Allocating female students to the only female supervisors!!??

[Floofle]

Please help me articulate what's wrong with this...

I am a relatively new member of female teaching staff in a very male dominated area, and in an email about allocating supervisors to the new students, there were a number of guidelines.

Some were quite sensible things such as "please try to distribute students across supervisors", but it also said:
"Please try to allocate female students to Annie and Sarah" (names changed)

I am "sarah", and basically we are the only 2 female supervisors. Out of about 10 on the list...

This is awful right??? How do I say this? The person sending the email is quite senior to me but I am now acting Programme lead on the MSc as someone else is off on long term ill...

My cynical take is that one of your male colleagues is a massive perv but can't be singled out, so this is their way of making sure he isn't alone with any female students...

Interesting mix of responses!

To answer some questions...

• it's pastoral supervision, not projects, so the subject area of the supervisor doesn't really matter
• the 2 female staff are on the junior end of the scale. There are some male at the same level, but all the higher ups are male.
• the MSc students at least will all see female teaching staff anyway, I'm the programme lead for the MSc, and teaching one optional module too. Not sure for the undergrads, but I think they have a female lecturer (more senior) on a core module.
• now I think about it, there was an awkward situation a couple of years ago where a member of staff had a relationship with a PhD student, but I don't know if he was her supervisor... that's been a bit of a shit show anyway, he got divorced and is/was an alcoholic...

My personal tutor was, of necessity, male, because there were no female academics at the time. it was awkward when I had personal issues, if I’m honest.

When I first became an academic pastoral care was an additional duty with an additional payment (those were the days!). Only a small number of people who actually enjoyed that job took it on, obviously unsuitable people were not appointed to the role. We didn’t assign by sex but students could request to change tutor at any time and it would be done. This hardly ever happened.

Later it was expected that everyone would do personal tutoring (however unsuited to the job), the payment disappeared and students of both sexes asked to change tutor more often. A lot of troubled students seemed to want a middle aged female tutor, even though I wasn’t nearly as nice as many of my colleagues! We had a policy that if another engineering department had no female staff their female students could request to have one of us as their personal tutor; that happened a handful of times.

Ah right. If it’s pastoral supervision and not academic, that may not be so unreasonable. There may be a variety of pastoral issues where having a same sex supervisor would be preferable.

I am aware of a department in my former university where there are male staff who are not permitted to have female tutees, because of previous poor behaviour. Someone from that department once asked me which of my colleagues I would not get in a lift with. I replied that a couple of them had personal hygiene issues but otherwise they were fine.

Not a STEM department, by the way and much less male dominated than Engineering.

But then that means that the female supervisors end up with extra workload as they're also mentoring people?

^mmm are any of them sex pests.

Was thinking that they’d need to adjust the overall numbers to account for it.

As a stem graduate of over 20 years I'd have been pissed off then if I'd been allocated a female supervisor on the basis I'm female. I'd be even more annoyed now.

It should be random allocation with the caveat that people may be able to swap if a good enough reason comes up.

There was, I think, 6 females out of 600 in our engineering department but I hope that's changed.

As someone who had a male supervisor try it on with me when I was a postgraduate student, I would say that this is a very good idea. What men get away with in universities is astonishing.

If the subject is male dominated, I also think it’s good for the female students to have a female role model and connect with other women in the field.

Great idea. Female staff get to take on extra work because some men can’t behave appropriately in the workplace. And male staff get rewarded with less student-facing work!

Eh? What are you on about? OP has explicitly said that she will not end up with a disproportionate number of students. How exactly are female staff taking on ‘extra work’?

Or are you trying to claim that female students are harder work than male students?

Assuming that your misreading isn't deliberate, no I'm not. I'm saying that it's a known fact that female academics do more of the pastoral and student-facing work than male academics do, to the detriment of those women's career progression. No need to give male staff further excuse to avoid this work by presuming that they can't be trusted around female students. Teaching students of both sexes is part of the job, and if they can't deal with that, it needs to be addressed some other means than by allocating students to female staff.

Surprised more people on here don’t get why this is a weird guideline. I’m amazed it is written down formally.

I agree with asking for the rationale (as you’re new, it’s easy to ask for clarification without having to go in all guns blazing). If you want to challenge it, you could suggest that, with a view to future sustainability, the dept creates a formal Women’s Officer position (workloaded) and then supervision is distributed only by expertise. Depts used to have these roles, and they were a good route for students to raise uncomfortable situations with creepy men.