4th March 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Blue Tutors receives roughly equal applications from prospective male and female tutors, but is there a significant difference in tutoring success between the sexes?
It’s interesting to note that sometimes students (or rather, their parents) explicitly ask for a male or a female tutor. Obviously at Blue Tutors we have no bias towards either sex when deciding on the best tutor for a particular student, but is there any grounding in a parent’s belief that the gender of their tutor is important?
There are many reasons given when either a male or female tutor are requested. Occasionally the reasons are religious, and that’s not really something with which one can argue; we don’t have to agree with the reason, but will, of course, always respect it. The other reasons tend to be feelings for how a student interacts with tutors of differing genders. These reasons tend to be based on stereotypes; men have more authority, women are more compassionate etc.
Obviously none of the above reasons are objectively defensible in regard to a tutor’s actual teaching ability.
However, with the advantage of being able to view a large number of our tutors’ tuition records, we can use our measures of how well they have performed to decide whether there does appear to be a significant difference, on average, between the sexes.
One of our measurements is out tier system, which takes into account a tutor’s performance at their assessment, the number of lessons taught by a tutor (both on average and in total), and the feedback received from a tutor’s students. This shows that roughly 80% of our tier 3 tutors (the highest tier) are female.
Like any statistic taken from a number of variables, it’s difficult to understand exactly how this difference has been created. Is it because female tutors are more committed? Are they better teachers? Do they encourage better feedback from students? It’s impossible to say without further investigation, but it’s clear that something in the UK is either encouraging women to go to education, or discouraging men, because our statistic mirrors the trend for new teachers in the UK, particularly in primary schools.