Are too many teachers women?

Balmed Out

Gravelly wrote: »

Seriously? I've a lad doing the leaving this year, and, although teaching wasn't something he considered, I am pretty sure if he had, that wouldn't have crossed his mind. Do 17/18 year olds really consider such a thing?

I did but it was 20 years ago when there was one abuse scandal after the next constantly in the media. I think it put a lot of people off. All of a sudden any man who worked or worse volunteered to work with kids was viewed by some with suspicion or even just jokes but they too would make it less attractive.
Perhaps its not in their minds anymore but the massive fall off of male teachers has also made the profession less likely to be taken up. I still think its an issue, I would imagine quite a few would still raise their eye at a man working in a creche etc.

tastyt

One point, teachers pay is not anywhere near ****, top of the scales between 60/70k.

Will ye cop on, what country are ye living in?

Christy42

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

There is a benefit and they should. It is not seen as a desirable job so they won't. They won't even think of the students in this case. I won't say they shouldn't or justify it. It is the reason however even if it is very flawed.

I also think they need to sweeten the deal to succeed imo but they won't try. Most notably in terms of respect.

mariaalice

tastyt wrote: »

One point, teachers pay is not anywhere near ****, top of the scales between 60/70k.

Will ye cop on, what country are ye living in?

After 25 years of permanent employment they will be on 61k but first you have to get the permanent job at that stage they will be about 50 so yest its not a bad salary at that stage.


https://www.nasuwt.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/6319e9f3-9a9d-4c6a-b6feadae64abdba7.pdf

Teacher salary's are not much different in the UK

freshpopcorn

I know a few lads who wanted to be primary school teachers and some of them did work experience and others went to college and left after either qualifying or after doing teaching practices. I'm from a rural area.
The biggest reason why they left or changed there mind about the career was because they realised that they couldn't cope with a room full of screamig children all day.
The second was the work load from paper work/etc but awkward parents were a big put off them.

jon1981

Gender quotas on entry to primary school undergrads. Larger tax breaks. Housing assist package. Education is too important to ignore, it's the foundation of any economy based on highly skilled and paid employment.

BrokenArrows

Gravelly wrote: »

Hmmmm. I don't want to be one of those people that knock teachers at every turn, but I'm not sure this is really the case. I've one offspring still in secondary school, and most of the correction is done in class, and a lot of the teaching via homework. How much planning and scheduling do lessons take? The curriculum is set and they follow it. I'm involved in a couple of sports clubs, and nearly every committee in sports clubs, charities etc. is dominated by teachers, because they are the only full-time workers with enough free time to do it. The preponderance of teachers in politics, at both local and national level would also indicate that they are not as busy as you indicate. Again, I'm not knocking teachers, and it's a job I certainly wouldn't do, but I think it's untrue that their hours are as long as they'd have you believe. It's a bit like all the civil servants that pretend that they are overworked and that there's any danger of them being fired for incompetence. It makes it difficult to take what they say seriously.

Possibly thats the difference between a good and bad teacher.

Anyone can walk into a class room and tell everyone to turn to page 54 and just read it out to them and follow the work.
A teacher needs to take this information in the book and actually teach it. Teaching it requires planning and recognizing the best way to get the class to learn this information which is more than just telling the students to read the book.

Also if your teacher is spending the time marking homework in class they are not doing much teaching are they?

raze_them_all_

brevity wrote: »

The question I would ask is why don't more men want to be teachers?

The accusations of paedophelia are a big deterrent

Mr. CooL ICE

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Why?

spurious

spurious wrote: »

...if the Teaching Council recognised those qualifications as allowing a person to teach Maths. They don't always.

Really, it's like a Monty Python sketch sometimes with them.

They're a total ****show. In something like ICT which they're meant to be pushing it would make more sense for someone with experience in the field to be able to skip the degree bit but I'll hazard a guess that won't be the case.

rebel girl 15

Outkast_IRE wrote: »

Easy way to get more male teachers . Run conversion courses in the evenings so this with degrees in engineering etc can train to be teachers and allow them onto the salary scale at a reasonable level. You would have a solid uptake

I'm based in the UK - a colleague of mine went to interview potential maths PGCE students last year, all bar one were male who were older and coming from industry as they had been made redundant.

spurious wrote: »

Presuming you get a job. This is what a lot here are missing. There are WAY more teachers being churned out than there are jobs for. There are thousands of unemployed teachers or teachers on 'contracts' of under 14 hours. No wonder people leave the country or get fed up trying for hours. I would not encourage anyone I cared about to go into teaching - male or female.

This! There are hundreds of Irish teachers leaving for the UK and Middle East every year fed up of getting half contracts or less, or working on contract when they know if they move they will end up on permanent contracts, with guaranteed employment.

spurious

rebel girl 15 wrote: »

This!There are hundreds of Irish teachers leaving for the UK and Middle East every year fed up of getting half contracts or less, or working on contract when they know if they move they will end up on permanent contracts, with guaranteed employment.

Or spending a year in a school on a promise of a contract the following year only to find the subject requirement has mysteriously changed during the summer and you cannot apply. Or being one of three teachers in a school with a third of an English teacher's job each, when one of the three could have a proper job if there was any desire on the part of management bodies to get away from the preponderance of part-time teachers in the school.

Hell, there aren't even any 'wholetime permanent' jobs any more, just the 'contracts of indefinite duration' which they claim are the same.
Well if they are the same, why not call them 'wholetime permanent'?

mahamageehad

I think that the difference between primary and secondary teachers needs to be more clearly spelled out in this thread to be honest, as I think the differences vary depending on that.

I went to a convent school for primary, and all the teachers were female. For the Christian brothers school, their ratio was about 70-30 men to women, although I believe that's come down over the years. No lad from my extended social circle went on to train to be a primary teacher, while a fair few girls did. I also went to a convent secondary and I'd say 40% of the teachers were men - mostly in P.E., Maths and Science. At a guess I'd say I know 5 girls for every 3 boys that trained to be a secondary teacher, so my guess is that at secondary level it's more diverse.

I'd agree with PB that Irish may be a factor at primary level. More girls take honours Irish, so boys are immediately at a disadvantage here. I also think there's an element of gender roles at play - for most 17 and 18 year old lads that I know, the idea of being in charge of 30 4 years old is horrifying - they just have no interest. Girls are, or are at least assumed to be, more "maternal". Primary teaching (and early childhood or creche) are seen as "women's" jobs and lots of young lads are put off by that - and that's partially because many of them only had female teachers so it's a vicious circle. I'd also wonder if the religious schools, especially the nuns, had a historical preference to only hire their own gender? At primary school level, I'd be genuinely surprised if the potential for allegations of abuse puts lads off tbh.

At secondary school level, I think the worry of accusations is a bit more likely and possibly a factor. Money is also a big thing here though too - I'm not saying being a teacher is badly paid, but if you have a degree in Maths and Physics you'd almost certainly be limiting your paycheck by going into teaching. Actually, that goes for both men and women, but men are more likely to have that specific combination. Especially, as mentioned earlier in this thread, these subjects may not even have full time hours available! The lack of available jobs may also be a factor? Especially when other industries are screaming out for these kinds of graduates (some engineering disciplines, cybersecurity etc.) For both primary and secondary it's also largely thankless work, perhaps this is also a factor?

I wouldn't be against any initiatives to bring in more male primary teachers. I think fixing that will help fix the imbalance at secondary level. Specific recruitment drives as mentioned earlier would be a great idea. However, that said, we're currently massively overstocked with teachers so unless some kind of gender quota is being implemented, I think we'll be seeing this inequality continue for a long time. I think that these same reasons are applicable across many other industries too - the OH is a social care worker and as a man he can almost walk into a job anywhere as there are so few in the field. Nursing would be another example.

raze_them_all_

raze_them_all_ wrote: »

The accusations of paedophelia are a big deterrent

There are a lot of good reasons being given for men not wanting to be teachers but I refuse to entertain the notion that being in fear of accusations is one of the reasons. I've never heard it even mentioned by anyone before and I know quite a few male teachers.

ShowMeTheCash

Jake Orange Molecule wrote: »

There are a lot of good reasons being given for men not wanting to be teachers but I refuse to entertain the notion that being in fear of accusations is one of the reasons. I've never heard it even mentioned by anyone before and I know quite a few male teachers.

Well I suggest you ask males who are not teachers and why they did not consider teaching, asking your male friends who are teacher shows a big of a flaw in your argument.

Permabear

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Your link is to a media report rather than the actual study - so I must make some time to read the full study. But I would be very sceptical of it from the outset.

First the difference appears to be 4% which is not as large as they article is making it sound. But the article is not clear what they mean by 4% better.

Second the report does not seem to dig into _why_ it might be that there is a difference. Is it because the students perform better under same gender teachers? Or is it that the teachers themselves perform differently with same gender pupils? The report says for example that boys with female teachers are "more likely to be seen as disruptive". That speaks more to the teachers attitudes to her class - than the students response to a teacher. Could the results of examinations be that the teacher is more inclined to mark up students of the same gender?

Third therefore follows from that - this is at best a correlation not a causation. There are any number of other factors which could therefore explain the results rather than simply assuming that pupils do better with the same gender of teacher.

Further the report - at least as reported on here I have as I said not read the original yet - does not dig into the distinctions between single and dual gendered classes. Does the correlation being reported on here hold true when there are single sex class rooms as well as mixed? A yes or no answer would each have implications on the causations behind the correlations identified.

On top of all that there is any number of other factors to normalise for which I do not see mentioned in the article. For example does the effect modify in schools where the majority of the teaching staff is one gender or another - compared to schools where the teaching staff has a more uniform split? Are teachers of a particular gender - andor with pupils of a certain gender - treated any different that might carry in some way into the class room? And so on and so on.

All in all too vague a result and report to make any useful assumptions on. And even if after all that - rather than merely assume matching gender to gender is the way to go it would pay to distil out _why_ the correlation/causation exists and see if the effect can teach us something entirely new about teaching methodologies.

All that said though I would _like_ to see more gender diversity in the teaching population sure. That is a nice ideal. But at the end of the day the contents of the underwear of a teacher are irrelevant to me. I want the best people for the job selected for each class room - their gender or sexuality is incidental really.

Shemale

mariaalice wrote: »

http://www.into.ie/pay/PayScales/

So from just over 30k to 61k over 25 years.

If your start at 25 by the time you are 50 you will be on 61k the upper end of the salary is good.

You are forgetting it being 61k after 25 years inflation.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

freshpopcorn

Jake Orange Molecule wrote: »

There are a lot of good reasons being given for men not wanting to be teachers but I refuse to entertain the notion that being in fear of accusations is one of the reasons. I've never heard it even mentioned by anyone before and I know quite a few male teachers.

The odd person says this in my experience but both male and female teachers are always very careful now.
The biggest reason I've heard is they can't put up with screaming children.

ShowMeTheCash

ShowMeTheCash wrote: »

Well I suggest you ask males who are not teachers and why they did not consider teaching, asking your male friends who are teacher shows a big of a flaw in your argument.

The ones who aren't teachers are not teachers for reasons other than this that I can assure you.

It never even entered my head as a reason for not being a teacher as I would consider changing career to be one except for reasons like poor salary, difficulty in getting a permenant job and having to do a hdip despite being extremely highly qualified already in the subjects I could teach.

As I said, I refuse to believe any rational person would really consider this a reason not to become a teacher.

Shemale

freshpopcorn wrote: »

The odd person says this in my experience but both male and female teachers are always very careful now.
The biggest reason I've heard is they can't put up with screaming children.

Exactly this, since the dawn of time men were hunter gatherers and even back to my dads generation born in 40's there was very little involvement in rearing children.

I love my two kids more than anything but sometimes I really struggle to keep my voice down when both of them are kicking off at the same time.

I think it might be as simple as women are more predisposed to nurturing than men and this would explain the numbers in nursing, teaching, creches, childminders and so on.

Mr. CooL ICE

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

I'd agree if it was for secondary students, but for primary, I strongly disagree.

The curriculum for higher and lower LC maths isn't as simple as saying one is a more difficult version than the other. They are different in what is taught. Even OL LC maths is far beyond what a potential teacher should need for primary level maths.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

ShowMeTheCash

Jake Orange Molecule wrote: »

The ones who aren't teachers are not teachers for reasons other than this that I can assure you.

It never even entered my head as a reason for not being a teacher as I would consider changing career to be one except for reasons like poor salary, difficulty in getting a permenant job and having to do a hdip despite being extremely highly qualified already in the subjects I could teach.

As I said, I refuse to believe any rational person would really consider this a reason not to become a teacher.

You do not need to assure me of anything, have you asked them all the reasons? Pay might be a leading factor but most reasonable people weight up all the pro's and cons's to a career choice.

Most of my male friends who are teachers teach at secondary level none teach at the national/primary school level.

I thought about secondary school myself before Uni but I never gave primary school a second thought however.

Being a male around small children that are not your own is always going to be met with certain level of scrutiny and caution and albeit it is a highly sensitive positions dealing with young kids I am very aware that the general public do not look at men and women the same within this capacity. I did not consider primary school partly because of this. It was not the only reason but I bet every single male teacher you know has at least thought about it.

spurious

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Compounded if the same child has a dearth of 'good' male role models in his home life.

Buford T. Justice XIX

mahamageehad wrote: »

I think that the difference between primary and secondary teachers needs to be more clearly spelled out in this thread to be honest, as I think the differences vary depending on that.

I went to a convent school for primary, and all the teachers were female. For the Christian brothers school, their ratio was about 70-30 men to women, although I believe that's come down over the years. No lad from my extended social circle went on to train to be a primary teacher, while a fair few girls did. I also went to a convent secondary and I'd say 40% of the teachers were men - mostly in P.E., Maths and Science. At a guess I'd say I know 5 girls for every 3 boys that trained to be a secondary teacher, so my guess is that at secondary level it's more diverse.

I'd agree with PB that Irish may be a factor at primary level. More girls take honours Irish, so boys are immediately at a disadvantage here. I also think there's an element of gender roles at play - for most 17 and 18 year old lads that I know, the idea of being in charge of 30 4 years old is horrifying - they just have no interest. Girls are, or are at least assumed to be, more "maternal". Primary teaching (and early childhood or creche) are seen as "women's" jobs and lots of young lads are put off by that - and that's partially because many of them only had female teachers so it's a vicious circle. I'd also wonder if the religious schools, especially the nuns, had a historical preference to only hire their own gender? At primary school level, I'd be genuinely surprised if the potential for allegations of abuse puts lads off tbh.

At secondary school level, I think the worry of accusations is a bit more likely and possibly a factor. Money is also a big thing here though too - I'm not saying being a teacher is badly paid, but if you have a degree in Maths and Physics you'd almost certainly be limiting your paycheck by going into teaching. Actually, that goes for both men and women, but men are more likely to have that specific combination. Especially, as mentioned earlier in this thread, these subjects may not even have full time hours available! The lack of available jobs may also be a factor? Especially when other industries are screaming out for these kinds of graduates (some engineering disciplines, cybersecurity etc.) For both primary and secondary it's also largely thankless work, perhaps this is also a factor?

I wouldn't be against any initiatives to bring in more male primary teachers. I think fixing that will help fix the imbalance at secondary level. Specific recruitment drives as mentioned earlier would be a great idea. However, that said, we're currently massively overstocked with teachers so unless some kind of gender quota is being implemented, I think we'll be seeing this inequality continue for a long time. I think that these same reasons are applicable across many other industries too - the OH is a social care worker and as a man he can almost walk into a job anywhere as there are so few in the field. Nursing would be another example.

Seeing as there is a gender imbalance in those roles, do you not find it somewhat unusual that there is no constant media reporting on the need for gender balance in those sectors?

As someone pointed out earlier, there is also no campaign to get women into construction, a predominately male preserve or the general manual labour market where there is also a massive gender imbalance.

I was brought up with equality and treated every one according to how I found them rather than how their gender would pressure me to find them. I find myself very uneasy with gender quotas targeting one sex in one profession when there is no similar campaign for the opposite sex in another role?

Isn't/shouldn't that be the true role of equality, all equal all the time?

Permabear

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

That is a big if though. I really need to read it myself and see what 4% actually means. It really could be anything. An average of 4% per student - or if you average them all a 4% different - is it a fixed 4% or a relative 4% - or is it just that 4% more of the students in one group went over some threshold figure. Etc etc etc. 4% is so vague as to be literally meaningless in isolation.

Especially as the media has a long history when reporting on things of finding the most sensational way to interpret percentages. Like if something changes your chance of cancer from .000001% to .000002% the media will blare out a headline of "100% increase in cancer risk!!!" for clicks.

But I am as sceptical that if a child is surrounded in people of both sexes - that not meeting "a single teacher of his own gender across his full 8 years of primary education" - is any more significant than the whole "homosexual parenting" thing where one gender is missing from the parenting role. I think it unlikely to be that significant at all in either case.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

spurious

spurious wrote: »

The Department have been trying for years to get more men into teaching and also to tackle the under-performance of a large cohort of boys. They have a whole section dedicated to it.

Scarcity of full-time jobs; payscale that takes 20 years to reach the top of; very limited promotional opportunities all have an effect.

People hear teacher and think 'Ah, June July and August!' and 'Off at 4 every day!', but not, 'working two hours a day' (thus unable to collect social welfare or apply for any other jobs), 'signing on for mid-term breaks, Easter, Christmas, summer', not to mention the abuse some people have to take daily from some people's darlings, physical attacks, desctruction of personal property etc..

The voice of experience and insight. It's a wonder anyone wants to be a teacher, regardless of gender.

I think the best person for the job should get the job. I don't believe in gender quotas in any given workplace. I do believe that gender-specific barriers to entry in any given workplace should be addressed, in the name of equality of opportunity for everyone.