http://www.npr.org/2014/04/22/305814367/evidence-of-racial-gender-biases-found-in-faculty-mentoring
As university students, I think that we all like to believe that every professor is equally invested in all student success without any bias. However, this study shows that this is not the case, at least in the top universities in the country. This reminded me a good deal about the study with the resumes that Ina was talking about in class. Despite the fact that the resumes were the same, white males' were always moved to the top of the stack and African American males' were discarded. In a similar way, the white males were reached out to by the professors in this study and those from minority backgrounds were ignored. I think that this really shows that even if we are fighting against organizational inequality, we also have to look at informal inequality. If marginalized groups are not receiving mentoring, then they will have much less chance of success.
This reminds me of a presentation that I heard from SLU's Writing Center in regards to helping students whose first language is not English. As they explained, they want to help all students equally, but they never want to take a student's writing style away from them, which can prove to be a task when international students come into the Writing Center asking for their help because his or her teacher does not like the way that they write or they think the writing style should be more "assimilated" in a sense. I think we have this idea that writing and speaking English in America is dominant, and if someone is not able to do that perfectly, they need immediate help to fix their writing style without any regards to the culture that they grew up in.
ReplyDeleteIt is a serious problem that our society is facing and most of us ignore it thinking it won't happen to us, but they forget about the minorities having to suffer.
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