Best and Worst Professors: Gender Patterns in Students' Choices

Over 100 primarily White students described their best and worst professor. For best, female professors were chosen more by their female students and less by their male students than expected. There were no gender differences in choice of worst professors. The qualities that students criticize are similar for their male and female professors, mainly a lack of organization and clarity. Best professors most often are described as caring and knowledgeable, but other qualities vary as a function of professor or student gender. These findings suggest that more attention should be paid to gender dynamics in classroom teaching and in student evaluations.     

A Study of Gender Differences in Autobiographical Memory: Broken Down by Age and Sex

Data from 40 older adults who produced autobiographical memories to word cues and to the request to list five important memories, and data from 60 older adults who answered factual multiple-choice questions for events spread across their lives, were analyzed for gender differences. In spite of considerable statistical power, there were no gender differences in the distribution of autobiographical memories over the lifespan, in the distribution of important memories, in various ratings provided to these memories, or in the distribution of knowledge for events. The only gender difference found was that men performed better on factual questions about current events and baseball. Thus, counter to what might be expected from Darwinian theory and some behavioral data, gender differences were minimal.     

Sex and Gender in Psychiatry: A View from History

Although physicians have attempted for centuries to uncover the biological differences between men and women with regard to mental illness, they continue to face the challenges of untangling biological factors from social and cultural ones. This article uses examples from history to illustrate three common problems in trying to establish biological differences: identifying factors as sex-based when they are really gender-based; overlooking changes in masculine and feminine roles over time; and placing too great an emphasis on hormones. By using the benefit of hindsight to identify problems from the past, we can think more critically about these issues in the present and the future.     

大学教授的论坛--西南联大与中国知识分子

皖南事变意味着一个时代的结束.联大人决心要使中国的高等教育事业继续维持下去,于是他们不畏艰苦的环境,毅然离开家、离开故乡和他们熟悉的环境,团结一致,来到云南开始新的生活,这一团结又因国家统一而得到了加强.国民党、共产党和其他小的党派组织都在致力于共同抗日.由于每一个人都对这个时代的主要问题--毫不懈怠的求知和对战争努力的无条件支持--达成了共识,因此人们在其他事情之上就易于宽容.从1938年到1940年,思想界之活跃是后期无可企及的.     

Plagiarism and Paraphrasing Criteria of College and University Professors

In Study 1, college professors determined whether each of 6 rewritten versions of a paragraph taken from a journal article were instances of plagiarism. Results indicated moderate disagreement as to which rewritten versions had been plagiarized. When another sample of professors (Study 2) was asked to paraphrase the same paragraph, up to 30% appropriated some text from the original. In Study 3, psychology professors paraphrased the same paragraph or a comparable one that was easier to read. Twenty-six percent of the psychologists appropriated text from the original version, whereas only 3% appropriated text from the one that was easier to read. The results of these studies are discussed in the context of existing definitions of paraphrasing and plagiarism.     

Another Look at Sex Bias in Students' Evaluations of Professors

Forty male and forty female students evaluated the identical teaching methods of three female and three male award-winning professors in two traditionally masculine, two traditionally feminine and two relatively non-sex-linked areas. Different ratings were assigned as a function of the sex of the professor and the teaching field. Students attributed the success of male professors to instrumental qualities and that of females to affective qualities.     

Sex vs. Gender

SUMMARY

This article was first published in D. R. Laub and P. Gandy, (eds), Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, California, 1973, pp. 20–24. Prince argues that previous contributors to the symposium in using such terms as “gender conversion surgery” and “anatomic and genetic gender” were failing to grasp the distinction between sex and gender. Genital anatomy is about sex; gender role is about a lifestyle. Out of 100 people applying for a surgery perhaps only 10 percent should have it. The majority confuse sex and gender and fail to appreciate that what they are seeking is a gender change and not a sexual change. Prince likes the word “dysphoria” but argues for distinguishing sexual dysphoria from gender dysphoria. They are different and people should be treated according to which one they happen to be suffering from.     

Gender orientation and the Bem Sex Role Inventory: A psychological construct revisited

In 1973, Constantinople revolutionized the conceptualization of male and female sex roles when she advanced that masculinity and femininity were not opposite ends of a unidimensional continuum but rather independent constructs. This gave rise to androgyny theory, which advanced that individuals could be both masculine and feminine, and that in fact, the most healthy gender orientation was one containing elements of both. Nearly two decades after the development of the androgyny theory and the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), one of its most popular measures, it seems prudent to reexamine the androgyny construct and its measurement. This paper does just that. Within the context of a predominantly middle-class, Caucasian population, this study uses factor analysis, reliability estimates, and measures of population agreement to assess the continuing validity and reliability of the BSRI and androgyny theory. While reinforcing the reliability of the BSRI, results raise both methodological and conceptual questions regarding the BSRI and the operationalization of androgyny.     

Definitions of Gender and Sex: The Subtleties of Meaning

Definitions of the word gender were collected from 137 participants, who also completed questionnaires designed to determine aspects of the usage of the words gender and sex. The majority of participants were European American (86.9%), followed by Latino/a (3.6%), Asian/Asian American (2.9%), African American (2.2%), Native American (1.5%), and West Indian (1.5%). Most participants (70.9%) had attended at least some college and occupations included students (43%), professionals (27.8%), health care workers (4.3%), technical workers (5%), sales and service workers (9.4%), maintenance workers (1.4%), and business owners (1.4%). Data were examined to see which common themes emerged from the free form define gender question, the amount of interchangeability of sex and gender in a sentence completion task, and the varieties of beliefs about the relation between the terms gender and sex. Results indicate a variety of understandings and beliefs about gender that range from the common response that gender is the same as sex to some less common responses that associate gender with females or discrimination. Implications of the ambiguous meaning of gender are discussed with an emphasis on the responsibility of researchers to clarify their own understanding of the terms when they discuss gender or sex in their research and publications.     

Gender and Sex Diversity in Sport Organizations: Concluding Comments

This article utilizes the work found within the special issue to note that sport as an institution still serves to produce, reinforce, and perpetuate male hegemony. However, it additionally argues that the collective works point to progress in some areas of sport. It highlights the ideas for future research regarding sex and gender diversity in sport and notes that these concerns are often situated in multi-level, sometimes subtle, and usually taken-for-granted structures, policies, and behaviors embedded in sport organizations. It concludes with a call for continued work in this area.     

Gender and Hedging: From Sex Differences to Situated Practice

In a reanalysis of women's language, Holmes (1995) has argued that women's use of hedges expresses interpersonal warmth and not, as many researchers have maintained, linguistic tentativeness. It is typically men, she suggests, who employ hedges to convey imprecision and incertitude. In this study, we investigated the use of the hedges sort of and you know in a sample of South African students. Holmes's method of analysis was applied to hedging behavior in 52 dyadic conversations. The study consisted of a 2 (Speaker Gender: Male/Female) × 2 (Audience Gender: Male/Female) × 2 (Condition: Competitive/Noncompetitive) between-subjects experimental design. The results showed that contextual influences eclipsed the effects of gender; in fact, no main effects were found for speaker gender. Fewer hedges were deployed in the competitive condition than in the noncompetitive condition. Moreover, perhaps reflecting differences in social status, both sexes used sort of to express tentativeness more frequently when talking to male addressees. When speaking to female addressees, on the other hand, men deployed facilitative you know hedges more readily than women.     

Sex Roles,Gender, and Fear

Male and female college students classified as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated on the Bern (1974) Sex Role Inventory (N = 199) were given the Wolpe (1969) Fear Inventory. Significant differences in average fear scores were seen between men and women and between the four sex-role categories, with sex role and gender contributing equally to the variability. The argument is raised here that excessive fearfulness or fearlessness might be as much a product of sex-role conditioning as a product of gender.