“A male student outright refused to take my feedback on his work. He said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just a woman,’” says Ellie Coverdale. “It was shocking; not just the words but how confidently he said them. When students disrespect you simply because you’re a woman, it makes classroom management harder, and it also affects how much you’re able to reach them. It chipped away at my authority.”
Ellie is just one of many women facing an onslaught of misogyny and racism in the classroom across the UK. Teachers are seeing classrooms flooded with these attitudes, with more and more pupils, especially boys, mimicking figures like Andrew Tate, and female teachers are enduring the worst of the consequences.
From a teacher being upskirted to primary school teachers encountering boys who refuse to speak to them because of their gender, misogyny is infecting classrooms and leaving women vulnerable to potential violence, aggression, and harassment.
In the teachers’ union NASUWT’s Behaviour in Schools Survey, 27.3% of female teachers reported experiencing verbal abuse several times a week, and 14.3% of them reported it daily. A significant proportion of this abuse is misogynistic or racist. Women report boys blocking doorways and even barking at female staff, as well as male pupils watching increasingly violent pornographic material. All in an environment where teachers should feel safe in their roles as leaders in education.
As a direct result of this surge in misogyny, Ellie Coverdale quit teaching and transitioned to become an online educator with UKWritings because “The slow build-up of everyday misogyny wore me down”. “When you are constantly second-guessed, and your students challenge your authority in ways they wouldn’t with male teachers — and I felt that if I raised those issues, it would just make me seem ‘difficult’ — it all started to take a real toll,” she tells GLAMOUR. Despite loving teaching, Ellie couldn’t carry on enduring the normalisation of these attitudes or the impact that they had on her mental health.
Other teachers are still working in these environments, simultaneously attempting to combat misogyny while protecting their well-being. The incidents range from minor to severe. Holly*, a head of history at a high school, has never encountered any threats of physical violence, but has noticed a significant uptick in male students using language to convey disrespect, like switching “Miss says” for “She says”, a contrast to how they’ll also respectfully call male teachers “Sir”. It extends beyond language changes, though.
“I’ve also overheard older sixth-form students ‘rating’ female staff members’ physical attractiveness; they did apologise when confronted, but it’s concerning that they felt it was okay to do that in a public hallway,” Holly tells GLAMOUR.
The situation only worsens for female teachers when racism and misogyny are weaponised together, which former teacher Jody Findley discovered while working across primary, secondary and higher education. “I’ve been subjected to racism and mistreatment in schools. I’ve witnessed these behaviours manifest as microaggressions, disrespect, and being talked over or dismissed,” she tells GLAMOUR.
“Misogynoir, the specific oppression faced by Black women, is especially insidious in this context. The intersectionality of race and gender is still not widely understood in schools, which allows these behaviours to go unchecked. These experiences have had a profound impact on my mental health, adding to the emotional burden of navigating these spaces.”
Jody has seen these behaviours escalate significantly since the pandemic, fed by the deterioration of young people’s mental health and the intense pressure on family units. “Schools are being asked to shoulder these burdens without adequate funding or staffing,” she adds. “Teachers are expected to be social workers, counsellors, mediators, and educators all at once. In this overstretched system, issues like racism and misogyny slip through the cracks. Without proper training and mental health infrastructure, staff are left reacting to crises rather than preventing them.”
The growth of misogynistic attitudes in classrooms beyond mandatory schooling, too. University lecturers also note a distressing increase in misogynistic attitudes. “I’ve seen women, especially women of colour, experience horrendous sexism and racism from students and staff,” Andrea*, a lecturer in music at a UK institution, tells GLAMOUR.
“Personally, a lot of my experiences of sexism are covert; it’s often unconscious bias, especially from students. I struggle with cliques of all-male students who don’t value or respect my feedback or integrate it into their work like they do for my male colleagues. Culturally, we’re also seeing a gender divide — my seminars of 30 to 40 students often segregate themselves by gender, which I challenge and encourage them to mix.”
