{"id":9661,"date":"2010-02-25T20:33:54","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T03:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9661"},"modified":"2010-02-25T20:33:54","modified_gmt":"2010-02-26T03:33:54","slug":"sexism-in-the-technical-writing-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9661","title":{"rendered":"Sexism in the Technical Writing Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a three or four sets of technical writing papers to grade this weekend–I am teaching two sections this semester–and I was thinking to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of having to deal with student writing so I am going to procrastinate by telling you briefly about a discussion I had Monday with the section that is all male (the other is mostly male) about the assignment they will be handing in to me next week. I am using a textbook called Elements of Technical Writing<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>by Thomas Pearsall, the first seven chapters of which deal with the technical writing process. Each chapter is given over to one step in that process, and Pearsall has built an incremental assignment into the sequence of chapters: Students are to imagine that they work for a start-up company that is thinking about investing in groupware so that employees can work remotely. They have been asked by their supervisor to do some research and write a report on groupware that she can use to persuade management to spend the money. The first two steps in the writing process that Pearsall lays out involve putting together a work plan, a description of the project and a list of the tasks that need to be completed. On Monday, we were talking about the audience analysis section of the work plan, and I was asking my students to list what they knew about their supervisor that might be relevant to how they would choose to write their report. They called out some obvious things about being a manager, and then someone said, “She’s a woman.”<\/p>\n

“Is that relevant to the writing of your report?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“Of course,” someone else answered.<\/p>\n

“Why?” I asked, and the answers came very quickly.<\/p>\n

“Because women are more skeptical than men.”<\/p>\n

“Because women over analyze everything”<\/p>\n

“They pay too much attention to details.”<\/p>\n

“Women ask too many questions.”<\/p>\n

“Because women never forget when you make a mistake.”<\/p>\n

“Because women in the workplace always feel they have something to prove; she’s probably going to be really pushy.”<\/p>\n

There were a couple of more that I don’t remember clearly, but all of them–with the exception perhaps of the last one–were such unambiguous instances of sexist stereotyping that I was, for a moment, shocked into silence. It had been a very<\/em> long since I’d heard anyone anywhere assert those stereotypes as if they were simple fact. “Do you really think you want to write your report based on those assumptions?” I asked. “Remember, she’s your supervisor.” A few of my students laughed; a couple of them shook their heads; we had a brief and predictable conversation about sexist stereotyping; and while I doubt I changed anyone’s mind about women in general, they all seemed to get the point: don’t base workplace behavior on those kinds of assumptions.<\/p>\n

Then, as the conversation was winding down, someone said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fighting us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.” Unfortunately, class was over and so I couldn’t pursue precisely what he meant by that, but I walked to my car with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is wisdom in what that student said; on the other hand, there would have been value for those men in having to deal with women’s anger; and it made me start to wonder about how to structure a lesson, or lessons, around the problems of sexism in the workplace and ethical behavior in the workplace, that would remain true to the course description but also go a little deeper than some version of When you go to work, check your sexism\/racism\/etc. at the door. <\/em>It’s something I will be thinking about, since it looks like I will be teaching technical writing for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a three or four sets of technical writing papers to grade this weekend–I am teaching two sections this semester–and I was thinking to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of having to deal … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}