Internal and External Factor that Affect Gender Flashcards
What External factor that affect Gender?
- impact of feminism
- Girls changing ambitions
- changes in family structure
- Changes in labour market
What is the impact of feminism?
Since 1960’s feminists’ movement has challenged the traditional stereotype of woman’s role
Angela McRobbie study of girl’s magazine. In 1970’s found that magazines emphasised the importance of getting married but nowadays they contain images of independent women
What is the Girl’s changing ambitions?
Sharpe interviewed girls In 1974 girls had low aspirations believing that educational success was unfeminine and being ambitious would be unattractive. However in 1990’s girls had placed importance on a career and being able to support themselves
What is the Changes in family structure?
increase in divorce rate, cohabitation and lone parent families have affected boys and girls’ attitudes toward education
Example increase numbers of female-headed lone-parent families mean more women need to take on breadwinner role
-This will creates a new adult role model for girls. Furthermore this may explain underachievement in boys through lack of role model in family unit to aspire
What is Changes in labour market?
1970 Equal pay Act-illegal to pay women less than men for work of equal value
1975 Sex Discrimination- encouraged women to see their future in terms paid work rather than housewives.
•There has been decline in Heavy industries such as mining in UK. There has been a decline in male employment which led to’identity crisis for men’.
What Internal factor that affect Gender?
- Equal opportunities policies
- Introduction to Coursework and Feminisation of education
- Teacher attention
- Challenging Stereotypes in the Curriculum
- Selection and league tables
- Laddish’ Subcultures
What is Equal Opportunities policies?
•GIST:Girls into science and Technology
•WISE: Women into science and Engineering
These polices have helped girls outperform boys
What is the Introduction to Coursework and Feminisation of education?
-Girls are more successful in coursework because they are more hard working and better organised than boys
-Sewell claims boys fall behind education because it has become feminised as schools does not nuture masculine traits such as competitiveness.They only celebrate girls qualities
What is Teacher attention?
•Mitsos and Browne -Teachers have lower expectations of boys and less likely to discipline for minor offences
•Swann found differences in communication styles.Boys tend to dominate whole class discussions whereas girls like to speak in smaller group
•Boys tend to use ‘agressive language’ where girls will be ‘communicative’ this explain’s why teacher respond more positively to girls as they are seen as cooperative
What is Challenging stereotypes in the curriculum?
-women are portrayed mainly as housewives and mothers that physics book show them as frightened by science and that maths books showed boys are more inventive
What is Selection and League tables?
-Marketisation policies has created more competition in school so girls are seen as desirable recruits because they achieve better exam results
-introduction of league tables has improved opportunities for girls that high achieving whereas low achieving boys are not
What is Laddish Subcultures?
Epstein argues that the growth of laddish subcultures are contributed to boys underachievement she examined the way masculinity is constructed within school and found that working class boys are likely to harassed labelled as ‘sissies’ and subject to homophobic verbal abuse if they appear to be swots
