She’s not there: Women and gender as disappearing foci in U.S. research on the elementary school teacher, 1995-present

Galman, Sally Campbell, & Mallozzi, Christine A. (2012). She’s not there: Women and gender as disappearing foci in U.S. research on the elementary school teacher, 1995-present. Review of Educational Review, 82 (3), 243-295.


The elementary school teacher population in the United States is overwhelmingly female. Those female teachers are also overwhelmingly white and middle class. This teacher population has often been blamed for learning and behavior problems in male elementary school students. With all that blame going on, though, one would think that there is a deep set of research on female teachers in elementary schools that supports that blaming. Guess what? There really isn’t, according to this study’s authors.

Galman and Mallozzi looked for research studies on the experiences of female teachers in the United States since 1995, when a major review by Ackerman was done on this topic. They found only 12 studies that actually studied female elementary teachers. In literature reviews these days, the focus seems to be on setting criteria that will narrow down the base of relevant research literature on a topic. Excluding as many studies as possible appears to be the goal (I personally prefer comprehensive reviews that attempt to be inclusive, but never mind). Galman and Mallozzi do something different, though; they spend a good deal of time discussing the exclusions—in fact more time than they do on the 12 studies that passed through the filter of their criteria.

Indeed, here the exclusions are the real story. Many articles that purport to talk about the gendered nature of elementary school teachers’ professional lives actually end up focusing on someone else. In some cases, it is the boys that these female teachers are often said to advantage. In other cases, it is their female students. Cultural difference between elementary school teachers and their increasingly diverse students is a common focus in articles. Some articles are actually about men in elementary schools, with the idea that adding men to the elementary teaching workforce might solve many problems. Women who want to leave classroom teaching and move into the administrative ranks have been studied. Few articles are really about studying how gender affects the experiences of female elementary teachers, even when they purport to be about them.

Some of the research described here in the discussion of the exclusions seems outright sexist. Female teachers seem to be viewed in a simplistic way, as if all of them are alike, and of course they (I may say, we!) are not all alike. We all are individuals, and we are many things as well as just women or just teachers. Our varied life experiences and backgrounds have shaped who we are as educators in unique and diverse ways. Instead of stereotyping us and blaming us, researchers should be attempting to learn about us and see what affects us and how what we are and do in the classroom has an impact on children.

Why haven’t we studied about females in elementary education much since 1995? Galman and Mallozzi suggest that it might be because of the neoconservative trend in the U.S. society in recent years. That trend has tended to disparage anything traditionally connected with being female (and females themselves have done their share of that disparaging in the educational literature). I believe that certainly is a factor, and have noticed the trend myself in the literature. However, I believe there is an additional, related but different factor. With No Child Left Behind, I think researchers have been in crisis mode, and I think that may be continuing even as the Common Core State Standards take over the nation. Researchers have been busy since the millennium with pressing issues related to assessment and accountability, increasingly diverse classrooms, urban poverty, and perplexing achievement gaps. It’s no wonder that the experiences of women in elementary classrooms have been put on the back burner, except when those women emerge as convenient scapegoats for the problems we don’t yet know how to solve.