Women and the internet


Motivated by the video Challenging The Algorithms of Oppression I decided to do a search of my own today. I didn't know exactly what to expect but the above picture is what I got when I searched female teachers, female teacher sex scandals. The first chapter in Net Smart discussed the high usage of use by the younger generation and it sparked a thought about how many might be female. With women historically being oppressed it felt like a natural connection once I heard the following quote from Reingold. 
"This interest by U.S. youths in media production practices might well be a function of adolescents' needs to explore their identities and experiment with social interaction." -Howard Reingold

For comparison purposes I decided why not search male teachers and this is what I got.

Essentially all about why we need more male teachers. Such positive first results. Could it be because female teachers are sex offenders (haha just kidding)? I find this so telling and interesting. While I know we do have very low numbers of male teachers in comparison to female teachers I didn't realize a search like this would be so dramatic. Now imagine being a female child searching a possible future career and this is the search result you get. Meanwhile your male peer student wanting the same career gets such a positive encouraging result. Now thinking as a teacher I am sitting here thinking wow what an opportunity for teaching our students how to detect the crap from the internet. I think finding examples like this and showing our students could teach so much more then just telling and lecturing them about it. Now I probably wouldn't suggest the porn influenced ones discussed in the videos but no doubt their are plenty of others more appropriate to show that still get the point across. Like her Trevon Martin example for instance if you were a high school teacher. After all when they are hearing his name throughout the news they are going to have questions and go in search of answers. We as teachers could help to filter out the crap with them. 




Comments

  1. Ben GutenbergOctober 22, 2018 at 2:28 PM

    Very interesting! At the same time, very discouraging. To me, this raises questions about how moderated search results should be. I don't know the search algorithms that well, but is Google obligated as a private company to modify the results that come up in the case of female teachers? If these are the most popular results, then I understand why they pop up first, but it does lead to a very damaging feedback loop where, as people only find those links, they grow ever more popular and substantial change is never made. This is a tricky moral dilemma to me.

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  2. UnknownOctober 22, 2018 at 3:06 PM

    This is so interesting! I wonder what it would take to make the search results more along the lines of what teachers would want other people to see? Sad that that's what gets the most buzz. It was encouraging to see the top results for male teachers had to deal with the shortage and gender divide. Thanks for digging into this!

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