4.7 Evidence Flashcards
Gender and Educational Attainment
The World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics, UN
The UN report covers 8 areas of social life, including a chapter on education, bringing together data from around the world. It was published in 2015, 20 years after the UN Beijing conference on wome, to review what progress had been made.
There are inevitable gaps in the statistics. The overall picture is of some progress but not yet equality between males and females in education. In some parts of the world, such as the UK, girls now do better than boys but in some developing countries girls face severe disparities. Although primary school enrollment overall has increased considerably, boys are still more likely than girls to attend primary school.
The gender gap is widest at further and higher education level. Although girls participate in ertiary education more than boys in almost all developed countries and about half of developing countries, there is still a striking lack of young women in advanced degree programmes, research and in fields such as science and engineering.
Although illiteracy rates have fallen, 2/3rds of 781 mill illiterate people in the world are women, reflecting the recent history of females being excluded from or only having limited participation in education in many countries.
Investigating the Patterns of Differential Attainment of Boys and Girls at School
Gorard etal
- there is little measurable difference in male/female attainment in maths and science
- there is no significant gender difference at the lowest attainment levels for all other curriculum subjects
- girls do better than boys among mid-high achievers, and there is closer correlation between achievement and class than there is between achievement and gender.
Lads and Ladettes in School: Gender and the Fear of Failure
Carolyn Jackson
Used both quantitative and qualitative methods to research how pupil subcultures develop in British schools, and how procsses within schools can affect the achievement of boys, who on average do not do as well as girls.
It was found that both boys and girls try to achieve status among their peers by being popular. For boys, this involved being sporty and having a girlfriend. However for all pupils status involved not being seen to work hard. Many students did want to succeed so were trying to balance doing well in tests and so on without being too apparent. Some mc pupils messed around in school but then, unbeknownst to their friends, worked hard at home.
There is a stereotypical view that boys tend to be louder and to misbehave in more visible ways than girls do and while this attracts teacher attention, it may be partly excused as being normal masculine behaviour. Boys tend to be given sanctions more than girls (more boys are excluded than girls) and so there is an assumption the boy’s behaviour is more of a problem.
However, it is possible that some girls break the rules in less noticeable ways that are less often detected than boys behaviour, for example, avoiding work through ‘switching off’ and talking in class more quietly than boys would. When girls behave similar to boys, they may be treated differently, because the stereotype of feminine behaviour is different: boys being disruptive in a lesson are conforming to a gender stereotype while girls are deviating from it.
Spender and Stanworth
They carried out observation-based research on the interactions between teachers and pupils, finding that schools reinforced gender inequalities. Teacher expectations of girls led to labelling that led to teacher discrimination.
Spender found boys questioned teachers, they were treated with respect, whereas girls were criticised for being too assertive.
Further, boys’ work was judged by a different standard. The same work got better marks when the teacher was told it was by a boy.
Stanworth found teachers gave more time to boys and also had higher expectations of them.
Stanworth and Spender’s work influenced social policies that aimed to make education more female-friendly.
Findings of Weiner (1995) demonstrate the influence of Stanworth and Spender; since the 1980s, teachers are confronting stereotypes more and many sexist images have been removed from school materials. Also, boys have become more aware of the unacceptability of sexist behaviour.
feminisation of schools
Pirie suggested that the change in the curriculum has affected achievement. The high-risk approach of O-Levels was geared towards boys whereas more organised coursework, requiring sustained motivation, suited girls better.
Machin and McNally (2006) support Pirie’s hypothesis, The change to GCSEs did coincide with female improvement. Further, evidence suggests that boys do better at end-of-course exams whereas girls are better at coursework.
Greg Hurst (2009) noted the differences in mathematic achievement, and concluded Maths GCSEs focused more on end-of-course exams from 2009, boys overtook girls.
The shift towards coursework-oriented GCSEs benefitted girls and could explain why they perform better, but the focus on exams, since 2010, could explain why the gap has closed.
