HE socialises women to avoid leading difficult classroom debates

Universities like to think of the classroom as a place where difficult conversations become possible. Bring students together, introduce a contentious question and, with the right amount of intellectual freedom, watch learning happen.

But there is a prerequisite we rarely discuss: someone has to be willing to start the conversation.

That becomes particularly important when the subject is religion. Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become some of the most politically and emotionally charged issues in the classroom. At precisely the moment when students may need an instructor capable of creating space for disagreement and complexity, women are less confident than men about leading those conversations, our data suggests.

The data comes from the Including Faculty on Religious, Spiritual, & Secular Mattering (InFORM) project, a US-wide study conducted by the College Impact Laboratory at The Ohio State University and funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. InFORM examines how faculty members’ religious, spiritual, secular and political identities intersect with their teaching, research and service. The project includes a national faculty survey and more than 100 in-depth interviews.

When we examined lecturers’ confidence in leading classroom discussions about religious difference, one pattern stood out across disciplines.

Women reported significantly less confidence discussing antisemitism, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Islamophobia. And the differences were not trivial. Even after accounting for academic discipline, race, tenure status, political orientation, state context and personal religious identity, identifying as a woman was among the strongest negative predictors of confidence.

It wasn’t the only predictor. Teachers at public institutions also reported lower confidence – perhaps because they are more concerned with First Amendment issues relating to separation of church. So do faculty in STEM disciplines and, in some cases, business faculty, probably because of a lack of pedagogical training in negotiating these issues in class. Yet – contrary to common assumptions – personal religious identity did not meaningfully predict confidence. Nor did political orientation.

So why is gender a factor? The data cannot tell us that patriarchal socialisation caused women’s lower confidence. But it does invite an uncomfortable question about the way academia teaches women to navigate professional risk.

Women routinely operate in academic environments where authority can be scrutinised differently depending on who is exercising it. Research suggests that, for women, speaking forcefully can be interpreted as aggression. Expressing uncertainty can be interpreted as weakness. Challenging a colleague can carry interpersonal costs. And taking a public position on a contentious subject can create professional exposure that extends well beyond the classroom.

None of this means that women are inherently more cautious than men. It means that confidence itself may be socially licensed. We might call this the patriarchy of confidence: a system in which some people are given greater permission to speak with authority, while others learn to calculate the consequences of being wrong, being unpopular or simply being perceived as too much.

Consider a professor facing a discussion about antisemitism after a contentious campus protest, or a conversation about Islamophobia following a violent event overseas. There is no perfectly neutral way to enter such a discussion. The professor has to decide whether to raise the issue, how much context to provide, which voices to include and how to respond when students disagree.

A professor who feels confident enough to enter that conversation can make room for disagreement. A professor who does not might reasonably decide that the risks are too high.

And silence can look deceptively like not caring about the issue.

This is particularly consequential now. Universities are increasingly expected to respond to religious conflict while simultaneously navigating intense scrutiny over what faculty say in classrooms. Recent campus research has also drawn attention to the role faculty and classroom environments can play in students’ experiences of antisemitism and religious hostility.

Universities spend considerable energy teaching students to find their voices. We should probably spend more time asking why some of their academics have learned to hold theirs back.

The answer cannot simply be to tell women to become more confident. That would put the responsibility back on the people who are already calculating the risk.

Instead, institutions should ask what they are doing to make difficult conversations possible in the first place. Faculty development should include concrete preparation for discussing difficult topics, such as religious difference, antisemitism and Islamophobia. Departments should make clear that thoughtful engagement with controversial subjects is part of teaching, not evidence that a professor has wandered outside the boundaries of acceptable academic work.

Confidence is not simply a pleasant feeling. In a classroom, it can determine which subjects make it on to the syllabus, which questions get asked and which controversies are addressed – or quietly avoided. It is vital to build academic environments in which difficult conversations do not disappear simply because the person standing at the front of the classroom has learned that silence is safer.

Matthew J. Mayhew is the William Ray and Marie Adamson Flesher professor of educational administration at The Ohio State University.

Christa Winkler is associate professor of higher education leadership at Mississippi State University.

Musbah Shaheen is assistant professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.