"Here’s a really interesting experiment to try, if you have the opportunity. Visit an..."

“Here’s a really interesting experiment to try, if you have the opportunity. Visit an elementary school classroom. First, just watch the teacher interact with the students while they’re teaching. Don’t try to count interactions. Just watch. See if you think that any group of kids is getting more attention than any other. Most of the time, you probably will get a feeling that they’re paying roughly equal attention to the boys and the girls, or to the white students and the black students. Then, come back on a different day, and count the number of times that they call on boys versus calling on girls. I’ve done this, after having the idea suggested by a friend. The result was amazing. I really, honestly believed that the teacher was treating her students (the teacher I did this with was a woman) equally. But when I counted?She was calling on boys twice as often as girls. This isn’t an unusual outcome. Do some looking online for studies of classroom gender dynamics, and you’ll find lots of structured observations that come to the same conclusion.”

- A White Boy’s Observations of Sexism and the Adria Richards Fiasco | Good Math, Bad Math