By Ryan Otteson | Reporter
Women make up almost three-fourths of the teaching population in the United States. However, according to the TIAA Institute, only 36% of women faculty are full professors in higher education. There are stereotypical speculations about why this is, including that women may be more nurturing or drawn to kids by nature and that men are more educated or knowledgable on research subjects.
When asked about this phenomenon, a School of Education’s Associate Professor Karon LeCompte gave some historical reasons for why most teachers in elementary and lower level education are women. As the population in the U.S. grew, the need for teachers also increased.
“Community leaders quickly realized that they only had to pay women about a third of what men were making,” LeCompte said.
Many of the men at this time were starting to look for more profitable jobs, so there was a higher demand for teachers in common schools and the women were able to fill those spots. LeCompte recognizes that there are more women teaching in elementary schools, which is not a bad circumstance, but she would like to see more men entering this field to be role models for young boys.
Being a woman in higher education, LeCompte has had to learn persistence as well as a work-life balance. She said that being a female professor is not all easy.
“It’s such a small percentage of women that do make it into higher education. I think it takes perseverance,” she said.
Denver junior Stella Steffen is an elementary education major and is already experiencing the need for perseverance in the education field.
“A challenging thing right now is learning what it’s like to balance being a teacher and being a student and being in college, which obviously is going to be different as I become an actual teacher,” Steffen said.
Watching kids find joy in succeeding is what she finds most valuable when she teaches, she said. She explained that most of her classmates are women, and the male students that are studying to become teachers may feel out of place at times but knows that their passion for what they do makes it worth it.
LeCompte said she loves working at Baylor, but expressed her concerns about the system that promotes men more frequently than women.
“Baylor is still in a process of having to rectify that situation with their current tenure promotions, while still being nondiscriminatory to the tenure applicants in the process of doing that,” she said.
