My MChem project students have submitted their theses to the online repository this year, and I’m writing a short blog about each one to help share the excellent work they did.

Hannah Bruce wrote a thesis titled Investigating Gender Bias in Chemistry Tutorials, which can be found in the ORA database. The project involved interviewing ten undergraduate students about their experiences of tutorials. Bruce produced an infographic to outline some of the project’s key findings.

Gender is being scrutinised increasingly closely in HE. The ‘split’ metrics of the TEF pilot and the EDI pressures of graduate recruitment are perhaps the clearest examples of mounting accountability for equitable undergraduate outcomes. At the same time, the phenomenon of ‘gender gaps’ in degree outcomes is often very hard to theorise: it’s easier to work out whether it’s happening than how it's happening (or how to fix it).

This means there is tremendous value in exploring the rich, individual experiences of students. Qualitative analysis can provide the kind of mechanistic insight which is currently under-developed, letting us gain purchase on the quantitative problem of degree outcomes being gendered.

Chapter 1

Bruce reviews the gendering of educational outcomes, and the theories (self-determination theory [SDT], cognitive load theory [CLT]) most relevant for understanding Oxford’s signature tutorial pedagogy.

Chapter 2

Bruce articulates her specific research questions:

1. As interpreted through self-determination theory, what makes a student’s experience within a chemistry tutorial positive or negative?

2. How do female students experience chemistry tutorials?

Chapter 3

After establishing the interview-based methodology of the study, this chapter focuses on the first research question. Understanding the dynamics of tutorials in general is important for understanding the ways they might be gendered.

Rather than thematic analysis, Bruce uses category analysis to explore the types of things students raise when discussing how their tutorial is experienced as positive or negative. Bruce constructs three categories: the effect of other students in the tutorial, the effect of the tutor in the tutorial, and the purpose of the tutorial.

The effect of other students in the tutorial

The actions of smart students were often framed negatively by participants, seeming to reduce their autonomy and sense of competence.

‘There was one tutorial I remember, it was a physical chemistry tutorial and one of the guys in my year, he was first at the end of basically every year, like he's excellent, and he started asking questions on some really obscure, difficult proof and led the tutor to go through that for like half an hour and everyone else was just sitting there, waiting for it to happen, having no idea what was going on. So yeah, that was a pain 'cause we were just listening to this thing that we had no idea about.’ -participant 7, female

The number of students in the tutorial could influence participation, and the sense of comfort with other students was important to the way that students engaged in academic risk-taking such as venturing answers they were not completely certain about.

‘I didn't feel embarrassed to make mistakes 'cause I was quite comfortable with my tute partners.’ -participant 1, female

The effect of the tutor in the tutorial

The tutor was really important! A good relationship with the tutor, or a sense that the tutor was welcoming, were important for the academic experience of the tutorial.

‘I definitely think that the relationship with the tutor definitely affected things a lot […] I think if I’d got along better with them, I would have had more confidence in bringing things up.’ -participant 7, female

At the same time, the academic focus of the tutorial can often be driven by the tutor and not quite connect with the needs of the student. Successfully responding to students’ academic needs was perceived positively, both in the tutorial itself and in marked tutorial problems.

‘...he kind of goes through the tutorial in a good way 'cause rather than going straight for the problem sheet, he goes through the content of the thing and then is like this is the content that related to these questions, here's why you were getting those questions wrong.’ -participant 10, female

‘...one-on-one feedback was the biggest thing I've got from tutorials, just really personalized feedback from your previous worksheets, I've seen you've done this a couple times now, do we need go over it again. I've seen you make this mistake, stuff like that, or I've seen you tend to do this, let's work on that, like personalized feedback […] I think generally my tutors were good at picking up on that. It did feel personalized’ -participant 3, female

The chapter ends with the limitations of the analysis, including some discussion about how selection bias might have influenced the findings: people who volunteer to be interviewed might have particular characteristics or perspectives.

SDT was successful in framing students’ categories of tutorial experiences. Positive experiences typically related to support for competence or autonomy, and relatedness - both to other students and the tutor - often enabled student-initiated actions which led to these experiences.

Chapter 4

This chapter explores the tutorial experiences of female students specifically. Bruce’s overall analysis is that female students do extra cognitive work in tutorials, which significantly affects their experience. Using thematic analysis, Bruce constructs three sources of extra work: self-censoring, imposter syndrome, and low relatedness.

The extra cognitive work is then framed as extraneous cognitive load. If you’re thinking about - say - whether or not to speak up, you aren’t thinking wholly about the technical aspects of the scientific content. This presents a plausible mechanism for a gender awarding gap: under-performance in exams might reflect a gendering of the pedagogy.

Self-Censoring

Some students described how they didn’t want to waste other people’s time by asking the questions they wanted to ask in tutorials.

‘I wouldn't actually get assistance [...] 'cause I felt as though I was holding my peers back from understanding more complicated content […] I felt like I was being annoying and like holding people back.’ -participant 1, female

Asking anyway was associated with negative emotions like guilt, something compounded by perceived judgement from smart students or tutors

‘...there was definitely that guy that was like, way better than all of us and like I definitely, could practically feel the resentment radiating when I asked something that felt, you know, too basic for him or whatever […] he definitely made me feel like I was stupid, basically, like made me feel like I wasn't very good basically.’ -participant 7, female

This student went on to link self-censorship explicitly to gender.

‘My thing with tutorials is I think they're about being wrong with confidence and there's something about being a woman, where it's kind of bad to be wrong about things and especially I think at Oxford, where, it feels like you’ve kind of broken every barrier and managed to finally get here, and now you have no room for mistake, I think that's how it feels, and I feel like, whereas the men will have the confidence to say things incorrectly and be corrected, I think there's a bigger pressure to say things correctly first time and so I think that definitely affected it.’ -participant 7, female

At the same time, one of the male participants expressed a similar self-censoring behaviour

‘I think, particularly when I'm in a tutorial with the two really smart people in my tutorial group, then I, like, don't really want to take up more time just for myself.’ -participant 6, male 

Bruce argues that the literature establishes self-censorship as being somewhat gendered. It is an action more commonly (but not solely) performed by female students.

Imposter Syndrome

‘Imposter syndrome’ is the phenomenon of feeling like you don’t deserve to be here. This could be evoked in tutorials by smart students:

‘There was this one guy in my group who I had had several tutorials with who would always ask very out of the box questions and I remember I always would feel like oh why didn't I think of that, why am I not having these kinds of thoughts and it kind of made me doubt myself a lot, kind of like imposter syndrome, like if I don't think this way, maybe I don’t deserve to be here. That’s what was running through my head whenever I had a tutorial with him […] it was just me wasting so much energy on having to convince myself that I am good enough to be here.’ -participant 2, female

While this has not been my experience of the Oxford admissions process at all, Bruce relays participants describing imposter syndrome as flowing from a sense that they might be ‘filling a quota’

‘Often, you have moments where you're sitting there and you're like, was I cut out for this, or was I just filling a quota or a box to say that they've now reached the number of female students that makes it, like, not seem sexist for the uni.’ -participant 10 

Low Relatedness

Most of Bruce’s analysis here exploits the concept of affinity bias: we are inclined to feel related to those who resemble us (e.g. those who share our gender). For male tutors this was sometimes framed as inadvertent, but also as relating to academic expectations

‘I'm not sure if it's a gender-specific thing, but me and the other girl, we've spoken about how one of our tutors seems to talk to us slightly differently. It's not like a visibly or like very obviously difference, it's just a slight, I don't know, he maybe expects a little bit less.’ -participant 9, female

Female tutors seemed to evoke positive affinity bias in female students.

‘I felt more comfortable when I had female tutors. I loved my maths tutor 'cause my maths tutor was a woman, I just felt like I related a lot to her and she just gave really good tutorials.’ -participant 1, female

This participant went on to discuss academic expectations.

‘I definitely felt more comfortable asking questions with female tutors. And there just tended to be a bit more of like a friendly rapport between myself and those tutors, like I just tended to feel a bit more of like a kinship with them, which I found very helpful. I just felt like they wouldn't be biased against me because they were women, so I didn't feel like I was already at a disadvantage and then was having to prove myself, whereas I felt like with other tutors I was consistently trying to prove myself to be a good student, whereas I felt like they [female tutors] already assumed that I was a good student.’ -participant 1, female

In terms of student-student interactions, female students often described male students speaking over them, which contrasted with tutorial contexts with only female students

‘I also definitely felt that there were no elements of showing off in the girls' tutorials, like we're all just there, like, I just want to, you know, understand things, absorb information.’ -participant 8, female

In this context, the representation of successful female scientists was described in terms which perhaps emphasise how rare and precious such representation is.

‘I saw [a female lecturer] at the front of the lecture hall and for the first time I kind of understood what representation meant and I was kind of like, oh my God, I can visualize myself being like her, 'cause like most of the other lecturers were all like old white men, basically. I think there was definitely a sense that I was an outlier, until I saw a lecturer was like me.’ -participant 7, female

The chapter ends with a discussion of the limitations of the study, again emphasising the self-selection bias of participants.

MON note: If you’re a male chemistry tutor, you might find it interesting to read Chapter 4 of this thesis in its entirety. It has the kind of insight which is hard to access within the staff-student power dynamic, and I personally found that being presented with candid student views challenged aspects of my teaching practice.

Chapter 5

Bruce identifies a few areas worth focusing on in future.

Tutorial Groups and Cohorts

The size and composition of tutorial groups are important to the experience of female students. Strategies such as letting students pick their own tutorial groups can be effective ways of letting them construct supportive tutorial environments.

Tutor Training

Training in the affective dimensions of the tutorial pedagogy might serve to improve the academic experience of students, and reflecting on how unconscious bias might play out in the tutorial context might also be a valuable activity for staff.

Employing more Female Staff

Seeing female academic staff is something which helps female students feel like they belong at Oxford. It would be good if this experience were more common.

Accountability

Bruce suggests that publishing relevant data (e.g. awarding gaps) might be one way to establish better accountability mechanisms within the department.

Further Research

A specific issue brought up by participants was how periods affect the experience of studying chemistry. Further research on this issue would be very valuable.

Endnote

It has exactly no bearing on the content of the study, but Bruce has perhaps written the most sensational dedication I have ever seen in an MChem thesis.

Lastly, I would like to thank my cat, Roxy, for being purrfect and for all the emotional supawt.