In 2012 when I am teaching Spanish at a local high school, the scent of chocolate brownies sometimes wafts down the corridor.  In this school of 2000 students, the smell of home baking is magical  Kids come in to class out of their home ec lesson with their take home samples, which they share with friends as they sit down for the next class.  Boys and girls take this class.  In fact I see very little gender limitation to any courses nowadays. Girls and boys can enrol in mechanics, auto shop, carpentry or ballet. The sports teams are still divided as girls or boys but they play the same sports, just on different teams usually. In band and choral music there are both genders, as there are in art.   Are we free of gender discrimination?  Mostly.  But some things self-select. It still is more common for boys to take shop than for girls. It still is more common for girls to be in choir and ballet than for boys.  There are no restrictions but that’s just how they choose their options. There may be social pressure for or against.

As for gender of teachers, there is also no bias, not in pay, not in hiring and probably not in promotion.  In theory it’s all by merit.  Marital status is also not considered relevant to getting a teaching job and employers are not even allowed to ask it.  I know of single teachers, teachers who are widowed, divorced, common law, even ones who have a child and did not marry. The principle seems to be that those are private concerns and not relevant to teaching.  In that I would agree. Your personal life changes a lot about your home life, your commitments outside the job, but it does not really affect your credentials for teaching  In fact having ‘a life’ often makes a person able to prepare lessons that kids may relate to. Many of the young teachers are world travellers now, some even have taught in Japan or China and for them a trip to Europe or Australia or the US is not rare.  I think this level of international experience helps them teach.

It does seem that more women than men choose to teach elementary. It is a rare elementary school of 30 teachers that has more than one man.  It does seem that in secondary the genders are about evenly split.  There was a time when all principals were men and yet in the 1980s and 90s there seemed to be a principle around the province of gender equity and affirmative action which in the end often meant hiring women for administrative jobs more often.  The system now has quite a few female principals at the second level, and some very effective ones. The head of the teachers’ association in Calgary at the public board and of the provincial teachers’ association are both women, but executies of the teachers’ association are still mostly men. It seems to me that we are at the point like in many professions where there is no official  discouragement of women for any job advancement. However the long hours of some of the jobs may self-select people who have fewer home obligations and this often does mean men.

Many teachers come from industry, and most have had part-time jobs getting through school to get to this point anyway. They often are married to or close to others in every other profession too, so their frame of reference about law or justice or medicine is often very broad.     It is true that both men and women now are teaching when they have very young children at home and I suspect many chose teaching because though the week may be 60-80 hours long, much of that work can be done from home while with the family. And of course there are still the summers for upgrading or family time or lesson planning also from home.

So gender and marital status are not really any big focus in theory in the schools. Yet of course kids at dating age think a lot about gender. Sex ed classes are often divided by gender, just to make people feel comfortable asking questions.  Billets on field trips, tent companions on school trips are by gender for sure and washrooms are still by gender.

Most students in the secondary schools wear jeans and in theory those are pretty unisex but really there is always a way to celebrate your gender anyway. I am amused sometimes to see how fashions change and what is ‘shocking’ is redefined. In the sixties it was bright colored tops, in the seventies bell bottom jeans with long hair, and then we had the mini skirts and rules about tops not being too low cut. We had rules for guys against muscle shirts and then against jeans that were so baggy they rode around the hip making undergarments even rear ends visible.  And we had rules for girls against halter tops, ‘spaghetti straps, and some schools banned tops with open midriff.

There will always be gender awareness in the schools but we have worked hard to not deny opportunity for education based on gender.

It was not always so.

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Back east only men were allowed to teach before 1857.  Those who came out to Alberta themselves may have only had male teachers.

In Calgary in 1887 the population was mostly men.  As people actually brought families to the frontier area the effect was some felt, to be a civilizing one  The influence of a woman was to add order and domestic stability.  When children arrived, boys and girls learned from very young that they would have different roles in life. In a classroom in 1890 they often even sat on opposite sides of the room.

The other common rule for early schools was that a female teacher was not to marry. Those rules were official in 1872 in the East and the same standard of behavior spread west. It existed for decades and was common not just to education but also to nursing as late as 1940 in Alberta.Women had to choose between marriage or teaching. Some couples even delayed marriage several years to get needed income and for love of the job.  In those days this delay did not mean living common law either. It was an actual delay of setting up life together.

In 1893 at some pioneer playgrounds, a fence was even built between where the boys played and where the girls played.

The general impression of the early times was apparently that teaching was a  job with dignity but men moved to other careers. A 1907 inspector even said that a man who taught lacked ‘go, grit and gumption’. Oddly then the angle was not to keep women out of other jobs so much as to keep men out of teaching.  At the time women outnumbered men teaching by four to one.

When the big sandstone buildings were created in Calgary the often had entrances clearly marked Boys and Girls. Early schools of lumber had a boy’s cloak room and a girls’ cloakroom. Schools that had several outhouses often had one marked Girls and one Boys. A few had a third for  Teacher.

Though boys and girls were both welcome to attend school, a  problem might arise though if neither gender felt called to learning about classical literature or Latin, given the high demands of farm life and more practical concerns.  For a time it seemed that girls were more anxious to go on  with school than boys were- two thirds of those who went on in 1907 were girls. In that year one school inspector in Edmonton suggested that the schools would hang onto boys better in secondary  if courses were offered in manual and vocational fields.

By 1911 Calgary had 1500 men to 1000 women and when a teacher was sought for small children, it was often a woman teacher who was sought.  In 1913 most of the teachers at King Edward were female and most were single. 

Other professsion were keeping women out though.  In 1913 teacher Maude Riley had to work to convince the police to hire female matrons.

When war came in 1914, again gender made a big difference in who enlisted and who took cadet training.  The men in the community were leaving and women often had to pick up the slack, doing farm jobs men used to do. The school boards often relaxed rules about hiring married women and got back on staff a few who had married, to fill vacancies left by men who went to war. The policy usually ended again after the war.

By 1916 women in Alberta got the right to vote. But the franchise was not full equality and in the 1920s women still were not permitted to sit in some levels of government.  In the schools this policy saw its own parallel.

In 1927 girls were not allowed to run gunny sack races or wheelbarrow races. The sports were considered too raucous plus girls  had to wear skirts to school and races like that might accidentally reveal undergarments.  By the same token when in 1928 a committee of teachers was et up at an educational progress club to talk about issues of teaching, only male teachers were invited.

In1936 girls were not allowed to play hockey, road hockey, softball or go fishing with the teacher.  In rural areas however girls often privately liked to play such games and fish, and those were the rebels of the day.  By 1938 some rural teachers were letting girls who wanted to, play shinny anyway.

During the Depression in rural areas some single women did get married and just did not inform their employer. When war broke out again in 1939 a teacher shortage relaxed the rules and married women were again hired to teach. In 1942 there were only ten men to every 100 women enrolled to learn how to teach.

Some have looked on those years of keeping women in some roles only as bias against women treating them as lesser. The mood at the time was not uniformly that though for some men felt that excluding women from rougher jobs or more highly combative ones was a way to honor and protect the female.  It was a matter of interpretation.

In 1951 however the inequality was still glaring, not just in promotion but in pay. Men were paid more than women and urban teachers were paid more than rural teachers.

By 1970 however the mood had shifted and big changes were made in the schools.  Boys were allowed to take cooking class, girls to take shop.  

Kids are now assuming right to an equality and are their own advocates,seeiing anything less as unfair.  There are gay rights clubs at some schools and sexist remarks are grounds for suspension if not expulsion.

All this is progress, except when I hear anyone joking around with a bunch of boys, insulting them and the way they choose to do so is to call them girls.  Hmm. The struggle continues.