Gender differences in achievement Flashcards
Explain 3 caveats about the gender gap in achievement.
1) The gender gap arises mainly because of differences between boys and girls in language and literacy skills, reflected in differences in performance in English and other subjects which are literacy based. The gender gap is small or negligible for Maths and Science. These trends are apparent both from historical data from English exam records going back 60 years and from international data.
2) While gender does independently predict attainment, the social class gap has greater explanatory power and for some groups, ethnicity is also a more important factor than gender.
3) A focus on boys’ underachievement can shift attention away from the fact that large numbers of girls are also low attainers. Tackling the scale of these numbers is arguably of greater priority and importance to policy makers than the proportionate difference between boys’ and girls’ attainment. Additionally, the different subject choices made by boys and girls may be more marked and have greater longer-term outcomes in terms of subsequent career choices than attainment differences
List some external factors that impact gender differences in achievement.
Gender role socialisation
Gendered activities and literacy
Social change and its effect on girls
The decline of traditional men’s jobs
What is gender role socialisation?
Gender role socialisation is the process through which children learn about the social expectations, attitudes and behaviours typically associated with boys and girls.
It has been suggested that gender-differentiated primary socialisation gives girls an initial advantage in both primary and secondary school- but still tends to create a patriarchal society (e.g. the willingness of boys to break rules can lead to their dominating classrooms).
Explain the impact of gender role socialisation on differences at pre-school.
A longitudinal study indicated there were significant gender differences in young children’s intellectual and social behavioural development at entry to pre-school.
Girls generally showed better social development than boys, especially in cooperation/conformity and independence and concentration. Girls also showed higher attainment on all cognitive outcomes. Girls made greater gains in pre-reading, early number concepts and non-verbal reasoning than boys over the pre-school period.
The researchers also found that the pre-school home learning environments differed for boys and girls. Significantly more girls’ parents reported activities such as reading, teaching songs and nursery rhymes.
Explain gender role socialisation according to Oakley.
Oakley postulated four ways in which gender socialisation occurs during primary socialisation.
Manipulation - The encouragement of behaviour that is seen as ‘normal’ for a child and discouragement of behaviour seen as abnormal or normal for the other sex.
Different Activities - Promoting different activities between boys and girls.
Verbal Appellations - Using different words and phrases with different sexes- e.g. praising a girl for being pretty and a boy for being strong.
Canalisation - The ‘channelling’ of children towards toys and activities seen as normal for their sex
Explain gendered activities and literacy.
Evidence suggests that the gender gap is mainly the result of boys’ poorer literacy and language skills. Although this may result from early socialisation- e.g. because mothers do most of the reading to young children, boys may come to view reading as feminine- it is likely furthered by boys’ leisure pursuits.
Typical boys’ leisure pursuits- football, computer games etc.- do little to help develop their language and communication skills. In contrast, girls may engage in a what McRobbie and Garber (1976) call ‘bedroom culture’, centred on staying in and talking and reading magazines- activities that help to develop their language and communication skills.
Clark and Douglas (2011) found that boys enjoy reading less, with 43% of boys and 58% of girls enjoying reading either very much or quite a lot. Nearly twice as many boys than girls agreed with the statement that reading is boring and that reading is hard, and were more likely to say that they did not read outside the classroom and could not find anything that interests them to read.
List the different ways in which social change has effected girls achievement.
Social changes in the last 50 years have contributed to girls’ improving educational achievement.
- The impact of feminism
- Changes in the family
- Changes in women’s
employment
Explain the impact of feminism on girl’s achievement.
The feminist movement can be seen as having had considerable success in improving women’s rights and opportunities: these changes are partly reflected in what we see in the media.
Magazines aimed at teenage girls have had editorial shifts influenced by the feminist debate, now presenting a more independent and ambitious girl rather than a passive and conformist one.
Explain Sue Sharpe’s research regarding social change and its effect on girls.
Sue Sharpe compared the attitudes of working-class girls in London schools in the early 1970’s and 1990’s. She found that the 1990’s girls were more confident, more assertive, more ambitious and more committed to gender equality.
Sharpe found that the main priorities of the 1970s girls were ‘love, marriage, husbands and children’, and they viewed being successful in education as unfeminine.
By the 1990s this had changed to ‘job, career and being able to support themselves’ with education being the main route to a good job. In 1994, Sue Sharpe found that girls were increasingly wary of marriage. They had seen adult relationships break up around them, and had seen women coping alone, in a ‘man’s world’.
Girls were more concerned with standing on their own two feet and were more likely to see education as a means to financial independence.
Explain the impact of changes in women’s employment on girl’s achievement.
Some feminist sociologists relate girls’ relative success in the past 30 years to post-industrialisation, which has transformed the attitudes of young women, and depressed the expectations of men.
The past 30+ years have seen a ‘feminisation’ of the economy- a shift to service sector work (financial services, retail, media, welfare…), with an accompanying expansion of jobs for women. As a result, girls may believe that the future offers them more choices: they are provided with the incentive to seek economic independence, and careers became a real possibility.
Wilkinson’s argument is that female aspirations underwent a radical transformation in the last two decades of the 20th century, suggesting that young women experienced a ‘genderquake’ in terms of profound changes in their attitudes and expectations about their futures, compared with their mothers and grandmothers.
Explain the family and risk as a social change affecting girls’ achievement.
Changes in employment and the attitudes of girls have been accompanied by changes in the family such as increase in the divorce rate, decline in first marriages, and decline in the birth rate.
Beck (1992) sees these changes as part of the growth or risk and uncertainty (‘risk society’), which lead to greater insecurity for men and women: both relationships and jobs are insecure and cannot be relied upon.
According to Beck this creates a more individualised society (the individualisation thesis), in which both men and women have to be self-reliant and financially independent.
This further increases the incentives for girls to achieve educational qualifications so that they don’t risk reliance upon a husband and are sufficiently well qualified to cope with the uncertainties of the labour market.
Explain the decline of traditional men’s jobs.
There is some evidence that social changes associated with a more individualised and post-industrial society have lowered the expectations of boys, and that boys in the early 21st century consequently lack confidence in themselves and experience low self-esteem.
Some commentators, notably Mac an Ghaill (1994) suggests that working-class boys are experiencing a ‘crisis of masculinity’. They are socialised into seeing their future masculine identity and role in terms of having a job and being a ‘breadwinner’, but the landscape has changed: a decline in manufacturing and heavy industry and rise in long-term unemployment; new jobs in the service sector regarded as women’s jobs; and, in some families, women may be the main breadwinner.
Consequently, traditional masculine roles are under threat. Wragg (1997) believed that pessimism about the world of work, induced by declining job prospects for males, has filtered down to primary aged boys and undermines their desire to work hard. Jackson (2006) believes that working-class male adolescents may conclude that education and qualifications are irrelevant because they can see that the jobs they will end up doing are unskilled or semi-skilled at best, and not very well paid.
List the different internal factors that impact gender differences in achievement.
Equal opportunities policies
Teachers and pedagogy
The curriculum and assessment
Laddish subcultures
Explain the impact of equal opportunities policies on gender differences in achievement.
The 1980s saw a greater emphasis on equal opportunities in schools, which resulted in the monitoring of teaching practices and resources for gender-bias in order to ensure more girl-friendly schooling. This was in part the result of the work of feminist sociologists such as Spender (1982) who found that girls were disadvantaged in multiple ways by sexism within education.
The introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988 removed one source of gender inequality by ensuring that both sexes studied the same core subjects, which was not necessarily the case previously.
Boaler argues that equal opportunity policies are a key reason for the improvement in girls’ achievement: as schooling has become more meritocratic, girls, who generally work harder, achieve more.
(-) This provides an explanation of the improvement in girls’ performance, but doesn’t explain why girls work harder.
Explain the impact of teachers and pedagogy` on gender differences in achievement.
Some sociologists have suggested that the school environment has become feminised.
Some research suggests that primary-school environments, which are female-dominated, exert a less positive influence on boys, and may even be alienating to them.
However, despite this, women teachers may act as important role models for girls, supporting their achievement.
Sewell (2006) has argued that schools do not nurture ‘masculine’ traits such as competitiveness and leadership, but instead celebrate the more ‘feminine’ qualities of careful working and attentiveness in class.
