Dear Professor,
I wanted to write this letter to you and bring up an issue in your class that I am not even sure you are aware of. To be honest, you probably don’t even see the problem because chances are you have never experienced “mansplaining” before. If you are unaware, mansplaining is when a man interrupts or talks over a women to make their point and/or explain the women’s point.
Without fail, this happens in your class almost everyday. You are not the first professor to allow mansplaining in class and I can almost guarantee you won’t be the last. As a professor I respect dearly, I want you to understand what it’s like to be mansplained.
Let’s use a class from last week as an example. Within the two-hour lecture a male student interrupted me over ten times without you saying anything. I later made a point during a class discussion and directly after, a male student stated exactly what I said verbatim. You then applauded him on what a great point he had just made. You also allowed one man to tell me why I thought the way I did, because that obviously needed explaining to me. Lastly, a man blatantly called me out as “wrong” on an opinion question. These are just some of the examples. Add those interactions with all the other times in a day that I am mansplained-out. The next morning I start the whole process over again.
As a vocal student who has been dealing with mansplaining her whole life, I am pretty used to accepting the inevitability that I will be mansplained in class, at work, and most social settings. However, accepting this and trying to fight it at the same time starts to become exhausting. It often gets to the point that I would rather not talk than deal with mansplaining.
Right there is your problem: mansplaining silences women.
It silences women because when you allow male students in your class to interrupt or rephrase a women’s point you are reinforcing the idea that a man’s opinion is more important than a woman’s. On a greater scale this devalues a women’s education.
You still may not see any problem with what you are doing and think that what I am saying is nothing more than a female student crying about not getting her credit. My response to you is this:
I am not telling you to only call on women or only validate women’s comments in class. I am not crying in the corner because I feel like I am not getting credit.
I am tired of feeling like a second-class citizen in a classroom where all the students are supposed to be equal. All I want is to be able to speak freely in class without the fear of being talked over or interrupted. Take a walk in my shoes and think about the struggle in not having that liberty, then think about how you can stop that and make a real change.