Advice for women teaching male-dominated classes (opinion)

I was so ready for this.

I’d printed off 32 course schedules, stapled and stacked for pickup upon the students’ entry into the classroom. I’d created an online quiz prior to class on technical communications skills, hoping to overcome the students’ potential resistance to the material; they were, after all, hands-on power engineering students, so they hadn’t enrolled in college to write.

Dressed for success myself, I’d put on my best big-girl, gray skirt suit combo that morning, planned for weeks in advance as my first-day-of-school outfit. I’d even gone to the washroom 10 minutes before class to freshen up my red lipstick—a trademark burgundy hue that I’d long used as a secret superpower source.

When the first student walked in, I greeted him with my warmest smile. He looked me up and down, snorted, and said, “Is this Sex Ed 101?”

My stomach flopped. I had not prepared for this.

I had wanted this job so badly. I’d interviewed for it more than once, and only the last time had I been successful (let’s credit my trusty skirt suit/red-lip combo for that second winner interview). I thought I finally had my dream job: teaching writing. Yes, it was technical writing, but so what? I could support myself as a single parent and my then 10-year-old daughter while sharing something I love with aspiring professionals.

Until then, I’d only taught graphic design students on contract in ethnically- and gender-diverse classrooms; in essence, my students were sweet nerds who rallied around me, the material and each other so we could do our best to complete their assignments and gain practical skill sets along the way.

The power engineering technologists I’d now been assigned to were completely different: predominantly young white men from rural communities, whose fathers or uncles or grandpas or older brothers were often power engineers. The work culture, I would later learn, is male-dominated, gruff and, yes—sexist. There were groups of international and nonwhite students in the class, but I all but ignored this difference when I looked out onto my first classroom full of men.

All I saw on that first day—plagued by the gut-sunk ache of one student asking me if I was teaching sex ed—was a sea of crossed arms, unimpressed glares and subtle smirks at my expense.

I never recovered. Not that semester, anyway. Each week, something untoward would bubble up to the surface whenever I would say something out loud that sounded innocuous in my head, and one of a few students would twist it. The room would erupt in mocking masculine laughter to remind me that I was always the butt of the joke, and never in on it.

Desperate to empower myself, I would Wonder Woman pose à la Amy Cuddy in the bathroom mirror before class … only to begin shaking as the students trickled into the classroom, a stream lasting well past start time. I asked for help from mentors and peers; a female colleague even came to class with me to observe what I was up against. She offered understanding and support, but mostly the message I heard elsewhere was: toughen up.

Somehow, it was my problem, not theirs.

Heartbroken because this was the job I’d wanted so badly, I became fearful to go to class, not only because of the groupthink among my students, but also because that first-day “sex ed” student kept finding fresh ways to intimidate me.

Still, I had an idea. My heart hurt, yes, but it also felt like working a muscle in the gym. I could feel the soreness making me stronger. As a final credential in my course-based master’s degree, I had chosen to develop a yearlong project—a sort of mini-thesis—and I needed a focus area.

What if I studied women’s experiences teaching in all-male classrooms?

When I finally completed a literature review and small analytical autoethnography qualitative project and graduated from my master’s in 2016, I had no idea that it was just the beginning.

This work would lead me to become an advocate for women teaching in male-dominated classrooms at my college and launch a two-phased research project with more than 20 research participants, six research assistants and hours/pages of textual data with hundreds of supporting sources. I would even learn to love being the only woman in the room and the one expected to lead.

But it wouldn’t truly hit home how far I’d come until a new colleague—10 years younger and light-years sharper—began messaging me last fall with concerns about a student in one of her all-male technical communications classrooms.

Maybe she just needed to vent at first. Her classroom debriefs came through voice memos, and she’d always end up describing this one older male student’s interaction with her. In addition to intimidating body language, he seemed to be questioning her, a lot—not just the material, but her.

In fact, from my current grounded theory research—which includes 14 qualitative interviews with women who have taught in male-dominated classrooms, some for only one semester, several for decades—it appears common for women instructors to experience a constant and pronounced questioning in their all-men classrooms.

Other researchers have drawn similar conclusions. It’s more common for women (and please note: especially women of color, which I am not) to experience incivility in the classroom than it is for men to encounter it.

It’s not you, I told my younger, brighter colleague; it’s them.

During one of our after-class chats, this co-worker also mentioned that other students seemed to be unable to look up at her face when she spoke, staring at parts of her body instead. Ugh, I thought, and felt flung far backwards to that day when that former student wondered if I was there to teach him sex ed.

Again, I told my colleague—it’s them, not you. Contrapower harassment — a term coined in the ’80s to define and describe the experience of being sexually harassed by a supposed subordinate (aka a student)—is a well-studied phenomenon in academia. I found it in the primary data when I spoke to many of my research participants, and my research assistants found it over and over again in secondary sources. The ’80s also gave us that hot-for-teacher trope (thanks a lot, Van Halen) that just won’t go away.

I still didn’t totally clue in that I should be doing more to support my colleague until she came to my office one day before her all-male class, and it was clear she couldn’t go there alone. That difficult student had been messaging her nonstop. Immediately, I thought of willing myself to go to class that first semester, only to end up back in my office, crying, because of Mr. Sex Ed 101. I didn’t want her to have the same experience of forcing herself to go somewhere she felt unsafe.

“Don’t go to class today without talking to someone in management,” I said. “Tell someone what’s going on. Ask them to come to class with you. But don’t go there without a manager knowing what’s going on.”

Finally, it clicked. This is what I wish someone would have said to me in those early days. I only wish I’d said something like this to her sooner, before it got to the point of fear.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many positives of being a woman instructor in an all-male environment—this is true in the literature and according to my research participants. It can be a straightforward space where men of all ethnicities, backgrounds and life experiences flourish under the guidance of feminine leadership. Meanwhile, some of my research participants report that they prefer an all-male environment to teach in, as they are familiar or comfortable with such an environment from experiences playing sports, growing up with brothers and boys, and/or being bulled, primarily by women, during youth and later in life.

I’ve even come to love the male-dominated classroom. This past winter semester, I had a very engaged power engineering group, and it might even be my favorite class from that semester.

But it seems, from my research so far, that the challenges of classroom incivility and contrapower harassment become more pronounced in an environment dominated by men when a woman is leading. And it requires a specific approach to master this environment, which is best fostered through women mentoring other women on what works well for them.

Although the second phase of my research looks at how academic managers can support women in these roles, an unanticipated finding is that other female colleagues, rather than management, are perhaps the best source of support.

That’s why I don’t know how it took me so long to realize I should help my colleague more. Yes, I listened, responding with an equally meandering voice memo and reassuring her that it was not about her, that this type of experience is common in all-male classrooms. But I should have said “don’t go to that class” sooner.

In part, I wonder if the almost 10 years now that I have been teaching in all-male classrooms has made me numb and blind to its difficulties. Or if—through my research and experience—I’ve developed a persona that isn’t rattled by anything unsavory. Also, I’m older, and a benefit of age is that students might not see me as a sexual object anymore. My research shows that age and experience seem to be insulators from contrapower harassment. My superpower is no longer my red lipstick and gray skirt suit, but rather my ’90s band T-shirts and gray roots.

For better or for worse, I’ve toughened up, after all.

If that’s the case, here’s what I know from one woman to another: Ask your trusted, empathetic and more experienced woman colleagues for their best practices—learned, most likely, from their own successes and failures. Share your own experiences and pool your lessons with your peers. You might be the only woman in the room, but you aren’t the only woman. And only another woman knows, in this case, exactly what to do.