those did not apply to herself.  This short video introduction gives a look into the life of an exceptional woman.

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Society had very high expectations of a teacher's moral conduct. This article links to teacher contracts and certificates from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

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Early Teaching Contracts and Certificates

Teaching was one of the acceptable things for a girl to do in the nineteenth century. Teachers were not just teachers, but had to be community role models as well. Perhaps today's educators would be amazed at the stipulations and rules from early teaching contracts

1905 teaching contract for Story County, Iowa

1894 Teachers Certificate

These early Story County, Iowa teachers certificates included grades in each tested subject; Orthography, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, Grammar, Didactics, Physiology and Hygiene, U.S. History, Music, Elementary Economics, Elementary Civics, Elementary Algebra, Elementary Physics, and the Theory and Practice of Teaching.

( image courtesy Cambridge Historical Society)

from a rural Iowa Story County country school in 1874

- Rules governing Teachers -

1. Each Teacher Teaching in Independent District No. one is Required to be in the School Room fifteen minutes before the time fixed Nine O'clock AM and one O'clock PM for the Session to begin.

2. the morning Exercises Shall Commence with Reading a Short Portion of the Scriptures without Comment which may be optionally followed by Prayer and Singing.

3. Teachers are Required to be diligent and faithful in Teaching and governing all Pupils under their Care and in case of Repeated absence or Tardiness Report the Same to their Parents or Guardians and no teacher is allowed in any way to appropriate to him or her Self any Portion of time which belongs to School hours.

4. Teachers are to exercise a Kind and Parental discipline and Show no Partiality whatever in School to any Pupil or Pupils nor Change their Seats without their consent after they have occupied the Same for one Week, avoiding Corporal Punishment when good order Can be Preserved by using milder means but they Shall endeavor to correct all misconduct and for Persistent insubordination or flagrant offenses they may be temporarily Suspended or expel Pupils and Report the same to the board of Directors who shall Confirm or Reverse it, but it Shall Stand good until Such action. Teachers Shall also Conform to all other Rules Required by Law.

See next Page

( image courtesy Cambridge Historical Society)

- Rules governing Pupils -

1. All Pupils Shall be Prompt and Punctual in their attendance at the opening of Each Session and Remain Till its Close except by Permission of the Teacher and in Case of absence or tardiness Shall be required to give a Satisfactory excuse to the Teacher or Remain un excused.

2. Pupils are Required to be attentive and diligent in their Studies obedient and Courteous to their Teacher and directors, and in all their intercourse and deportment with one another Conduct them Selves in an orderly and decent manner. They are Strictly to abstain from Profane Language, offensive epithets, falsehoods and from all obscene conduct, quarling, fighting, Calling each other Nick Names or abusing each other in any manner.

3. And no Pupil or Teacher is Permitted for Perusal to bring any Papers or Periodicals, Books or Novels having no connection with the Branches Taught in School.

4. All Pupils are Strictly forbidden to injure the School house or any of its furniture or any of its out buildings fences or trees or affects of any Pupil belonging to the School, any Pupil found guilty of wantonly or carelessly doing injury to any of the above Named Property Shall under Penalty of Suspension have the Same Satisfactory Restored by his Parents or guardians which must be done immediately without unnecessarily discommaeling School.

5. All Playful exercises are to be without the School house and no games of Chance or dancing are allowed in the School House.

6. The Teacher is Required to Read these Rules in School every Monday morning.

1899 Teacher's Certificate

This Certificate is good for the time named subject to the following conditions: That the holder of this certificate will make such reports as the County Superintendent may require, attend teachers' meetings held within reasonable distance, and conform to all legal requirements in the discharge of duty. Notes of Explanation 1. The standing in "Professional Interest" is based on the interest taken in Teachers' Meetings, Professional Reading, and Success in Teaching. 2. The requirement in scholarship for Two Years' First Class Certificates is a standing of at least 92 per cent. in all branches of study; Second Class an average of 82 per cent. with no branch below 75 per cent. 3. Certificates will not be granted to males under 19 and females under 18 years of age.

1905 Teacher's Certificate

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Early Teaching Contracts and Certificates Teaching was one of the acceptable things for a girl to do in the nineteenth century. Teachers were not just teachers, but had to be community role models as well.

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Women were generally paid only 1/2 of a mans salary as teachers.  Here is an exceptional story that is the exception to that rule.  Click to read about  another not as famous sister that deserves some recognition, Mary Stafford Anthony, and her impact on education.

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Educator and Suffragist

Mary Stafford Anthony was the youngest sister of the famous social reformer and feminist Susan B. Anthony. Often overshadowed by her older sibling, Mary was a suffragist and educator who served as the first female school principal in western New York. She played an active role in several social reform organizations, including the New York Women's Suffrage Association.

Image: Mary Stafford Anthony
At about 25 years of age

Early Years
Mary Stafford Anthony was born April 2, 1827 to Daniel and Lucy Read Anthony in Battenville, New York. Her parents had different religious beliefs; he was a liberal Quaker abolitionist. Although Lucy was a Baptist in her younger years, the Anthony children were raised as Quakers. Anthony had three sisters and two brothers. One of her older sisters was suffragist Susan B. Anthony.

Mary's father was at various times a successful businessman. While the family lived in Battenville, he owned a mill, and established a school in his house for his children and some fron the neighborhood. Mary received much of her early education there. The Anthony family followed the Quaker traditions:

... men and women were partners in church and at home, hard physical work was respected, help for the needy and unfortunate was spontaneous, and education was important for both boys and girls.

During the Panic of 1837, Daniel Anthony lost everything, and he and his family gave up all they owned to be sold at auction. Their most personal belongings were saved, however, by Daniel's uncle, Joshua Read, who bid for them and returned them to the family.

Career in Education
When Mary was seventeen, she followed in her sister Susan's footsteps, and became a teacher at a district school in Fort Edward and received $1.50 per week. She taught for one year there, and then the family moved to a small farm in Gates, New York, west of Rochester in 1844.

In 1845 they moved again, this time to Rochester, New York. Mary remained at home for the next eight years, helping with the farm and the household duties; in her spare time, she studied. The farm became a meeting-place for anti-slavery activists, including Frederick Douglass.

In 1854, at the age of twenty-seven, Mary Anthony returned to teaching and taught in the Rochester public schools for 27 years. In 1868, she was offered a position as a school principal in Rochester, and she was one of the first women to serve in that role. She accepted the job provided her salary would equal that of her male predecessor, quite a demand in those days when women were often expected to take as little as half of a male teacher's salary.

Mary Anthony House
This is now known as the Susan B. Anthony House, but Mary Anthony owned it. During her career as a feminist and suffragist, Susan lived with her sister. While the Civil War was waging, this two-story, twelve-room red brick house in the Italianate style was constructed at 17 Madison Street between 1859 and 1864. In 1864, Mary's older sister Guelma and her husband Aaron McLean moved into the structure as tenants.

Image: Mary Anthony House
Although this structure is now known as the Susan B. Anthony House, Mary Anthony owned the home from 1873 until her death in 1907.

Mary Anthony, her sister Susan, and their mother Lucy Read Anthony moved into the home in 1865. In 1866, Lucy purchased the house for $3,500. Mary purchased the house from her mother in December 1873 for $4,500; Mary owned it from that time until her death in 1907. Rochester city water mains were connected to Madison Street in 1876; water was piped into the kitchen, and a bathroom was added. The Anthonys had previously relied on a rainwater cistern.

Career in Activism
Mary Stafford Anthony shared her sister's devotion to social reform; she was the first to enlist in the crusade for equal rights for women. Mary, plus her mother and father, attended the first Women's Rights Convention in Rochester on August 2, 1848, two weeks after the historic first women's rights meeting in Seneca Falls. At that time, Rochester was a thriving community of 30,000 citizens.

On August 2, 1848, Mary attended the Women's Rights Convention at the Unitarian Church in Rochester. The function had been planned by Amy Kirby Post, Sarah Hallowell, Sarah Fish, and Sarah Owen. They chose Abigail Bush to chair the convention, marking the first time a woman led such an event. Major women's rights activists and abolitionists were present: Elizabeth McClintock, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass.

In 1878, Mary represented Monroe County at the Rochester convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1885, she organized and hosted the first meeting of the local Women's Political Club (later the Political Equality Club); she served as its president from 1892 to 1903. She became corresponding secretary for the New York State Woman Suffrage Association in 1893 and helped run a suffrage campaign headquarters out of her home at 17 Madison Street.

Mary Anthony served as the family breadwinner, caregiver, and household manager, enabling Susan to devote her time and energy to the cause of women's rights and suffrage. Mary contributed financially to Susan's journal, The Revolution (1868-1872), and supported the campaign to convince the University of Rochester to accept women students.

After her retirement from a career in education in 1883, Mary had more time to support her causes and to travel. She and Susan toured Europe in 1899 and again in 1904 to attend meetings of the International Council of Women. Both sisters were present in Berlin when the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was established; Mary and Susan were its first members.

Mary Anthony became an ardent suffragist and a respected leader in Rochester and the national movement. She often supported her sister Susan financially. In 1892 Susan was elected president of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and 17 Madison Street became the headquarters for that organization. In 1893, Mary Anthony became corresponding secretary of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association.

Renovations performed in 1894 repurposed several areas of the house at 17 Madison. First floor parlors became public offices where Susan met with famous reformers like Lucretia Mott and Ida B. Wells Barnett. Guest rooms were used for handling mail during the New York State Constitutional Campaign. A telephone was installed in the house.

A third story was added to the house in 1895, where Anthony helped research and write the multi-volume opus entitled History of Woman Suffrage with Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper. It was published in six volumes (1881-1922); its 5700 pages offer primary documentation about the women's suffrage movement.

From home, Mary and other suffragists challenged New York voting policies; a law passed in 1918 allowed women to vote in some New York elections.

University of Rochester
The University of Rochester was founded in 1850 as an all male institution. In the 1880s, women began to petition the University to open its doors to women. The Board of Trustees voted to allow women to enter the University in 1898 - if they raised $100,000 (about $2,000,000 today) to help defray expenses. Over the next two years, a committee of women raised $40,000.

In June 1900, the Board agreed to admit women students, if they could contribute $10,000 more; but the deadline came and they had only raised $2,000 more. Mary Anthony donated $2,000, received that same amount from Sarah Willis, and a third from the Reverend William Channing Gannett. Still short $2,000, at the last moment Susan B. Anthony pledged her life insurance policy, and the University of Rochester admitted the first class of women in the fall of 1900.

Image: Mary Stafford Anthony (left)
With Susan B. Anthony in their later years
Rochester Public Library Local History Division

In 1901, Mary became a Life Member of National American Woman Suffrage Association, which had the sole objective of securing the right to vote for women citizens.

Property Taxes
As a homeowner Mary Anthony paid property taxes - but not without protest. She believed that women should not have to support a government that did not allow them the right to vote. She sometimes enclosed a letter to the county treasurer:

Enclosed find County tax for 1904. A minor may live to become of age, the illiterate to be educated, the lunatic to regain his reason, the idiot to become intelligent - when each and all can decide what shall be the laws, and who shall enforce them; but the woman, never. I protest against paying taxes to a Government which allows its women to be thus treated. Please so record it.

The Anthony sisters took their last trip together to attend the National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in Baltimore in 1906.

Susan B. Anthony died March 13, 1906 at home at the age of 86.

Mary Stafford Anthony died from leukemia February 5, 1907 at age 79.

The Anthony sisters are buried beside each other at the historic Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

While Susan's contribution to this effort has been appropriately noted, Mary's significant contributions remain undeservedly overlooked. Mary Stafford Anthony wrote:

... taxation without representation is just as great tyranny today ... as it was in 1776 ... until we can establish equality between men and women we shall never realize the full development of which manhood and womanhood are capable.

SOURCES
Wikipedia: Mary Stafford Anthony
Susan B. Anthony Museum and House
Rochester Voices: The Other Anthony Girl

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Mary Stafford Anthony | History of American Women

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Educator and Suffragist Mary Stafford Anthony was the youngest sister of the famous social reformer and feminist Susan B. Anthony. Often overshadowed by her older sibling, Mary was a suffragist and educator who served as the first female school principal in western New York.

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From 1999 - 2018, female teachers have steadily outnumbered male teachers significantly as illustrated in the chart provided. While there are more male teachers at the secondary level, there are overall 76% female teachers vs. 24% male teachers in the profession today.

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Characteristics of Public School Teachers

The percentage of public school teachers who held a postbaccalaureate degree (i.e., a master's, education specialist, or doctor's degree) was higher in 2017-18 (58 percent) than in 1999-2000 (47 percent). In both school years, a lower percentage of elementary school teachers than secondary school teachers held a postbaccalaureate degree.

In the 2017-18 school year, there were 3.5 million full- and part-time public school teachers, including 1.8 million elementary school teachers and 1.8 million secondary school teachers. Overall, the number of public school teachers in 2017-18 was 18 percent higher than in 1999-2000 (3.0 million). These changes were accompanied by an 8 percent increase in public school enrollment in kindergarten through 12th grade, from 45.5 million students in fall 1999 to 49.1 million students in fall 2017. At the elementary school level, the number of teachers was 11 percent higher in 2017-18 than in 1999-2000 (1.6 million), while at the secondary school level the number of teachers was 26 percent higher in 2017-18 than in 1999-2000 (1.4 million).

Show all available findings

Select a subgroup characteristic from drop-down menu below to view relevant text and figures.

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COE - Characteristics of Public School Teachers

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The percentage of public school teachers who held a postbaccalaureate degree (i.e., a master's, education specialist, or doctor's degree) was higher in 2017-18 (58 percent) than in 1999-2000 (47 percent). In both school years, a lower percentage of elementary school teachers than secondary school teachers held a postbaccalaureate degree.

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Teachers still face bias and unrest in their profession

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Teachers still face bias and unrest in their profession

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Female teachers continue to battle the same bias and gender norms and expectations in their current roles in education. Females are met with male administrators who continue to expect subordination outside of the classroom while maintaining dominance in their classroom management procedures. Several teachers remark on the obstacles as female educators.

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This week's question is:
What are the challenges facing women in the teaching profession and how best to respond to them?
Women make up the vast majority of K-12 teachers - 76 percent. Yet, only 52% of public school principals are female. What does that discrepancy say about women in education today? And what other challenges might women teachers face?

Today's column features a discussion on this topic joined by educators Megan M. Allen, Rusul Alrubail, Pernille Ripp, Amy Williams and Patricia (Tish) Jennings. You can also listen to a ten-minute conversation I had with Megan, Rusul and National Teacher Of The Year Shanna Peeples on my BAM! Radio Show. You can find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

You might also be interested in a previous series in this column on the challenges facing men in the teaching profession:
Male Teachers 'Walking A Tight Rope' Wondering 'How Gender Influences a Teacher's Struggles & Successes' Response From Megan M. Allen
Megan M. Allen is a National Board Certified Teacher and the 2010 Florida Teacher of the Year. She currently is serving as the director at Mount Holyoke Programs in Teacher Leadership, which has just launched an online Master of Arts in Teacher Leadership. She has taught for ten years, most as an elementary and special education teacher, serving in Title One schools in Hillsborough County, FL. Megan enjoys blogging for the Center for Teaching Quality at Musings of a Red Headed Teacher and co-hosting #Edugeekchat the 2 ndand 4 th Thursday of every month (visit the archives here). She is also proud to serve on the Board of Directors for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the Alliance for Public Schools, but most excited about her new learning experience of being a new mom to four wild and wonderful children:
I think about gender dynamics a lot in education, especially in education leadership. I didn't want to even consider being a teacher, mainly because of the gender of the profession. When I began teaching in 2003, the percentage of the teaching population that was female was about 75%, which is similar to how it shakes out now at about 76%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. I know that this sounds horrible, but I had worked my whole life to be the only girl on my tennis team, the only girl playing football with the boys at p.e., one of the few girls in my science and math classes. I liked the struggle and the uphill fight of showing the boys what a girl could do. My parents had raised miniature Rosie the Riveter, right down to the pint-sized muscles and bandana. So how would working in an almost all female profession continue that battle that I loved? Turns out, though I have worked in an almost all female schools, the education leadership playgrounds that I run in are just the opposite. As a woman, I'm still fighting for equal footing for my gender. I have had my head patted--literally--by a white-haired good-ole-boy Florida politician when I was advocating in Tallahassee for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, saying that it was "so sweet to see an elementary teacher like me interested in politics" (would he have done that to a MAN!?!). I have sat in rooms discussing teacher leadership, listening to all male panels laid out in front of me. More recently, I saw a photograph of the advisory panel of a struggling district--almost all (white) men. And last month, I sat at a leadership dinner with 12 people, of which the two lone men at the table seemed to dominate the conversation. Gender dynamics fascinate me, but they make my blood boil as well. This was a topic written my teacher extraordinaire and Ed Week blogger Nancy Flanagan, which then inspired an #edugeekchat that I cohosted titled "Do we have a gender issue in education leadership?" The more I get into the thick of leadership, the more I see this as one of many glaring equity issues. So what's a girl to do? Jump in. We must continue to speak for our profession, speak for our students, and fight for spots at the leadership table. And when we get to that literal or metaphorical table, we must not be afraid to speak out. And more importantly, we need to encourage our colleagues to do the same. We need education leaders that look like the population of students that we serve, that represent the beautiful array of colors, backgrounds, and diversity that sits in our classrooms. And we need women. We are each others best allies. By the way, that Florida politician's jaw dropped once I started talking and he realized that I was much more than a cute little elementary school teacher, but an advocate, a researcher, and someone who knows her stuff. That I can hang with the Florida good ole' boys club. So let's show 'em, ladies.

Response From Rusul Alrubail Being a woman teacher has had its many challenges for me, but the great thing about these challenges is that I always had a strategy to deal with them. That is not to say that women should learn to deal with these challenges as a normal part of teaching. In fact, I hope by discussing this issue and writing about it, there is more awareness to the general treatment and perception of female teachers. Women make up the majority of the teaching force, yet there are still challenges that we face in the classroom. Much of these challenges have to do with power, communication, and unresolved biases. Classroom management is probably the most challenging aspect of teaching for a woman teacher. I found it to be challenging at times if a group of boys, or rarely, a group of girls refuses to stay on task and focus. I also notice it is often not their lack of engagement with the task itself, but that they're looking to get my attention and also test my limits when it comes to patience and classroom management in front of the other students. When I felt that my limits of patience were being tested, I go directly to the group and ask them questions about the task and their progress. This often gets them to slightly focus on their work. If the students choose to remain off task, I will address the behaviour right away in a calm manner but firm manner. For example, if the students were required to answer questions, I would say "Please focus on answering question x, we will be sharing our answers soon". Or allow students to see that you care about their work: "Have you answered question 2? I am really looking forward to hearing your answer!" In situations that become a bit more difficult to manage in the classroom, I would discuss the issue privately with each student who is involved. As a new teacher, another challenge was feeling like I needed to project my voice more than its capacity to get my students' attention after an activity. This was difficult, I am usually told I am a soft-spoken person, so it felt like it was out of my comfort zone to project my voice to the room. Instead, the pause and wait strategy works most of them time. I stand in the middle of the classroom, where everyone can see me and say "may I have your attention please?". This might take a few minutes of you awkwardly standing there, and waiting. If a minute passes by raise your hand and repeat your statement, that should work. For younger students, especially when working on projects, it often can get very noisy, so I try "If you can hear me clap once, if you can hear me clap twice". The clapping strategy works all the time because it's fun and gets students interested in its rhythmic power to pay attention. As a female teacher, I know that I am faced with certain obstacles and challenges due to my gender and race, but often times communication with students and understanding on both ends helps to solve this problem. Ultimately, student relationships are important to maintain in the classroom, and if a teacher is faced with a situation that challenges a healthy relationship with the student, she needs to communicate this to the student and share her feelings. In this way, the student sees the teacher as a human being, with feelings, thoughts and emotions. With redirection, open-communication, and respect female teachers can overcome a few of the challenges they face in the classroom. Please remember that if a teacher is feeling harassed, threatened, or bullied, such acts should not be taken lightly and need to be reported immediately. Response From Pernille Ripp
Mass consumer of incredible books, Pernille Ripp, helps students discover their superpower as a former 5th grade teacher, but now 7th grade teacher, in Oregon, Wisconsin. She opens up her educational practices and beliefs to the world on her blog www.pernillesripp.com and is also the creator of the Global Read Aloud Project, a global literacy initiative that since 2010 has connected more than 600,000 students. Her book "Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students" has been published by Routledge. Her second book "Empowered Schools, Empowered Students" was published by Corwin:
The first time I realized being a female educator could work against me happened during my first job rejection phone call. I thought I had had a pretty good chance at the job, I was known at the school and thought I had interviewed well. And yet, when the principal started his sentence with the dreaded "I am sorry, but..." my heart dropped. When I later realized that not only had I lost the job, but I had lost it to a male teacher who had quit teaching but the principal had recruited him to come back, I was confused. Didn't I have the same qualifications as the other teacher? Would I not have been just as good of a fit? Yet, after I was hired, I realized that a male educator at the elementary level will almost always trump a female teacher, that since male educators are needed to fill the void of all those boys that do not need more females in their lives they are always given a bigger chance at an interview. Because males are needed to balance out "all those women." Because males are needed to do those things that female educators will never do, whatever those may be. So for the past 7 years I have tried to be just as good as all of the male educators I work with, if not better. The second time I realized that being a female educator could work against me happened when l went to my first education conference. As I searched through the program looking for sessions to attend, I couldn't help but notice that most of the featured speakers were male; male superintendents, male consultants, male principals, and even male teachers all seemed to be the ones in the spotlight. Where were all the females? Why, in a female dominated profession, were we not highlighting all of the female educators out there doing amazing things? And yet, that conference was not an exception. Almost every conference I have been to since has a larger male speaker population than female. So I started submitting my own proposals and slowly began speaking at more conferences, and yet, I am almost always one of the few females featured. The third time I realized that being a female educator could work against me happened when a previous school searched for a new principal. We had 3 final candidates; two females and one male. And so in the lounge that day, I asked; what are we looking for? What are we hoping for? I was shocked when several female educators stated that they hoped the principal would be male because we did not need any more female drama in our school. I left the lounge swearing to do something about the negativity even us female educators carry about ourselves and each other and yet to this day, I still see it in many places. Why is it at times a bad thing to be a female educator? Part of the blame lies within the society we work in. For years I have noticed that we females are "supposed" to be educators. That when we tell others that we are teachers, they are not surprised. After all, we women, are nurturing, caring, and meant for the rigors of the job. Yet, when a male declares himself to be a teacher there is a newfound respect as if being a teacher is a noble deed, one that means he is sacrificing himself in some way, much like we do with male nurses. Why is that? Why is that even within our own schools we tend to value male teachers more than females? And how can we stop being a part of it? How can we look past what sex someone is and just appreciate the fact that they are an educator and not dole out different values and assumptions based on their gender? Part of the blame lies within ourselves as well, myself included. So I think it is time we have a courageous conversation with ourselves. Are we placing more weight on the opinions of male educators? Are we bringing a submissive female mindset into what we think an administrator should look like? Are we inherently devaluing other females because we assume they are all of those stereotypes that are applied to women? What are we doing to lift others up rather than tear down? Are we pushing our voices out there via social media, conferences, and leadership positions so that being a female educational leader becomes the norm and not the exception? What can we do to change the unequal balance that lies within the education community when it comes to leadership positions and spotlighted educators? Since there is nothing I can do about the fact that I am a female educator, and not anything I would want to do about it anyway, I can change the conversations I am having. I can point out the inequities I see, I can ask for more female leadership, I can build up other women rather than tear down. So many of the barriers we face as female teachers are ones stemming from within our own community of women, and that we can change. But the change starts with us, not by waiting for others to tell us to change. Response From Amy Williams
Amy Williams holds Masters degrees in English and teaching. She was a New York Educator Voice Resident Fellow in the 2014-15 school year, and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Grant recipient in 2014. Amy teaches high school and college English courses in Upstate New York:
I recently wrote an article for Education Week Teacher in which I argue for productive inquiry into problems associated with gender and teaching at the K-12 level. The goal of talking about gender is to improve teaching and to improve educational experiences for students. We know now that we can't discuss "students" as though they all share the same ethnicity, socioeconomic class, or gender. Educational tools and practices designed to meet the needs of educationally-privileged children living in Manhattan shouldn't be expected to work the same with English Language Learners living in Arizona. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to imagine that educators are all the same, or that various aspects of a teacher's identity don't influence their experience in the classroom. Several university professors have documented their experiences with misogyny in the classroom. In a Ms. magazine blog article, for example, Ebony Utley writes: "Many male and female students' impertinent gendered expectations lead them to approach me as a peer, a potential girlfriend and an imposter--anyone other than an academic authority figure." White, straight, male professors tend to benefit from student prejudices. They're more likely to be seen as "brilliant," less likely to be critiqued for the way that they dress, and less likely to face resistance from students. At the college level, these student biases can affect decisions about teacher tenure and promotions. They also place women educators and faculty of color in unique ethical dilemmas. As Ming-yeh Lee and Juanita Johnson-Baiely write in their 2004 New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education article: "[C]lassroom power structures often mirror those of society in that women of color faculty have limited power in affecting the teaching setting. So when students perceive us as having less authority and power, to what extent should we share power with them?" (62). If these kinds of interactions and power struggles happen at the K-12 level, then how are teachers affected, and how are they responding? More precisely, are teachers punishing students, letting inappropriate comments slide, or respectfully confronting students with the end goal of changing their attitudes? How are these teachers handling their own frustrations when confronted with demeaning behaviors or comments? And are straight, white male teachers disrupting student biases, or remaining oblivious to the ways in which they benefit from these prejudices? Once we get over our gender blindness, we can begin addressing questions like these that may help us to flesh out, and elaborate on problems in our education system like teacher retention. If we think about "gender" more broadly to refer to behaviors gendered as "masculine" and "feminine" like dominance/aggression versus caring, then critical discussions about gender could also work to promote more ethical discussions surrounding the use of punishment in classrooms. After all, something is not currently working with classroom management and discipline in the United States if millions of students still receive out-of-school suspensions that set them up for failure in the long-run. It makes sense for us to question why teachers and administrators exert authority in this way. I don't have a solution to problems associated with gender and power in the classroom, but I do believe in the power of collaboration. I'd like to see more evidence-based discussions with educators working to share ideas, and seek out productive and ethical solutions. Unfortunately, a lack of research on this subject makes it more risky to discuss concerns related to gender, because teachers must frame these discussions around their own personal experiences, and thus open themselves up to critique. Because teachers already face so much scrutiny from the public, there may be a fear that open discussions about gender will be read as merely complaints about students, or as evidence of some kind of personal or professional shortcoming. Response From Patricia Jennings
Patricia (Tish) Jennings, MEd, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Education at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. She is an internationally recognized leader in the field of social and emotional learning with a specific emphasis on teacher stress and how it impacts the context of the classroom and student learning. As Senior Director of the Initiative on Contemplative Teaching and Learning at the Garrison Institute, Dr. Jennings lead the faculty team that developed the Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education ( CARE for Teachers), a mindfulness-based program for teachers designed to reduce stress and promote improvements in classroom climate and student academic and behavioral outcomes. She is the author of Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom. Watch a short video trailer for Mindfulness for Teachers, and visit Dr. Jennings at //www.tishjennings.com/ and //www.facebook.com/mindfulnessforteachers:
A growing body of research shows that the teachers who are most effective at classroom management are both warm and demanding. Their warmth helps them build strong relationships with their students, and their demands communicate high expectations for behavior and achievement. Like many new female teachers, warmth came easily for me. I became a teacher because I love kids and wanted to make a positive difference in their lives. However, that first year of teaching, it was especially challenging for me to be demanding. While I received excellent training in classroom management, I had no idea how to get my students to pay attention and respond to my directions. I had the mistaken idea that if I was nice to them, they would like me and behave well to please me. I quickly learned that this was not an effective strategy. As my frustration grew, a cold harshness crept into my communications. One day a supervisor came to observe me to evaluate my progress. During our meeting after class she said, "Did you know that after every direction you give your students you say, 'Okay?'? You are also turning statements into questions by raising the tone of your voice at the end. This gives your students the message that your directions are optional suggestions, and you give away your power." I was so unaware of this tendency that this feedback was a total surprise. No wonder my students were so unresponsive! I had been sabotaging myself by unintentionally conveying the impression that my directions were optional. When I began teaching classroom management to teacher candidates and supervising interns, I found that this problem is very common among women teachers. I observed female teachers and their female interns using a passive style of communication as they gave directions and tried to communicate expectations. Exploring this issue further, I learned that this is a very common tendency among women in general. In the U.S., girls are often socialized to be overly polite and accommodating. Many of us learned early that pleasing others is important. We learned to qualify our comments with question tag lines such as, "This is really fun, isn't it?" and to minimize our communications by including words like "just" and using suggestions rather than direct communications: "I think it would be best if you would just finish this assignment before lunch." Contrast that sentence with: "Finish the assignment before lunch," which is a direct and unqualified command. Some children eventually learn to understand that this passive language is a way of expressing expectations. However, children who grow up in families where this way of communicating is not the norm may not. Unfortunately, teachers often mistake their students' misunderstanding as misbehavior and peg them as defiant. Culturally responsive teachers recognize that these students simply don't understand the communication style, and they take responsibility for communicating in a way that their students can understand. By applying mindful awareness to observing and monitoring my speech, I overcame this habit and developed a warm but also firm and demanding style of communication. As my students began to respond to this new communication style, it reinforced my sense of teaching efficacy, so important to a teacher's first years. This experience opened my eyes to the importance of what we say to students and how we say it. It also reinforced for me the value of applying mindfulness to build the necessary self-awareness to monitor our speech and behavior. Response From Readers

@Larryferlazzo Lack of paid maternity leave, & lactation accommodations.

-- christina martinez (@christinaixchel) November 6, 2015

@Larryferlazzo //t.co/ZAP8pKAgFK. All leave for CA teachers after birth is unpaid. The strain of this reality is an incredible burden

-- christina martinez (@christinaixchel) November 6, 2015

@Larryferlazzo //t.co/y487XIqdck After my baby was born,I was limited to one 30 minute break in which I pumped in a cold storage room

-- christina martinez (@christinaixchel) November 6, 2015

Thanks to Megan, Rusul, Pernille, Amy and Patricia, and to readers, for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

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Look for the next "question-of-the-week" in a few days.....

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Response: Challenges Faced By Women Teachers & Ways To Respond To Them (Opinion)

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This week's question is: What are the challenges facing women in the teaching profession and how best to respond to them? Women make up the vast majority of K-12 teachers - 76 percent. Yet, only 52% of public school principals are female. What does that discrepancy say about women in education today?

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The professionalization of teaching and education

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The professionalization of teaching and education

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Men have held the gender role of maintaining more "professional" roles in the workforce. This is a reason we continue to see more females in teaching than males. In secondary schools, compensation tends to be increased and as a result, the number of male teachers is higher. It is likely to see a bias toward hiring males for those positions and the increase of difficulty for women to acquire positions in the secondary schools.

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One of the great accomplishments of the late 20th century was to bring women onto a more equal footing in the labor market. Salaries became more equal. Employers opened up jobs for women. Educational opportunities became more gender-equal. And for college-educated women, all of this meant that careers outside teaching and nursing became possible.

One might think that as more career paths opened-even if not opened all the way-increased alternatives would have meant relatively fewer women in teaching. In fact, that is not what happened. As we celebrate Women's History Month, we look at how one of the very few historically female-dominated professions has become even more so. Here, I briefly describe what did happen and offer my explanation as to why.

Unlike with most jobs, teacher salaries have long been based on a schedule that minimizes opportunities for discrimination. Little matters for salary other than years of experience and level of education. (Oh yeah, and whether you teach in a district with high or low salaries.) So women and men get almost equal pay. In the most recent available data, base pay for female teachers was 96 percent of the pay received by male teachers. Even if you include extra school pay above the base level (for extracurricular activities, coaching, and a few other things), women still earn 93 percent of what men earn. High school teachers get paid somewhat more than elementary school teachers, and men are more likely than women to teach at the secondary level. But women teachers have slightly more education than men do.

While the gender pay gap has not yet been fully eliminated, it is smaller for teachers than in most of the economy. As a rough comparison, in "management, professional, and related occupations," the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women earn 73 percent of what men earn. While a large majority of teachers are women, a majority of these management and professional workers are also women. The difference in the wage gap is much smaller in teaching, making teaching especially attractive to women.

What about in the not-so good old days? It's hard to get exactly comparable data, but reports from the 1970 census suggest the male-to-female earnings ratio for year-round workers with four years of college was 55 percent. (Something else from the old days: the reports are all separated by race. The 55 percentage is for whites only.) In contrast, teaching salaries have been approximately equal by gender, although not perfectly equal. The earliest year for which I was able to track base teaching salaries was 1987, when the salary gender ratio was 0.89.

In other words, women's and men's teaching salaries have long been almost equal. Outside teaching, earnings are far less equal-but they're a lot closer together than they were in past decades. So what would you expect to happen to the relative number of women and men in teaching over this period? It used to be that few opportunities outside of teaching were available and women had equal-ish pay, which incentivized talented women to go into the classroom. Now with a more open world, the incentives for women to teach are lower, so relatively fewer will become teachers and the gender balance in teaching should become somewhat more equal.

At least that's what I thought. It turns out that I was wrong and, in fact, the opposite has happened. Here's a picture of the proportion of female teachers over time.

The green line tells the real story. The share of teachers who are women rose, not fell, over the past three-plus decades. The proportion rose quite a bit through some time in the 1990s and then has edged up a bit more since.

Now some more explanation about the graph. The solid lines are taken from the Current Population Survey (CPS)-a representative survey of the U.S. population-and look only at full-time teachers. The dots are taken from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which is a survey of teachers only and does not reach back quite so far. The SASS trend is also upward, but somewhat less dramatically so.

We can split out a few more details using the CPS data. The blue line at the top shows the female share for elementary school teachers: unsurprisingly, heavily female. The percentage moved up some through the 1980s, then back down a little. Overall, it has been pretty flat over time. Elementary school teachers are overwhelmingly women, both historically and today.

The orange line at the bottom tells us the real change in the female share is in secondary school. Teaching secondary school used to be a majority male occupation, and today a solid majority of secondary school teachers are women. Notably, the majority of math and science teachers in grades nine through 12 are women. Probably a small piece of the story as to why women's share in teaching has risen rather than fallen is that secondary school teaching jobs have become more open to women.

Here's what I think is going on: While it's true that the relative attractiveness of teaching versus other careers has declined for women versus men, there has been an enormous increase in the number of women with the basic required education to be a teacher-a bachelor's degree. The picture below shows what happened over the last 40 years; the ratio of bachelor's degrees going to women relative to men has risen by 60 percent. In other words, the greatly increased number of women in the qualified labor pool for teaching overwhelms any effects of changed incentives of teaching relative to other professions. (Ingersoll et. al. provide a very readable report on these and other trends in the teacher workforce; also see the nice summary in the Atlantic.) From an economics point of view, it is interesting that the quantity effect dominates the incentive effect.

We should also ask whether it matters for the kids if their teachers are women or men. Hopefully, you already have a good idea of the answer, because Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero reviewed the evidence last July right here on the Chalkboard. Here's the nickel summary:

"It is not clear that the plethora of females in the teacher workforce is worrisome in most circumstances-more female teachers may even be preferred in math and science classrooms."

But I'd place one big caveat on the conclusion that teacher gender doesn't matter. Most of what we know about the effects of teacher gender are about what happens in K-12. As you've seen in the chart above, there has been a massive change in college attainment of men versus women-and though everyone looks at four-year degrees, the change in associate degrees is just as large.

Interestingly, the large increase in the fraction of college degrees going to women is a worldwide phenomenon. And perhaps not coincidentally, women as a fraction of the teaching force has increased in other developing countries as well.

The table shows the increase in the fraction of teachers who are women in the OECD. (Note that the comparison is not perfect, as the set of countries included changed a bit over these two decades.) What we see is that the change in the teacher gender ratio-including in secondary school-is not just a U.S. phenomenon.

The "coincidence" of a shift to relatively more women going to college during a period in which students also had relatively fewer male teachers is interesting. One possibility is that high school boys are in need of male role models to keep them on track to college. Another possibility is that it's the decline in discriminatory barriers that has led to both more women teachers and to more women going to college. Evidence on how much either explanation contributes to the changes we've seen will have to await further research.

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As more women graduate from college, the teaching profession becomes more female

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One of the great accomplishments of the late 20th century was to bring women onto a more equal footing in the labor market. Salaries became more equal. Employers opened up jobs for women. Educational opportunities became more gender-equal. And for college-educated women, all of this meant that careers outside teaching and nursing became possible.

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The effect on students of female teachers and lack of male teachers

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The effect on students of female teachers and lack of male teachers

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The evident gender gaps in the field of education, seem to be impacting the learning outcomes of students. This video explores the value of gaining more male teachers.

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Why there are currently more female teachers than male

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Why there are currently more female teachers than male

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Again, we see evidence that men seek out in the workforce that which is perceived as prestigious. Teaching as it is, unless a position of power or administration, is not attractive to male teachers. Adding more males into administrative positions is only keeping the gender gap issues in education alive and active.

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Women now make up a larger share of educators than they have in decades.

Bettmann / Getty

Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession's gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country's public-school system was born. As schoolhouse doors opened to children of all social classes and genders, so too did the education profession. By the late 1880s, women made up a majority-63 percent-of all the country's teachers (though men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s). Within a few decades, the choice to teach young children was solidified as an inherently "feminine" pursuit; in fact, girls who couldn't or didn't want to be homemakers had few other job options.

In the mid-20th century, however, cultural and political shifts prompted a surge in the number of women seeking employment in traditionally "masculine" sectors. These changes also prompted the reverse-albeit to a lesser extent: The number of men seeking classroom careers rose and has grown by 31 percent since the early 1980s.

Yet despite this, the gender distribution in the profession has strangely grown more imbalanced, according to recently released data, largely because women are still pursuing teaching at far greater rates than men. According to the study, led by the University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Ingersoll, the nation has witnessed a "slow but steady" increase in the share of K-12 educators who are women. During the 1980-81 school year, roughly two in three-67 percent-public-school teachers were women; by the 2015-16 school year, the share of women teachers had grown to more than three in four, at 76 percent. (From 1987 to 2015, the size of the teaching force increased by more than 60 percent, from about 2.5 million to about 4.5 million, according to the recent report, which helps explain why the field tipped further female despite the rising number of men in the profession.)

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The trend is "odd," Ingersoll and his co-authors-all education scholars, and most of them former classroom teachers-write in the report. Generally speaking, starting in the 1970s the country's occupations witnessed a significant decline in gender segregation, as the number of women in the workforce soared. An index that measures how many women or men would need to change jobs to achieve equal gender distribution across occupations fell 26 percent from 1972 to 2002, when it was at its lowest point, according to a 2010 report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

Ingersoll and his research team highlight the rising proportion of women who are, for example, physicians (from 10 percent in 1972 to 40 percent in 2018, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data and federal surveys), lawyers (from 4 percent to 37 percent over the same time period), and pharmacists (13 percent to 63 percent). Other research shows that fewer female college students are seeking teaching degrees: In the late 1970s, roughly a third of the women enrolled in U.S. colleges were majoring in education; today the share has dropped to 11 percent.

What explains these contradictory trends? Much of it comes down to misunderstandings of what teaching entails and how those assumptions intersect with gender norms. Unlike in many other countries, in the United States, teaching has long been seen as a relatively low-status profession. In 2018, a survey of people in roughly three dozen countries asked respondents to rank 14 different professions-including teaching, medicine, law, social work, and website engineering-by each career's perceived social status. On the one hand, survey participants in the United States gave teachers a middling ranking, and tended to liken them to librarians; respondents in countries such as China and Malaysia, on the other hand, put teachers in first place, analogizing them to doctors.
Read: Let women teach
This cultural disregard for teaching has a gendered consequence: The status of a given career tends to correlate with the share of men in that profession-higher status equals more men, generally speaking. And that has its own consequence: Research has found that employers place less value on work done by women than on that done by men. These trends reinforce each other in perpetuity.

Within a given field, the more prestigious positions attract more men. Notably, close to half of all principals today, including two-thirds of those serving high schools, are men, as are more than three-quarters of school-district superintendents. Additionally, nine in 10 elementary-school educators are women, according to Ingersoll's study, compared with six in 10 of their high-school counterparts. Prekindergarten in particular is heavily dominated by women, perhaps because younger kids might be dismissed as requiring little more than "Wheels on the Bus" sing-alongs.

Julio González, a 23-year-old pre-K educator at a public bilingual school on Chicago's Lower West Side, admitted that he bought into such stereotypes when Teach for America first offered him the job a little more than a year ago, straight out of the University of Texas at Austin. "I made sure to ask people, like, 'Is this an actual job, or am I just a glorified babysitter?' " he recalls. A first-generation Mexican American who dreamed of becoming a lawyer so he could advocate for low-income communities like his own, González eventually realized that teaching might be a more effective way to serve those communities. After all, an individual's racial and gender biases tend to develop at a very young age.

Prestige is not a merely notional idea, as it tends to correlate tightly with compensation. The fact that prekindergarten classrooms have difficulty "attracting men as early-childhood teachers is hardly surprising," Marcy Whitebook, who co-directs UC Berkeley's Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, said in an email, given that work as a pre-K teacher "is seen as a pathway to poverty."

Teachers overall tend to have pretty meager salaries. The ACT, which every year surveys a pool of test-takers on their career aspirations, found that among respondents who said they were "potentially" interested in a job as a K-12 teacher, as opposed to definitely interested or definitely not interested, low pay was the sticking point that made them unsure. Average teachers' salaries have remained essentially flat since the 1990s after controlling for inflation, according to a report published last year by the nonprofit Education Resource Strategies (ERS), and grew just 7 percent in the two decades before that. Using a metric developed by MIT researchers, the ERS report found that in most states, K-12 educators' salaries fall below the living wage. And usually, the younger the students, the lower their teacher's pay, as a 2018 report on early-childhood educators shows.

Women might be more willing to accept teaching's low wages because the profession is, in theory, more amenable than other careers to the needs of women. Mothers, for instance, are more likely now than ever before to desire employment, yet still tend to bear most of the child-rearing responsibilities. The school day tends to end two or so hours before that of typical American workers. A 9-to-5 workday, as Kara Voght has reported for The Atlantic, creates a challenge for parents who have to coordinate and pay for child care (or leave their kids unsupervised) during that time gap. The notion that teachers enjoy shortened work days and summers exempt from work-related duties is little more than a myth, but teachers who are parents are often at least on a schedule a little more conducive to their children's needs.

Read: What if America's teachers made more money?

One effect of the gender imbalance could be that younger students have fewer opportunities to interact with positive male role models. "As a black male teacher, sometimes I feel like a unicorn," said Charles Jean-Pierre, a D.C. Public Schools art and French teacher. He said the black male teachers he had as a child of immigrants in Chicago motivated him to embrace his passion for art and become a teacher himself. "I think it's important for students to experience joy, nurturing, and compassion from men ... Male teachers embody hope and love for many students who do not see that on a daily basis [from men] in their homes."

But men who do this work might confront wariness about their abilities, or suspicions about their intentions for working with young children. Ingersoll cited research published in one 1993 book about men in traditionally "feminine" occupations finding that among elementary-school teachers, men who were perceived as too "male" were dismissed as incapable of working with young children, while men who weren't "male enough" were suspected of being child molesters. "You have to sort of work it out so you're the right amount of maleness," Ingersoll told me. "It's tiresome, and so a lot of the male elementary teachers say after a while, 'This is just too draining.' " Both González and Jean-Pierre said that they're always aware of the latter concern, ensuring that another adult is always in the classroom and forging strong relationships with parents.

But the fact that male teachers have to consider this at all traces back to the entrenched stereotypes that underpin teaching's gender imbalance. Given that low pay-and accompanying low social standing-is both a result of and driving force behind men's underrepresentation in the profession, it stands to reason that salary hikes could help stem the imbalance. A pay bump could in theory spur a virtuous cycle in which greater representation of men in the profession could slowly shift perception, which Ingersoll in 2016 suggested to The New York Times could then beget even greater representation.

That said, some research suggests that pay hikes will only go so far in boosting the share of male teachers-attitudes about caregiving will need to change, too. "Two years ago, if someone had told me that the most important role you can play as a teacher is to be a caregiver, I probably would've said, 'Well, that's not what I'm signing up for,' " González acknowledged.

Today he-echoing Jean-Pierre-embraces the fact that caregiving is, indeed, integral to his responsibility as a teacher, and that it's just as valuable as all the other parts of his job.

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university of pennsylvania professor richard ingersoll

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The U.S. Teaching Population Is Getting Bigger, and More Female

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Women now make up a larger share of educators than they have in decades. Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession's gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country's public-school system was born.

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Wages for women do lag behind that of men in the teaching field as a result, often, of women needing time off work for having babies and needs within the family. Pay schedules in districts have been put in place to counteract this bias, but if failing to offer fair wage without gender influences.

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Two University of North Carolina graduate students were curious: Were female school superintendents earning less than their male counterparts?

Considering longstanding gender pay gaps across the economy, they expected to find a disparity. And using data from Pennsylvania, they did. But they also turned up something else when they plugged in data about classroom teachers.

"We were like, 'Oh, we'll throw these numbers in," said James Sadler, one of the researchers. "And that's when our eyes opened wide."

To their surprise, they found a small but notable gender pay gap for classroom teachers, who are usually paid based on set salary schedules that are designed in part to root out exactly those sorts of disparities.

Virtually no matter how the data is analyzed, female educators earn less than their male counterparts in Pennsylvania, and, according to a separate analysis released this year, Illinois.

In Pennsylvania, disparities are even larger for principals and district leaders. And the gaps actually grow when controlling for factors that might explain the differences, suggesting outright discrimination may be at play.

Together, the two new studies illustrate how even the education field - a female-dominated one where many salaries aren't open to negotiation - isn't immune to the gender pay gap, at a time when strikes and walkouts mean extra attention is being paid to teachers' wages.

"I'm not surprised at all that there's a pay differential between men and women within the field of education, because men do get promoted more quickly," said Judith Kafka, an education historian at CUNY's Baruch College.

What is surprising, Kafka agreed, is the gap researchers found among teachers, considering that salary schedules typically rely on education and experience levels.

Still, in most cases, the pay gap is small relative to educators' overall salaries - no more than 7 percent and usually less - and the studies can't definitively explain what's behind the gap.

The most detailed look at the issue comes from the UNC researchers, who compared the salaries of all public school teachers, school leaders, and district superintendents in Pennsylvania in the 2016-17 year.

In each job category, the raw dollar gap between men and women's salaries was over a thousand dollars.

There are a few potential explanations for this. Women teachers had about one fewer year of experience, on average, perhaps because they are more likely to take time off in the middle of their careers. Men may be more likely to take on extra duties like sports coaching, which could show up in the numbers even though the data is only supposed to include base salaries. And male teachers more often worked in slightly higher-paying districts.

Accounting for a teacher's education, years of experience, and district and school type makes the teacher pay gap shrink to about $600. That's just 1 percent of the average teacher's salary, though over the course of a career, that difference could mean thousands of dollars lost.

The researchers say they're not quite sure why it exists.

"That's really the main question that is still unanswered," said Sadler. "It's something that we're still still trying to figure out."

One potential explanation, he said, is that teachers who enter a new district mid-career may find room to negotiate where they start on the salary schedule. This may advantage men.

"The salary scale is not necessarily the panacea for dealing with disparities," said Jay Carter, the other UNC researcher behind the study.

But to Wythe Keever, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, the finding suggests salary schedules are keeping disparities small.

The gender gap "still appears lower than pay gaps based on gender in many other occupations," he said.

Researchers also found a gender pay gap in Pittsburgh, one of the only districts in the state to have a performance-based pay system for some teachers. But the gap was present for both teachers who were and weren't part of the system.

While women made up 73 percent of classroom teachers in Pennsylvania, the study showed they accounted for just 44 percent of school principals and 35 percent of superintendents.

That probably explains a part of the pay gap for all educators, a group that includes both classroom teachers and higher-paid administrators. (Nationally, women make up 77 percent of the public school teaching force but 54 percent of principals; just one in five superintendents in the 100 largest school districts have been women over the last decade and a half.)

"As in with other professions, I think that the education field needs to think a lot about how they promote and how they identify people to be promoted," Kafka said, pointing to a phenomenon known as the "glass escalator," when men in female-dominated professions move up the ranks more quickly.

Women who lead schools and districts in Pennsylvania face substantially larger pay gaps than teachers do - and controlling for education and years of experience actually makes the disparities bigger, suggesting that women are more qualified than men but still end up making less.

For superintendents, the pay gap amounted to over $4,000 annually. Here, since salaries are usually not based on a set schedule, differences in negotiations and outright discrimination could explain the results, though factors not accounted for by the researchers, such as size of district, may also be at play.

A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Education laid the blame at the feet of districts. "It is important to note that in Pennsylvania educators' salaries are determined at the local level," said Nicole Reigelman, who noted that the state had recently banned state agencies from asking for job applicants' salary histories.

Some of the Pennsylvania findings are echoed by another study released in March looking at educators' salaries in Illinois.

Max Marchitello of Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit consulting firm, found that women in the education field made about $7,000 less than men. This lumps together different professional jobs, including administrator, classroom teacher, as well as guidance counselor and librarian, among others. But even in similar jobs and at similar experience levels, woman earned less in most cases.

(The exception was elementary school, where men and women were paid comparably despite the fact that women were typically more experienced.) Unlike the UNC study, this analysis does not try to control for multiple factors at once that might explain the disparities.

Even though some of the gap disappears when you control for differences in role, experience, and other factors, the UNC researchers argue that that doesn't necessarily make the raw disparities less meaningful. If the roles that women fill or their years in the workplace are influenced by society's expectations of women, it's worth noting how that translates into smaller salaries.

"We could probably find enough stuff to control for to get rid of a pay gap," said Carter. "It's kind of a philosophical question: How hard should you have to work to explain away why real dollars [differ] between what goes into male households and female households?"

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In female-dominated education field, women still lag behind in pay, according to two new studies

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Two University of North Carolina graduate students were curious: Were female school superintendents earning less than their male counterparts? Considering longstanding gender pay gaps across the economy, they expected to find a disparity. And using data from Pennsylvania, they did. But they also turned up something else when they plugged in data about classroom teachers.

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UNGEI – United Nations Girls' Education Initiative, is a global partnership dedicated to advancing gender quality through education. They are a social justice organization that focuses on forwarding women's rights movements through education as well as championing women teachers who dare to teach progressive topics in traditionalist societies.

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When gender-responsive, quality education is available to all it has the potential to transform societies and build sustainable peace. A joint initiative from the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), Education Cannot Wait (ECW) and the UN Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI), the EiE-GenKit is a core resource package for gender in education in emergencies. The EiE-GenKit is the first resource of its kind, providing education practitioners with practical tools to promote gender-responsive programming from crisis to peace and sustainable development. The EiE-GenKit is based on extensive research and consultation with the latest resources, evidence, new tools and good practice available in one easy-to-use package. The EiE-GenKit builds on existing humanitarian processes for a streamlined approach to gender-responsive EiE. The EiE-GenKit offers tools for practical and immediate use including checklists, tipsheets and assessment templates supporting practitioners to ensure that each phase of an EiE intervention is gender-responsive. Bridging the gap between what we know about gender-responsive EiE and the tools we need to make it happen, the EiE-GenKit aims to promote improved gender and education outcomes of learners living in crises.

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When gender-responsive, quality education is available to all it has the potential to transform societies and build sustainable peace. A joint initiative from the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), Education Cannot Wait (ECW) and the UN Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI), the EiE-GenKit is a core resource package for gender in education in emergencies.

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Female teachers dominate the teaching world. This article looks at six facts of female teachers across the world. Though there are so many benefits women bring to the teaching profession, education systems should make sure barriers are not created for women.

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Of the 80 million teachers worldwide, more than half are female. This International Women's Day we offer six facts about the share, location, role, and prospects of the 45 million female teachers globally.

We show that while most developed countries have a higher share of female teachers, women in sub-Saharan Africa still compose a minority in the profession. Female teachers tend to be concentrated in the earlier years of school, and, while they're are just as qualified as their male counterparts, they do not advance proportionally to leadership positions in schools.

Female teachers are important for education systems and for gender equality. Evidence suggests that female teachers may increase girls' test scores and their likelihood of staying in school, heighten their aspirations, and lower their likelihood of being subject to violence. And the teacher labour market is important for women: in some countries, teaching is one of the few high skilled professions that is accessible to women.

1. There are large variations in the percentage of female teachers among regions, with more in rich countries

Although, globally, close to 60 percent of teachers are female, there are considerable variations among regions. In Europe, Latin America, and North America women have made up roughly 70 percent of all teachers since the 1980s, and the teaching profession has been women-dominated for much longer in some areas. At the primary grade level, the United Kingdom reached 70 percent of female teachers by 1901 and Argentina 85 percent by 1930 ( Kelleher et al., 2011). Most regions of the world have a large and increasing share of female teachers, except sub-Saharan Africa, which has a low share of female teachers with little change over time.

One explanation behind these large differences between regions is the strong association between a country's level of development and the share of female teachers in a country. In the poorest countries in the world, female teachers are rare, making up less than 15 percent of all teachers in Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, and Chad. But as countries get richer, the share of female teachers increases rapidly and there are no countries with more male than female teachers above $8,000 gross national income (GNI) per capita (adjusted for purchasing power).

2. The share of female teachers is higher in urban areas

Female teachers tend to be located primarily in urban areas. For instance, in India women make up 65 percent of teachers in urban areas versus 37 percent in rural areas (Kelleher et al., 2011), with similar results found in Lesotho and Sri Lanka. There is no global dataset on the location of female teachers, but we looked into PASEC data from 2014, which includes information for primary schools in 10 francophone African countries. All 10 show the same pattern: urban areas show a much larger share of female teachers than rural, with an average of twice the percentage of female teachers in urban areas (46 percent) than in rural areas (23 percent).

Safety, more conservative values, or the difficulty to take a job far away from their family might explain why women are less likely to teach in rural areas. But this means girls in rural areas are less likely to have a female teacher, when they could benefit the most from being in contact with a qualified working woman.

3. Female teachers tend to teach lower grades

Almost universally, there are more female teachers at lower grades. Across all regions of the world, income levels, and time spans, there are more female teachers at primary level than secondary level and more at secondary level than tertiary level. Out 150 with available data, we found just four with a higher share of female teachers in secondary than primary (Bhutan,Myanmar, Côte d'Ivoire and Pakistan with a small difference of -5 points) and one where there are more female teachers at tertiary level than secondary level (Bangladesh, 2 points difference). The rest follow the pattern (see Figure 4).

And within the general categories of primary, secondary, and tertiary, female teachers are more likely to teach earlier grades. Figure 5 shows at least twice as many female teachers in grade two than in grade six. In Togo and Chad, there are barely any female teachers in grade six.

Is there a good reason for this? It is not clear that there is evidence that female teachers are more effective at teaching low grades than men. We know that the gender of a teacher can matter for girls' achievements and aspirations, and limited evidence suggests that positive impacts may be greater in middle schools. Reallocating female teachers to teach higher grades may be an important way to support girls' education.

4. There is a glass ceiling for female teachers

Women are under-represented in leadership positions in schools, a pattern that seems to be common across most countries and income groups. A survey of 28 OECD countries found that women make up 70 percent of lower secondary teachers but only 45 percent of school principals. The pattern is similar across developing countries: in Sri Lanka, 71 percent of teachers are female but only 28 percent of principals are (Kelleher et al., 2011).

5. Setting the record straight on female teachers

If anyone ever thought that female teachers are less qualified than men, they should look at the data. We find that female teachers are just as qualified as male teachers.

As for the notion that women may be more likely to quit teaching jobs than men (notably to look after their own children), we find that, in 31 out of 45 countries with available data, teacher attrition rate is actually lower for women than for men.

6. Teaching makes up an important share of qualified jobs in poor countries for women

Female teachers are important for education systems, but the reverse is also true: teaching is important for women. Indeed, in very poor countries teaching is one of the few high skilled, or qualified, jobs that women can access (meaning jobs categorized by the International Labour Organization as skill level 3 or 4 in its four-tier classification system).

Figure 9 shows the number of teaching jobs as a share of the number of high skilled jobs for men and women. In the poorest countries in the world, more than 40 percent of female qualified jobs are teachers. The share decreases as countries get richer and there are more and more qualified jobs available but teaching still makes up 20 percent of qualified jobs for women at countries with a purchasing power-adjusted GNI of $16,000-twice the percentage of qualified jobs for men.

Recruitment policies of Ministries of Education therefore likely matter a lot for women. Recruiting more women as teachers can be a way for governments to boost the number of women who hold qualified jobs and promote gender equality.

Concluding remarks

Female teachers already make up the majority of teachers in the world, and we can expect that their share will continue to rise-but Ministries of Education should still think carefully about the management of their female teachers. Getting more female teachers in rural or remote areas is challenging but might be desirable to offer job opportunities for women in these areas and give female students a chance to have a teacher that looks more like them. There is nothing wrong with women predominantly teaching early grades, but it is not obvious that it is always where female teachers would perform better, and older students may also benefit from having a female teacher. Finally, education systems need to make sure that barriers are not created for female teachers and that women have the same chance as men in being promoted to managerial positions.

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Six Things You Should Know about Female Teachers

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Of the 80 million teachers worldwide, more than half are female. This International Women's Day we offer six facts about the share, location, role, and prospects of the 45 million female teachers globally. We show that while most developed countries have a higher share of female teachers, women in sub-Saharan Africa still compose a minority in the profession.

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The video touches on the history of education, wage gap among teachers, and women in teachers. Teachers in the U.S. are paid significantly less than others with similar education backgrounds. How will this impact the teaching profession in the future? How will we attract more men to enter the profession?

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Why Teachers Are Paid So Little In The U.S.

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Ecological Analysis of Male and Female Teachers

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Ecological Analysis of Male and Female Teachers

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This scholarly article seeks to answer questions, such as: Why are the majority of primary teachers female? What are the consequences of the sex of the teacher in the classroom?

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The questions which this essay shall raise and try to answer are these: Why are the vast majority of elementary teachers women? What are the contextually imposed constraints upon the sex of the teacher as an operational component of classroom life? What are the consequences of the sex of the teacher in context, particularly the unanticipated consequences?

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The questions which this essay shall raise and try to answer are these: Why are the vast majority of elementary teachers women? What are the contextually imposed constraints upon the sex of the teacher as an operational component of classroom life? What are the consequences of the sex of the teacher in context, particularly the unanticipated consequences?

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Impact of Gender Gap in American Schools

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Impact of Gender Gap in American Schools

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This book explores the growing gender gap by assessing the (1) trends and macro environment, (2) academic performance, engagement and family influence, (3)and role of schools.

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While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women's educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.

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While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school.

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In this TED Talk in Western Washington University, Alex is a senior who notices that there aren't many men in early childhood. He talks about the significant impact if more men join.

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Men in Early Childhood Education | Alex Straus | TEDxWWU

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How can we get more Black teachers in the classroom?

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How can we get more Black teachers in the classroom?

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Our country lacks the presence of culturally relevant Black males in public schools. In fact, 2% of our country's teachers are Black men. This impacts the overall student outcome, especially with young Black boys. Similar to how books are mirrors and windows, students should see themselves in the diverse population of the school staff.

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2% Of The Nation's Teachers Are Black Men. How Can We Get More Black Male Teachers In The Classroom?

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Hannah Fraik
Tiffany Bezeau
Tom Mangione
Laura Roark