Are We Doing Enough to End Gender Bias?

Gender bias has been a huge topic of discussion in years past and there are people who

think its been dealt with and done, but there are a lot of reasons to believe otherwise. There is

little denying that it has been a problem before in history, but there are still women being

affected by it. On college campuses, women are experiencing gender bias and there are

colleges still taking action to prevent it. So yes, I agree that gender bias is an issue and

encourage colleges to continue developing programs that spread awareness of this ongoing

problem.

As recently as 1999, an institution as big as MIT had one of their female professors fight

back against gender bias that she was experiencing (Wilson). Nancy Hopkins was a biology

professor at the university and didnt realize for a long time that she was being discriminated

against. Ms. Hopkins said that when she first started she had, feelings of isolation and

alienation, because she had no mentors or many other female colleagues to help her with her

experience. Her office and lab space was a lot smaller than other male professors which

seemed unfair. However, Ms. Hopkins finally decided to take action after she read MITs policy

on sexual assault which stated, Harassment was to be in place where the atmosphere was so

threatening you couldnt do your work. She thought to herself, This is my entire life. The

Dean, Robert J. Birgeneau, acknowledged the problem and has since improved the gender bias

on campus. Gender bias is hard to deny and many other campuses have also taken action.

Today, this still holds true on some of our college campuses.

Research done in my class proves that gender bias still exists on the University of North

Carolina at Charlottes campus. We sent out a survey to many of our classmates that asked

questions about gender bias and how they feel about it. Of our 60 responses, 16 people said

that they had experienced gender bias on UNCCs campus. Although this is only about 27
percent, its still alarming because theoretically, there should be nobody feeling the affects. If

you also take into account that 41 of the respondents were female, thats close to half of

females that struggled with it on campus. Many of these responses were done by freshman, so

if the survey could have gotten out to more upperclassmen, there may have been more people

saying theyve felt gender bias affect them. However, probably the most interesting result from

our data is that 70 percent of people said that efforts should be made to end gender bias. This

means that even though not everyone claims to have experienced it personally, they are aware

that it happens and that the school needs to do something about it. The fact is, gender bias still

occurs on UNCCs campus, and that could mean that many other schools are having the same

problem across the country. Another issue that arose from our results, is whether or not the

university is actually doing anything about it. We asked in our survey if students felt that efforts

had already been made to end gender bias, and almost 75 percent of people said that they

either didnt know or that they didnt believe efforts have been made. Considering that people

are experiencing gender bias even today on campus, the school should be doing something

about it.

UNCC and its faculty have started to make strides in ending gender bias. The university

continually holds events and conferences that talk about the issue and offer ways to solve it, the

biggest one being a two part series called, Gender Bias in Academia. Each conference

discusses gender bias in different areas of life. The first deals with grad school and how women

are being affected by admissions among many other things. The second deals with women

trying to find employment, and how many job markets are male dominated, thus making it hard

for women to compete. Thankfully, UNCC also has approved organizations for women that help

bring them together. The SWE or Society for Women Engineers, is an organization designed to
get women involved with each other in STEM related fields that have been typically dominated

by males. So it seems that UNCC is trying to help, but how much help is that really?

Gender bias still continues to be problematic in todays society, but it used to be much

worse. For UNCC and its students, things are looking to be in the positive direction. The school

is being active in their pursuit to end gender bias, which I fully support because students on

campus are still complaining about it. Its clearly an issue that needs to be addressed. How can

we still live in a society that doesnt have gender equality? The campuses are doing their jobs,

but what else can be done?

 Bibliography

Wilson, Robin. 1999. "An MIT Professor's Suspicion of Bias Leads to a New Movement for
Academic Women." Chronicle Of Higher Education 46, no. 15: A16-A18. ERIC, EBSCOhost
(accessed March 29, 2017).