Jimena talking and you are silent

When the angry hero is about to break down a door, a girl appears on the scene and tells him: “Cid, in our evil, you gain nothing.”

That nine-year-old girl is the first woman who speaks in the

Poem of my Cid.

She is not the only one: verses later, the anonymous song of deeds gives voice to the faithful wife Jimena several times.

They are early female voices in peninsular literature, but not the first: in the jarchas, so dark and difficult to reconstruct, verses are frequent that completely seem to be written to be said by women who claim their absent lover.

Women have not stopped speaking through the mouths of their literary characters since Latin became languages ​​on the Peninsula.

In the History of Language class we are with the early texts and these female voices sound in Iberian languages, be it the Castilian of the Cid or the Andalusian romance of the jarcha.

While I am drawing on the blackboard the linguistic portrait of those first peninsular romances, someone, with the usual normality in a university class, raises his hand.

Before answering the question, a background thought crosses my mind.

Once again, I have in front of me in the classroom a raised hand of a student and around him 40 silent students.

I am trying to understand why, in relative proportion, those who ask and speak the most in class are the students, why the most extensive interventions are theirs and not theirs.

I'm not talking about grades or academic results: I'm talking about raising your hand to ask a question, or answering resolutely (wrongly or correctly) a question posed by the teacher, or taking the floor without wanting to let it go the second you assume the role. shift.

I have been teaching for as many years as there has been this century, and they have always spoken less than them, even if a teacher teaches them, even if the students are the majority in the classroom.

I want to include some statistical data here out of respect for the readers, who do not deserve my opinion to be based on an impressionistic idea or on the randomness of my experience.

Two decades ago, teacher Allyson Jule began to quantify the dose of silence administered by students in Canadian high school classes, and they were consistently the least talkative;

Sociologist Janice McCabe explained in a 2020 scientific paper how in university classes, male students speak in public 1.6 times more than women.

And it is not only a question of measurable quantity, of timeable time, it is also of time used, not wasted in diminishing capacity or downplaying the importance of what is going to be said next or in imbuing the expression of an idea that is so polite with so much courtesy. ends up being a faint argument.

Yes, the cliché portrays us women as loquacious and chatty, but it seems that in classes we feel less comfortable speaking.

And if we leave the classroom, the distribution of time in the speaking turn does not change: in environments of recreated conversation (audiovisual production), the dialogues constantly reserve less script for women;

In very egalitarian spheres such as parliamentary chambers (even balanced by quotas on electoral lists), female discursive production, counted in minutes, is always less than male output.

Something is not quite working: our predecessors entered the world of work and contributed to us naturalizing the female gender in traditionally masculine professions: judges, engineers, councilors, mayors arrived.

Spanish was acquiring new feminine nouns, normalized in use and today common in conversation.

Someone thought that saying

everyone

would make us feel more included, and the split was a tempting whitewash for anyone who wanted to be seen as a feminist;

It was easy for some politician to even go down the slide of the

boutade

to invent some

members

or a

spokesperson

with whom to win in the and me more competition.

But in my class the students were still silent.

There is a part of feminine communication that is about to take hold.

At this point I think it's up to us to raise our hands, risk saying something absolutely stupid or an outright truth (in the same proportion as them), not apologize in advance for it: speak up and, if necessary, not allow they interrupt us.

That's why now I'm the one who has my hand raised to ask my university students why they remain silent.

Because I am in front of the blackboard waiting for one of you to raise your hand and speak, ask or say, in tribute to all the women who could not occupy a university desk and so that the female voice does not sound in our classes only through the mouth of the in love with the jarchas or with Jimena, wife of the Cid.

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