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What Role Does Gender Play in Collaboration?

Among the many challenges that may arise during a collaborative writing project, gender differences—especially related to leadership and power—are certainly a concern. While some argue that collaboration allows women a more equal status than the traditional classroom setting (see Atwood especially), others note that small groups can just recreate the larger issues (see Morgan especially). Below, we have listed some of the potential benefits of collaborative writing groups as well as the challenges that an instructor should be aware of beforehand. As always, we invite others to expand on these lists and offer possibilities for overcoming the challenges.

The Benefits:

• Collaboration may allow for an “androgynous collaborator” according to Mary Lay. This participant, “not bound by gender identity” (89), is better able to handle conflict and distinguish between types of conflict. Also, whether male or female, the androgynous collaborator “appreciates different styles and needs of team members” (100).
• Julia Ferganchick-Neufang states that a collaborative writing assignment in her basic writing class “eliminated competition and replaced it with cooperation…. Also, power of individuals in this atmosphere was not decided by gender but rather by skill and articulation” (197, emphasis original). It is perhaps important to note that Ferganchick-Neufang was specifically looking for gender roles in this study.
• Johanna W. Atwood, like Ferganchick-Neufang, sees collaboration as a way to change the competitive status quo, or “the only game in town” (13). She sees the traditionally competitive classroom as inherently detrimental to women “because of gender –coded assumptions” (15). Thus, collaboration informed by feminist pedagogy is one way of thinking outside of these traditional roles and possibly opening up space for women.
• Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede see dialogic collaboration (no group leader, fluid roles) as “potentially at least, deeply subversive” to the status quo (236). While they don’t offer ways to translate this into the BW classroom, this type of collaboration would likely appeal to the teacher interested in giving female and male students a place to speak from that’s at least somewhat different than traditional academia.
• Meg Morgan shows how women can emerge as leaders of groups even when the groups have both male and female members; again, collaboration may help to break down the standard gender gap.

The Challenges:

• Tom Fox examines gender issues in addition to differences in race in collaboration. Essentially, he says the same thing about both: “racial and gender inequalities, which exist socially and politically outside the classroom, inhibit the kinds of collaborative conversations that would work towards [generative and positive identification]” (113). In essence, in the “real world,” collaboration may only highlight rather than transcend gender roles. Fox even suggests that homogenous groups (all women/all men) might be considered.
• Lay, who talks about androgynous collaborators, points out that strong leadership (a masculine quality) “may disrupt the collaborative process” (100). So, if collaborators aren’t able to adapt to an androgynous viewpoint, the idealistic process may fall apart.
• Ferganchick-Neufang, who clearly finds collaboration to be beneficial for deconstructing traditional gender roles and giving women voice, admits that it’s not always so perfect: in another collaborative writing assignment, she had to revert to individual papers because the topics chosen were so gender-specific (women chose domestic topics, men chose guns and cars). She states, “It was obvious that gender differences in topic choice would discourage mix-sex collaborative groups” (202).
• Atwood qualifies her support of collaboration by siding with John Trimbur in questioning the notion of collaboration as liberating. While not a downfall, it reminds us not to imagine collaboration as free of problems or a miracle solution.
• Though Lunsford and Ede highly praise the dialogic mode, they are not particularly fond of hierarchical collaboration. The hierarchical mode, which relies on a strong leader, sees multivocality as something to fix, not celebrate. This mode, then, may serve to further the silencing of female voices.
• Morgan, who focuses on leadership roles for women, says that women have to work much harder to receive recognition as a leader. She outlines four conclusions about this problem:
  • If a male and female both contribute significantly, even if the female enacts more leadership qualities, either the male is seen as the leader or the group is labeled leaderless (214).
  • “In order to be perceived as leaders, women have to ‘do it all’” (215).
  • Males can be leaders without doing the writing tasks (216).
  • “Male and not female students are likely to withdraw from group work” (216). This may be because the male students feel threatened by female leadership.

Gender Bibliography