Thursday, September 17, 2015
Teaching Sex Stereotyping
I used this video clip by Shelley Correll (Stanford - Sociology) today to introduce the topic of sex discrimination and stereotyping, to terrific effect. Students are appropriately outraged by the facts of Price Waterhouse, but they also know that few employers these days are so stupid as to be as overtly discriminatory. Today's flavors of discrimination are much more subtle, and this 20-minute video does a nice job of illustrating that.
I followed the video by asking the students to describe sex stereotyping that they had observed at our law school, at our university, and in the law firms and courtrooms they were working and interning in. This generated an animated discussion, and wearing my decanal hat, gave me some ideas of things I can do to improve our law school environment. One of the many interesting directions our discussion took was that law student perceptions of the expertise of junior law professors can vary considerably by gender, and that that in turn may influence the "personas" that male and female law professors may adopt in the classroom.
Thanks to my colleague Dacy Wilcox for sending the video to me.
rb
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2015/09/teaching-sex-stereotyping.html