ABSTRACT
That girls and women have had unequal access to educational institutions is news to no one. Even the traditionalist who holds to false accounts of sex differences and inadequate justification for gender roles within education might well argue that gender differentiations within education are not meant to constitute a gender bias. Studies on teacher-student interactions indicate that within coeducational classrooms, teachers, regardless of sex, interact more with boys, give boys more attention and that this pattern intensifies at the secondary and college levels. There are linguistic styles of speech that can affect women's participation opportunities in the classroom. In the case of gender-differentiated speech patterns, a male valuation scheme might well recommend a single classroom speech pattern, an assertive one, and offer girls and women special training in this form of "educated speech". A gender-sensitive perspective is a higher-order perspective than that involved in the gender-free strategy.
