Customer Reviews

Still Failing at Fairness: How Gender Bias Cheats Girls and Boys in School and What We Can Do About It

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More than ten years ago, in the mid 90's, the Sadkers did an expansive as well as longitudinal study of gender bias, ethnic bias and other forms of stereotyping and their effects in our public school systems -- from grade school through college. What they found was appalling, and perhaps more tragic, was the that the situation wasn't being recognized by teachers, administrators or parents - though to their credit, the teachers were horrified that they were inadvertantly sending such messages. However, the children knew and their stark responses to the gender and ethnic inequalities they felt showed that even as grade school children they already knew.

Ten years later, in the mid-2000's Sadker and Zittleman decided to revisit all the data and update their report with current research. Sadly, they didn't find much improvement. They did find improvement, but as the mountain of current research still shows, things have not improved much.

Please don't let dismissive reviews fool you. The folks doing this kind of research know that the Sadkers work is VERY up-to-date and is backed up by hundreds of other papers and studies that still show how far we have to go before more than half our population is allowed to be considered equal and is encouraged to achieve their full potential.

Don't believe me? Try looking at Hanson's Lost Talent, another book from the 90s or more recently, Hall's 'Who's Afraid of Madam Curie', or better yet, just do a Google Scholar search for 'gender bias' or 'stereotypes' and you'll find more than enough 'current' proof that things have not improved.

The less we try to convince ourselves that everything is just peachy, the better off we'll be -- and the better off our educational system will be. This book isn't about blame, it's about fixing the problem so we all can have a better future.

Who am I? I'm a gender bias researcher concentrating on getting more girls involved in science and engineering, and have just compiled over 100 different research papers on the problem -- almost all of them are from 2000 to 2011. And they back up the Sadkers 100%.

If I didn't have to read this book for school I probably wouldn't. Not only is the book extremely repetitive, the arguments are very biased. When you write a book trying to state the fact that there are gender bias in schools, you also have to argue the counter examples. They make very extreme statements. Also I find many of the "facts" that they stated outdated. I understand that this book is a newer edition to the old book Failing at Fairness but it seems like they used many examples from the 1900's that I can't relate too. Stating things like teachers never call on girls in math classes, teachers seat the boys and girls on opposite side of the rooms, girls never speak out in class, etc. Some of these facts just seem outdated and i can't relate to any of these issues nor can my classmates. What's interesting about this book is the history of women in the educational system. But other then that, just reading the first few sentences of a paragraph can get you the jest of what they are trying to say.