Male teachers not as emotionally intelligent as female teachers?

cnn27

I came across this article about male teachers and one comment in it annoyed me. "[font=source-sans-pro, arial, sans-serif]it's possible that women are more emotionally intelligent, and are better equipped at dealing with students' growing number of emotional needs'.[/font][font=source-sans-pro, arial, sans-serif] I'm a guy who teaches in a large secondary school (in Manchester) , part of my role involves pastoral issues, and I've dealt with a lot of pupils going through challenging issues. I'd like to think I'm reasonably good at that, feedback from both kids and parents has always been fantastic, and I've built some great relationships with kids. So it's really annoying to see someone make a throwaway comment like that, as it does have an effect on peoples views of men in the more pastoral roles, which then impacts on men being willing to apply for the roles, and also impacts on schools being willing to give pastoral roles to men. Just wondering what others think? Has anyone experienced stereotypes like that? Or do people generally agree with what was said in the article? [/font]

GreenFolder2

You'll always get that kind of stereotypical stuff thrown around.
Both genders are very capable of being emotionally intelligent or not.

There's sexism creeping into the debate where women are being once again drawn as being suited for caring roles while men are being portrayed as some kind of mix of emotionaless technocrats or at worst threatening.

When you think about it we've all dealt with horrible emotionally absent females and horrible males who have zero empathy - plenty of drill sargent managers out there and we've all dealt with really caring females and males be they grannies, grandads, that teacher you could talk to, your best mate, a councillor, a guy in the pub you chat to about life or that woman at work who brings you out for a cup coffee at lunch because they've picked up that you've had a horrific day.

The reality is both genders have historically taken on caring and helping roles in all sorts of professions and social activities.

I find this stereotyping stuff goes back to the fact that a %*still* want to shoebox women into caring roles and men into rough work or technical roles.

Also people will conform to social stereotypes so it can be a self fulfilling prophesy too.

There's a lot of intellectually lazy nonsense out there and it's something that should be left in the 1950s.

Your personality is what matters. If you're good at pastoral stuff, you're good at it!

Stoogie

Excellent reply.

evolving_doors

People are people.