Education: Gender Flashcards
62% of girls could
concentrate without supervision for 10 minuets compared with 49% of all boys.
External factors for the Gender Gap:
The impact of Feminism
Helped bring about legal changes and promoted equal opportunities.
Raise girls expectations and ambitions.
Girls rethink self-image, so they no longer see themselves as the traditional wife or mother.
External factors for the Gender Gap:
Changes in employment
Changes in legislation.
(Equal Pay Act 1970, Sex Discrimination Act 1975) Females see their future in terms of paid work.
Women understand the necessity of qualifications.
Girls benefitted from exposure to more successful career women who act as positive role models.
External factors for the Gender Gap:
Changes in ambitions
Major change in the way girls see themselves.
Girls no longer feel the need to fill a traditional homemaker role.
Sharpe (1974)
Research conducted in 1974 found that girls viewed educational success as unfeminine and had low aspirations, with marriage being their main goal.
Repeated research 1994 with simple sample, and found great change in priorities.
Findings show major change in the way girls see themselves.
Francis (2001)
Girls are rejecting the traditional female role and understand the importance of education.
External factors for the Gender Gap:
Changes in the family
Increase in divorce, cohabitation and SPFs have impacted on girls attitudes to education.
Girls recognise they need to take on more of a breadwinner role.
Encourages girls to look to themselves and their own qualifications to be financially independent.
Internal factors for the Gender Gap:
Equal opportunities policies
- Teachers are more sensitive to the need to avoid gender stereotyping.
- Belief that girls and boys are equally capable and entitled is mainstream thinking in education.
- Policies such as GIST and WISE encourage girls to pursue careers in non-traditional areas.
- National curriculum made girls and boys study mostly the same subjects.
Internal factors for the Gender Gap:
Positive role models in schools
Increase in proportion of female teachers and head teachers.
Qualified women in professional positions may act as role models for girls.
Primary schools in particular have become ‘feminised’, with virtually all-female staff, could influence pupils into seeing schooling as a ‘female’ activity, contributing to boys underachievement.
Internal factors for the Gender Gap:
GCSE and coursework
Changes in the way pupils are assessed have favoured girls and disadvantages boys.
Girls are more successful at coursework because they are better organised and better at keeping deadlines.
Gorard (2005)
The gender gap in achievement was constant from 1975 to 1989.
In 1989, GCSEs (and coursework) were introduced, which girls benefit from.
There are also more oral exams, which girls benefit from as they have better developed language skills.
Mitsos and Brown (1989) - Coursework
Conclude that girls are more successful at coursework because they are more conscientious and better organised, spending more time on it and are better at meeting coursework deadlines.
Elwood (2005)
Argues that although coursework has some influence, exams are more important in terms of final grades and girls do better in exams than boys.
Internal factors for the Gender Gap:
Challenging stereotypes in the curriculum
The removal of gender stereotypes and sexist images from textbooks, reading schemes, and other learning materials has removed a barrier to girls’ achievement.
Internal factors for the Gender Gap:
Teacher expectations
Teachers spend more time with boys because they attract more reprimands.
Boys dominated whole-class discussion, and gained more opportunity to speak.
The way teachers interacted with girls was more positive and focused around schoolwork rather than behaviour in boys which attracts negative attention from teachers.
Internal factors for the Gender Gap:
Selection and league tables
Marketisation has created a more competitive climate where schools see girls as desirable recruits because they achieve better exam results.
Girls are more attractive to schools which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where girls have greater likelihood of doing well.
Slee (1998)
Notes that boys are less attractive to schools and are are four times more likely to be excluded. As a result, boys are more likely to be perceived as a ‘liability’.
Jackson (1998) -League Tables
Believes that high achieving girls are attractive to schools as they can boost a schools league table position, whereas low achieving boys are not. This creates self fulfilling prophecy because if girls are likely to be recruited to good schools, they have a greater likelihood of doing well.
Swann and Graddol (1994) - Gendered Self-Fulfilling prophecy
Found boys are generally more boisterous and attract teacher’s gaze more than girls. Boys dominate whole-class discussion, whereas girls were better at listening and cooperating. Found that the way teachers interacted with girls was more positive and focused around school work rather than behaviour in boys which attracts negative attention from teachers. This could lead to a positive self-fulfilling prophecy with girls and a negative one in boys.
French and French (1993) - Attention
Argue attention given to girls and boys is quite similar and on occasions where boys are given more attention it’s usually because they attract more reprimands.
Spender (1983)
Teachers spend more time with boys and that they are able to demand more of the teachers’ time and gain more attention.
Symbolic capital
Feminists explain one reason for WC girls achieving less than MC girls is a conflict between WC girls feminine identities and the values and ethos of the school.
Performing their working-class feminine identities, the girls gained symbolic capital from their peers. However this brings conflict with the school.
Hyper-heterosexual feminine identities
WC girls invested considerable time, money, and effort in constructing ‘desirable’ and ‘glamorous’ hyper-heterosexual feminine identities, that combined black urban American styles with unisex sportswear and ‘sexy’ clothes.
This brought status from their female peer group and avoided them being ridiculed or called a ‘tramp’.
However this led to the school ‘othering’ the girls - defining them as incapable of educational success and thus less worthy of respect.
Archer et al (2010)
In her study of working-class girls, used concept of symbolic capital to understand the conflict between working-class girls’ feminine identities and the values and ethos of the school.
Found that by performing their WC feminine identities, girls gained symbolic capital from their peers.
Archer
Identifies strategies that the girls followed for creating a valued sense of self. Included adopting a hyper-heterosexual feminine identity, having a boyfriend, and being loud.
According to Archer the ‘ideal female pupil’ identity is
de-sexualised, and middle-class which excludes many working-class girls.
Symbolic Capital: Boyfriends (Archer)
While having a boyfriend brought symbolic capital, it got in the way of schoolwork and lowering girls’ aspirations.
Includes loosing interest in going to university, studying ‘masculine subjects’ or gaining a professional career.
Instead girls aspire to ‘settle down’, have children, and work locally in feminine jobs.
WC girls dilemma (Archer)
Argues WC girls’ feminine identities and educational success conflict with one another and the former leads to underachievement in the latter.
WC gils’ therefore faced with the dilemma of either gaining symbolic capital from their peers by conforming to hyper-sexual feminine identity or gaining educational capital by rejecting this.
Some tried to resolve this dilemma by defining themselves as ‘good underneath’, reflecting their struggle to achieve a sense of self-worth.