My 3-year-old daughter is a shrewd negotiator.
One of her many schemes is to convince us to let her reserve something for later if we won’t let her have it in the moment. She’ll come to us and ask for a piece of candy. The answer is usually no. She’ll nod respectfully but then ask for the same thing in a different way:
“Can I put a piece of candy on the table?”
When we inquire why she wants to do this, she explains that perhaps later, maybe after dinner, it would be all right for her to eat it. Then the candy would be ready for her.
This is surprisingly effective.
At any given time in our house, the dining room table is littered with objects or treats over which my daughter is in current negotiations. And yet, by bedtime, the table is always cleared of clutter.
When I first began teaching at the college level, I unknowingly developed a bad habit: I favored the male students. I realized a few years in that I was deferring to them.
In my flimsy defense, there were many reasons why this was the case. For starters, during my first five years of teaching, I was an adjunct and taught undergraduates at night. Often, I was the only teacher in the entire building late at night with my 20 or so students, many of whom were male. To some degree, I felt some fear as a young female with so many male students. One night in class, during a particularly heated debate about gun control in which two male students became verbally threatening, my fear was justified.
Aside from that, I’ve always gotten along well with men. I was a friend to boys growing up and in college. And I worked better with men than women in my first few jobs out of college. So, as an instructor, I naturally gave them the attention I’d always given them.
All of that is on me.
But the other side is that the men behaved differently from the women in class. They talked louder. They were not shy about criticizing my thoughts or the thoughts of their classmates. They never struggled to speak their minds. No wonder I favored them; they gave me something to favor.
And yet, the women in my classes were consistently better writers, more effective public speakers, more thoughtful debaters, and kinder classmates.
So when it finally occurred to me, on the long drive home one night, that I was more likely to pay attention to the men—because of fear, intimidation, interest, and awe—I knew I had to change my ways.
The next class period I publicly apologized to the students. I spoke to everyone but made eye contact only with the women. I said that while I knew I had been fair in grading, perhaps I’d been too quick to defer to the louder, deeper voices in the class. And, from that day forward, I pledged to be the biggest advocate my female students had ever had. I offered them private meetings, reference letters, job counseling. And then I challenged them to speak up. Sit in the front row. Interject more. And not let themselves be intimidated by the men in the class as I had been.
Everyone stared at me blankly.
I felt foolish. How arrogant of me to assume that my female students needed my advice, let alone wanted it. Maybe my favoring the men had been invisible to them. Had I just drawn their attention to something they’d never even noticed? Had I offended the women? Alienated the men?
Yet the next day I received two emails, both from female students asking for letters of recommendation. A third asked for career advice. And a handful of others added me as a friend on Facebook.
Now, having moved on from long commutes and late-night classes to a full-time position with office hours, I find myself in different terrain. And my relationship with my female students is quite different.
At the graduate level, the women don’t struggle in class to compete with the men. They contribute equally. I don’t find myself deferring to the male voices, as they never seem to overpower the women’s. Both men and women speak up confidently, and challenge each other without fear. They all seem to be strong writers, good speakers, and kind to each other.
But while there isn’t much difference between my male and female students academically at the graduate level, my female students struggle with a host of concerns that my male students either don’t experience or don’t express.
Emails from my female grad students pour in about missing class because they are stuck at home with a sick baby and no child care. Or they cry after class about a bad grade—the result of lack of study time because of work and child-care responsibilities. I see them struggling to juggle more, excel more.
The biggest mistake I see them make is in thinking they can’t get everything they want out of life. They tend to stop themselves short of going after what they want. I see some of them settle for mediocre relationships. Or become mothers and abandon their professional ambition. Or give up on the idea of having kids because their future job will require so much travel.
When I started off as a commuting adjunct, I was married but had no children. And it’s clear to me now that my perception of women then was born out of my lack of knowledge about them. What I knew of women was that they were mean in junior high, desperately tried to fit in during high school, fun in college, and competitive as coworkers. And I felt little kinship with them.
So, in the beginning of my career, it wasn’t just the powerful voices of the men or the fact that I had been friends with more boys than girls that drove my favoritism in the classroom. It was that my own relationships with women lacked depth.
Motherhood has given me that. I saw how outsiders treated my husband and me differently as parents. I saw my peers struggle, like me, to achieve balance between work and motherhood. I experienced firsthand how my ambitions conflicted with my maternal instincts, and I worked hard not to resent the men who didn’t feel the same pressure or as much conflict. I battled problems with body image, depression, discrimination.
It took the birth of my children to give me insight into the complicated role of being a woman.
Now, when I hear a knock on my office door and turn to see one of my bright female students standing in the doorway, I’m ready for her. If she’s coming to me about a class assignment, I talk her through it. If she’s coming to me for help selecting next semester’s courses, I give my feedback.
If I’m lucky, she’s there just to talk about life. And then I rely on the wisdom of my demanding, opinionated 3-year-old daughter at home—begging for a cookie to put on the table until after dinner—because she has taught me the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned as a woman: Ask for everything you want. Never take no for an answer. Find a way to have it all.
And leave nothing on the table.
