Gender and Educational Attainment

Gender can come up a fair bit - but you can use the basic input/school factors approach I outlined the other day to tackle them – simply add relevant studies. Here are a few pointers. Tomorrow - ethnicity and educational attainment.

The nature of gender differences in educational attainment changed in the mid-1990s, with girls doing better than boys in most A level subjects.

However, there are still important differences in choice of subjects, differences in performance in higher education, and of course, different career outcomes. So gender inequalities are by no means dead and buried or consigned to history.

Input Factors
Sociologists like Goldstein have found limited evidence of innate differences in aptitude, but the significance of these is open to interpretation. Feminists argue that patriarchal attitudes effect the expectations and wishes of parents and indeed, of female students themselves.

School Factors
There is a rich tradition of studies –many from the70s and 80s, showing how schools and teachers shaped girls educational attainment. Some of the well known ones which you should draw on include – Sharpe, Lees, Stanworth, Kelly.

These and other studies indicate that the curriculum is permeated with sexist assumptions and that the hidden curriculum also acts to reinforce patriarchy.

The improved performance by girls in recent years could be explained in terms of the following factors:

•The national curriculum – makes it more likely that everyone gets access to the same input, e.g. girls now doing CDT, etc. – a school factor

•Affirmative action on the part of schools and teachers – more single sex classes, projects aimed to give girls more opportunities. – school factors

•Increased expectations from girls and their parents. More women work now, and many people take it as given that their daughters will not just get married when they are older –they will have and want to work as well. – these are input issues – peoples attitudes have changed.

•An increase in the service sector – there are more opportunities in professional and non-professional roles in service sector jobs, as traditional industrial manual work declines. This has provided more opportunities for women in the labour market. – not an input quite, but it impacts on the inputs, because it changes peoples attitudes and expectations

Although girls educational attainment has improved, sociologists would be swift to point out that there are still inequalities in attainment – in higher education and gender differences in subject remain marked. Educational attainment is still something which is gendered – what counts as achievement and good and bad, varies on the basis of gender.

It should also be remembered that gender is not just about females – its also about males. With this in mind, its worth also briefly worth considering male attainment – why do so many boys underperform?

Mac an Ghaill (1994) argued that there has been a crisis of masculinity, because of the decline in traditional manual jobs. This has led, he argues , to an identity crisis, and made it easier for some males to question the need for qualifications when the jobs they would have traditionally gone into no longer exist.

Others views – non-sociological, come from conservative (and Conservative sometimes) policy makers and thinkers, who explain the problem in terms of the decline of the family and the lack of male role models. But such views tend to be simply asserted and lack hard empirical evidence to support them.