The Effect of Gender on Student Writers' Evaluations of Peer Tutors

This study examines how the genders of both student writers and their peer tutors affect the dynamics of writing tutoring sessions and influence the student writers’ subsequent evaluations of their peer tutors. Even though peer tutors employed the same non-directive, facilitative approach with all students, students judged female tutors to exhibit stereotypically feminine characteristics and male tutors to exhibit stereotypically masculine characteristics. Students also more highly evaluated the peer tutor whose sex matched their own. Students who were more highly sex-typed (masculine males and feminine females) more highly evaluated the same-sex peer tutor than did less sex-typed students of the same gender, though feminine female students more strongly exerted this preference than did masculine male students. Evidence gathered from post-session Likert surveys, paired observations, and semi-structured telephone interviews supported all three hypotheses. Reasons concerning why sex stereotypes still shape tutoring sessions as well as implications for altering tutor training policy are explored.Office of Honors Programs and Academic Scholarship of Texas A&M Universit