Building Block Activities will vary from week to week but are designed to give you the opportunity to learn more about the topics we discuss in class. These activities may involve reading a scholarly article, reading a blog post, listening to a portion of a podcast, watching a short video, and so on, all related to a specific topic that connects to course content. All of these materials will be posted and/or linked below. After working through these materials, you’ll need to submit a brief paper demonstrating what you’ve learned and reflecting on the materials.
This week’s topic is all about sexism. For this week’s Building Block Activities, you’ll explore gender—and, to a lesser extent, racial/ethnic—representation in academia and a key hypothesis that can explain these statistics. Note that the two articles I’ve assigned are fairly heavy in the analyses they report. You don’t need to understand how all of the analyses work; just make sure you understand the arguments and main points of each. Here are the materials you’ll need to work through before writing your paper:
Material #1: Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines (scholarly article), Science: Leslie, Cimpian et al. (2015).pdf
Material #2: Google, Tell Me. Is My Son a Genius? (blog post), New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/google-tell-me-is-my-son-a-genius.html (Links to an external site.) or download a pdf version here: Download Stephen-Davidowitz (2014).pdf
Material #3: Female Professors Hardly Brilliant, Certainly Not Genius (blog post), U.S. News & World Report: https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2016/03/07/female-professors-hardly-brilliant-certainly-not-genius (Links to an external site.)
Material #4: Adults and children implicitly associate brilliance with men more than women (scholarly article), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: Storage et al. (2020).pdf
If you want to earn full points on these assignments, pay special attention to the requirements:
- Format requirements: 1 page (headings don’t count toward the length requirement), 1-inch margins, double spaced, 12-pt font, Times New Roman.
- Content requirements: a very brief “Summary” of the assigned materials, a “Connections” section in which you connect these materials to your own experience or to what we’ve discussed in class, and a “Reflections” section in which you simply reflect on the topic.
Here’s how you can expect to be graded:
- 2 pts for following format requirements
- 4 pts for following content requirements
- 4 pts for being thoughtful in what you write and illustrating that you really worked through the assigned materials
