– Faculty used three dominant discourses to construct student gender expression and teacher identities: gender blindness, gender acknowledgment, and gender intervention. Faculty most frequently utilized discourses acknowledging gender inequity, which often limited their responsibilities to promote equity and highlights the pernicious nature of systemic gender bias.
– Institutions could expand discourse and better align faculty awareness of gender inequity with meaningful, pedagogical change strategies.
– In the first position, gender blindness, instructors in various ways denied perceiving their students’ gender, supporting a discourse that gender had no meaning or influence in the classroom.
– In the second and most frequent position, gender acknowledgment, participants took up positions of observation, drawing on discourse constructing specific gendered trends in students’ performance, preparation, and experiences in college STEM courses.
– In the third and least prevalent discursive position, gender intervention, instructors took up discourse that identified current practices as broadly detrimental to women, and constructed activist teacher identity positions by describing their own efforts to disrupt bias in their classrooms.