Check out fellow UHPer Tim Steves’ discussion of his work with students in the UHP and WLP on researching sex education with Professor Carly Jordan!
My name is Tim Steves, and I am a sophomore in the University Honors Program. Over the course of the last eleven months, I have been working alongside other members of the UHP as well as the Women’s Leadership Program on a project called RESET: Research for Equality in Sexuality Education and Texts. Under the guidance of Dr. Carly Jordan, biology professor for UHP and WLP, our team has been analyzing the most popular North American sexuality education texts for instances of sexism, heteronormativity, conflation of sex and gender, cultural representation, and misinformation. The goal of RESET is to expose the inadequacies and inequalities across these educational texts, advocating for a future of inclusive and free educational materials for all regarding our bodies and minds. Through research publications, conference presentations, and communication with publishers, we seek to put pressure on the authors of these texts to provide more inclusive and accurate information, raising the bar for sex education.
I first met Dr. Jordan during my fall semester of first year. When browsing through the wide array of unique courses provided by the UHP to fulfill my Scientific Reasoning and Discovery requirements, Dr. Jordan’s Human Reproduction course caught my attention. On a whim, I decided to register for this course, acknowledging that my past experience with sex education from a public high school in Illinois had likely left some gaps in information. Dr. Jordan’s fantastic teaching and vocal efforts to be inclusive of all bodies and minds exposed to me for the first time how far-reaching and prevalent inequality in sex education across the United States really is. Dr. Jordan would frequently edit the texts that she distributed to us prior to our reading to ensure that they would be inclusive, and she would often challenge us to learn to recognize instances where the materials were failing to uphold an inclusive standard. I would highly recommend taking this course to any freshmen who have the opportunity.
RESET began with an email from Dr. Jordan in early March of 2020, inviting several students from her Human Reproduction class and the WLP to come to her classroom on the Vern for pizza and discussion of a research opportunity. Today, this cross-program research team is making progress in the massive task of transforming the sex education landscape. Having completed the data collection phase, many members are now in the process of drafting manuscripts for publication.
I have been working alongside Gaia Norman from the WLP, focusing on the conflation of sex and gender in these texts. On February 11th, we presented our findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology research conference with over 4,500 attendees. Although the conference was supposed to be in person in Austin, Texas, the online format went incredibly smoothly, allowing us to interact with researchers and experts in gender from universities across the country. Analyzing the anatomy chapters of 7 current textbooks, we sought to quantify how often sex and gender are conflated in sexuality education materials. To collect this data, we defined two codes: C (conflated sex and gender) and U (unnecessarily gendered language). Our C code is for instances where the author used gendered language (e.g. man/woman) to define or discuss biological traits, associating an anatomical feature with a specific gender identity and treating sex and gender as one interchangeable concept. Our U code is for times when the author used gendered language to describe information that pertains to all people, regardless of gender identity. Using these codes, we found that textbooks misrepresented sex and gender an average of 136 times per anatomy chapter, and in 90% of these instances, sex and gender were overtly conflated.
Overall, the experience of sharing our data with the public for the first time was incredibly rewarding. This event felt like a launching point for RESET, and we are expecting to see multiple publications from the team across academic journals regarding various issues with inequality in sex education in the coming months. Keep an eye out for more RESET related content from the UHP as we continue to work toward a more inclusive future of education and be sure to check out the many honors research assistantship opportunities available through the UHP website.
