Upon receiving the assignment details for the required sophomore research paper, I copied the list of political figures that students are given as possibilities, and pasted them into a Google spreadsheet. In column B, I noted the figure’s gender, and in column C the continent they were primarily active in. On a new sheet, I ran two simple COUNTIFs, and graphed the results, shown above.
Given that the sophomore class is from the 1860s to the present and that it’s supposed to be a “world history,” I was surprised to see the lack of equality in the list of historical figures students are given.1
Needless to say, I have my first project to work on for the new class I’ll be teaching next year.
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Students are certainly able to choose a significant historical figure that is not in the list, but I worry that at the beginning of the course, they don’t know enough to find alternate noteworthy figures to research and write about. ↩︎