Writing Centre Development
ADDRESSING THE REAL ISSUES OF ACEDEMIC WRITING
GENDERBALANCE IN THE WRITING CENTER
Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson¹, Helga Birgisdóttir²
¹University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland ²University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
In the newly founded writing center at the University of Iceland (Ritver Hugvísindasviðs, RH), one of the most striking facts to emerge from our statistics is that 85% of our clients are women. To be sure, a perfect gender balance is not to be expected since female students comprise 62,8% of the undergraduates at the university and 70,9% of the graduate students. It is well documented that writing centers attract more women than men (Nicolas 2003) but the gender gap at RH is so big that it requires further investigation. Tipper (1999) offers some speculations as to why male students stay away from writing centers, but many of them are based on the assumption that students know what to expect in writing center consultations, e.g. that they involve a nondirective style. This cannot be the case for RH as our students live in a country without any tradition of writing centers and have only vague ideas about writing center work. Moreover, it is overly stereotypical to claim that male students dislike the nondirective approach of writing center consultations. In our view, it is not particularly helpful to view writing centers as “feminized spaces” that drive away male students if we want to understand the gender difference in writing center use. Rather, one must carefully examine the way that male and female students approach their studies at a university level, and at the same time look for variables other than gender that may affect the gender ratio in writing center consultations.
References
Nicolas, M., 2003. Retelling the story: An exploration of the feminization of the writing center narrative . Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University.
Tipper, M.O., 1999. Real men don't do writing centers. Writing Center Journal , 19(2), pp. 3340