Does Gender Influence the Teaching?

There are some myths in society regarding the teacher’s gender. Those myths have blocked the access to getting teaching job vacancies for both men and women. Two sample myths are the following. The first is that women are better teachers at kindergarten, and the second is that men are better teachers at senior high school. At the beginning of the twentieth century, competition at work became high. However, that level of competition at work is nothing compared with the one going on nowadays. The advent of the state-of-the-art technology that everybody can enjoy has lead competition to rocket. As a result, employers look for the most qualified people for the needed jobs. Within this search for employees there is a study about which gender is more competent for a specific job. This is applied to education. Schools want to employ the best teachers; and for that objective, they need to know whether one gender is better than the other when it comes to teaching. Women and men can become equally professional teachers, but at the same time each one has unique gifts for making the teaching-learning experience more perfect.

Both, male and female have the same capacity to become excellent teachers. To begin with, women and men teachers have the same intellectual capability. It is a fact that no gender is more intelligent than the other. There are many studies that prove this fact, such as the one conducted by Jim Flynn and Lilia Rossi-Case in 2011. Moreover, male and female teachers have the same capacity to teach professionally; that is, helping the students to learn the subject matter in the most suitable way. Therefore, teachers of both genders can explain in a clear way that is understandable for the students. Also, they know when the students have a difficult time understanding the subject matter, and know how to adjust in these circumstances by explaining from a different perspective and offering new examples. For instance, among the winners of the Pearson Teaching Awards 2014, which is one of the most prestigious teaching awards in the world, we find the team of The King’s School, which is lead by Paula Ferrand and composed of both, women and men. Therefore, the ability to transmit knowledge effectively to the student can be acquired regardless of gender.

Women and men are gifted in its own way to make the teaching-learning experience more effective. First, women are more caring than men by nature, so they can help the students to feel more confident in the class and undertake a risk taking behavior when doing the exercises. Since the time of conception, women feed and comfort their children. This extremely close bound with their children enhances a special capacity for care and love. Therefore, female teachers are capable of exerting this care and love for those students who are undergoing a difficult emotional time. This is important because students are human and need to feel loved and cared for. As an example, in Surabaya there is a boy named Reiner, studying in Saint Louis high school, who had some personal needs, but it was only a female teacher who felt that, and was able to kindly help him find a solution. The male teachers of Reiner could not have imagined what Reiner needed. Secondly, men show more discipline than women, so they are more likely than women to engage the students in the subject matter at hand. It is a fact that men will not feel any remorse of conscience to correct students who misbehave in class. This is the reason why most of the military schools are made up of men. When something wrong is going on in the classroom, male teachers do not hesitate to take tough actions if needed. As a consequence, the students will develop the habit to focus more on the class and avoid disrupting the class, or getting distracted.

Nowadays in the midst of an extremely high competition at the workplace, schools do not need to worry whether the teachers they hire are male or female. Both, women and men can be excellent teachers. Regardless of gender, human beings have the same capacity to attain a high intellectual level. Besides, the skill of transmitting knowledge to students can be attained by both genders. However, there are differences between male and female teachers. Nevertheless, those differences do not make one gender better than the other, but rather unique. Both, men and women have unique gifts that make them special. Therefore, it is needed to have teachers of both genders. As a conclusion, schools should not look at the gender when hiring teachers, but rather at the acquired skills for teaching the given subject matter.