Have you ever thought about the fact that 50 per cent of the population is - on average - physically taller and more muscular than you?

For most female teachers this is a day-to-day reality. It is quite normal for me (at 5ft 1) to be stood in front of a mob of Year 11 boys who, when standing, tower over me and could quite easily overpower me.

This is not the same for most of their male teachers.

So, is it easier to control a class if you are male?

Behaviour management

Well, it shouldn’t be. And I don’t think it is. But the perception certainly exists in schools that the big burly man will sort the rowdy boys out.

And that perception can be brought into reality because so many people buy into it.

It’s exacerbated, too, by the physical and masculine language we use around behaviour, and the fact much of the behaviour advice being dished out comes from male consultants (Sue Cowley being a rare and welcome female voice). 

All this undermines female teachers and is a highly damaging lesson for pupils. Who you are and how you identify should not dictate your role in a school or the way you teach. Yet inevitably it does.

Gender myths

I am ashamed to say I have been guilty of it, when I was a younger teacher. I would not walk into a rowdy room full of male students, but would get a taller, louder - generally male - colleague to go booming in for me.

And when my Year 7 tutor group felt more inclined to talk to me (their “in-school mum”) about their friendship dramas than their male teachers, I embraced that. And, if I’m honest, I was probably exactly the same at their age.

So even though I know I consciously dislike conforming to gender roles, I find myself swept into adopting them.

A new approach

How can we turn this around?

1. We need to have systems in place in schools where gender is not an issue in what or how you are taught. That requires consistency across classrooms in the teaching so that teachers do not fall into - or are pushed into - gendered ways of teaching.

2. We need behaviour systems that take gender out of behaviour management: that requires a strict behaviour policy, enforced consistently.

3. We need to be more conscious that this is an issue and that we need to tackle it pro-actively. We need more female voices, too, in the behaviour debate. 

We preach equality to students, but how much equality do we model?

Too often, the big male teacher enforcing behaviour and the female teacher handing out the pastoral lifebelt are the norm.

Katie White is a teacher in the south-west of England