For years, Shanghai's primary and middle schools have seen the number of their male teachers declining and the imbalanced sex-ratio among their faculty has now become a headache for the city's educators, website wenhui.news365.com.cn reported.

According to a survey issued by the Shanghai Municipal Women's Federation recently, male teachers only make up 21.7 percent of the total teaching force in the city's primary and middle schools.

For many primary schools, male teachers merely take up 10 percent of the total faculty members and for middle schools, where the situation is a little better, the sex-ratio still fails to reach 1:1.

Xiang Jiaxiang, Vice-director of Shanghai Normal University, said the problem of imbalanced sex-ratio between male and female teachers is universal, and other countries such as the U.S. and Japan also face the problem.

For the city's educators, the situation is serious. "Male teachers are better at logical thinking and tend to pay more attention to cultivating students' practical abilities. They can provide an essential part of education that female teachers may not do as well. Their absence will have huge impact on students, who are in the middle of their character building." said Guo Changjiang, a senior educator in the city.

Educators in the city hold that at least 30 percent of the teaching posts in primary and middle schools should be taken by male teachers, if this can not be achieved, students will surely be affected.

Why male teachers are becoming fewer and fewer? Wu Zunmin, a professor at East China Normal University, said the imbalanced sex-ratio is even more apparent in the city's normal universities. The average sex-ratio between boys and girls is 3:7, resulting in a shortage of male teachers in the first place.

To ease the pressure on the imbalanced sex-ratio, the city's educators have called for enlarged enrollment of boys at the city's normal universities to train more qualified male teachers.

(CRI January 22, 2008)