Gender and Education

Currently, there is a trend of femal achievement rising whilst boys has increased at a much slower rate. However, boys used have greated levels of achievemt than girls. This was due to:

• Limiting gender roles in the past - Lobban - found that women were presented in a stereotypical, expressive role inr eading schemes encouraging traditional gender roles.
• Teachers spent little time and effort on girls - Spender - boys receieved over 60% of teachers time and they got away with poor and abusive behaviour to girls.
• Women were missing from the curriculum
• Discrimination - 1944 Triparite 11+ System - boys had a lower pass mark than girls to achieve an equal ratio of boys and girls at grammar schools.

External Factors for Female Achievement:

However, we can explian an improvement in girls achievement due to the following external reasons:

• Feminism - Mcrobbie - Studied magazines and found a changing aspiration for women between the 1970's and 1990's. In the 1970's womens priorities were marriage and 'not being left on the shelf'. In 1990's however women's roles have shifted and they are more concerned with careers and are not confined to the traditional expressive role.
• Changes in the family - Importance placed on girls independancy and a need to be more socially/economically independent due to changed in divorce rates, increaed cohabitation and decrease in first marraiges.
• Changes in women's employment - Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination Act encouraging more women in the workplace. Number of women in employment has risen from 41% in 1959 to over 70% in 2007. There has also been a fall in the pay gap from 30% to 17%.
• Girls ambitions and perceptions - Sue Sharpe - A study involving unstructured interviews with working class girls in the 1970's and 1990's. In the 1970's girls revealed that they aspired for love, marraige, husbands, children, jobs and careers. Whereas in the 1990's women aspired for careers and independency.

Internal Factors for Female Achievement:

• Equal Oppurtunties Policies - GIST (Girls into Science and Technology) and WISE (Women into Science and Engineering) - encouraging girls to think out of their gender roles and onto higher paid careers. Teachers have also actively enforced the Sex Discrimination Act in the classroom actively challenging stereotypical images of females in the past.
• Positive role models - There has been an increase of female teachers within the system and more role models for girls - 'feminisation of education' including more styles of assessment that suit girls better.
• GCSEs and Coursework - Mitsos and Browne - Coursework suits girls more than boys as they are more conscientious, better organised, spend more time on work, present work in a neater way and meet deadlines. Girls are also socialised to suit coursework through the transmission of norms and values such as neat and patience.
• Challenging stereotypes
• A shift in teacher attention 
  
• Identity - Archer - W/C girls attempt to gain 'symbolic capital' from their peers by being 'the loud one' or…