"Math class is tough." - first words barbie ever spoke Interplanetary theory of gender tells us that boys and girls are fundamentally and categorically different: that boys excel in science and math, play violently in the playground, and shout in class; that girls, on the other hand, sit quietly, speak softly, play gingerly, and excel in French and in literature. Official Curriculum (textbooks and the like) + Hidden Curriculum (interactions with both teachers and other students/ also media) = we become gendered. AND what we get is: that women and men are different and unequal, that the inequality comes from those differences, and that, therefore, such inequality is justified. TRADITIONAL EDUCATION FOR MANHOOD Since 18th century, education reserved for upper class boys and men. U of Michigan first debated co-education in 1858, the president said, "[m]en will lose as women advance, we shall have a community of defeminated women and demasculated men." local paper, in support, said educating women would, "unwoman the woman and unman the man." THE GENDERED CLASSROOM In nursery schools and kindergarten classes, we often find the heavy blocks, trucks, airplanes, and carpentry tools in one area and the dolls and homemaking equipment in another area. Areas are segregated by invisible but real boundaries. example of story on page 197 "From elementary school through higher education, female students receive less active instruction, both in the quantity and in the quality of teacher time and attention," note education professors Myra and David Sadker. (Failing at Fairness) Many teachers perceive boys as being active, capable of expressing anger, quarrelsome, punitive, alibi-building, and exhibitionistic, and they perceive girls as being affectionate, obedient, responsive, and tenacious. When boys put girls down, as they often do at that age, teachers usually do nothing to correct them, thus encouraging the boys' notion of superiority. One study found that in all ten of the college classrooms observed, boys were more active, regardless of the gender of the teacher, though a female teacher increased girls' participation significantly. whether "one is looking at preschool classrooms or university lecture halls. . . research spanning in the past twenty years consistently reveals that males receive more teacher
attention than do females." American Association of University Women report example on page 199 Journalist Peggy Orenstein observed - boys "yelled our or snapped the fingers of their raised hands when they wanted to speak [while the] girls seemed to recede from class proceedings." one girl told her, "boys never care if they're wrong." WHAT CHILDREN SEE One reason boys don't seem to care if they're wrong is because it's virtually always their faces they see illustrated Until recently, studies of children's books and anthologies have consistently reported traditional sex differences and pro-male biases. Females have been vastly underrepresented, and often absent, in pictures, in titles, and as main characters. Female characters cast in insignificant or secondary roles. Women have not been given jobs or professions; motherhood has been presented as a full-time, lifetime job. The son has worn trousers, the daughter has worn skirts, he has been active, she has been passive. Example - Marie Curie has been depicted as a helpmate to her husband, rather than as the brilliant scientist and Nobel Prize- winner that she was. researchers now find that though females are more visible in the books, their portrayal still reveals gender biases. Females are still being depicted in passive and submissive positions, whereas males are shown as active and independent. Dick and Jane example page 200 1975- U.S. Dep. of health, education, and welfare surveyed 134 texts and readers from sixteen different publishers, looking at the pictures, stories, and language used to describe male and female characters. "Boy-centered" stories outnumbered "girl-centered" stories by a 5:2 ratio; there were 3x as many adult male characters as adult female characters, 6x as many biographies of men as of women, and 4x as many male fairy tales as female. In children's books today, girls and women are much more likely to be depicted as the main character and far less likely to be depicted as passive, without ambition or career goals. BUT, gender stereotypes still prevail, girls are still depicted as more interested in domestic life than boys are. There has been a change in women's depiction, but not mens. There has been no comparable change in the depiction of men or boys in children's books, no movement of men toward more nurturing and caring behaviors. Commercials- commercials for children on saturday morning usually depict boys driving cars or playing with trucks and depict girls playing with dolls.
commercials are expressly designed to persuade. Commercials link gender roles to the significant adult roles that the young will be playing in the future. The authoritative voices advising you what to buy are nearly all men's voices, which indicates to children who the experts are. By linking material benefits to gender roles, the commercials teach a powerful lesson - if you consume this product, this is the kind of man or woman you can be. Tv- In the representation of women and men, then, television images generally mirror American ambivalence about change. Women can leave home but will encounter problems in sustaining a satisfying family life; men cannot find a way back into domestic life without being emasculated. in our real lives and on tv, gender difference and fender inequality are mutually reinforcing ideologies. National Television Violence Study - four terms of researchers systematically examined TV violence found - violence is ubiquitous (61 % of all shows contained some violence) and is typically perpetuated by a white male, who goes unpunished and shows little remorse. The violence is typically justified, although nearly one-half (43%) of shows presented it in a humorous way. "The long lasting consequences of violence are frequently ignored." By fall of 2005, there were over four instances of violence per hour in prime time (increase of 75% from 1998) ((not even 10 years, crazy!!)) GENDER DIVERGENCE IN ADOLESCENCE Exclusion from curriculum + gender stereotypes in the media + often-invisible discrimination in the classroom = divergence between boys and girls by adolescence. In elementary school, girls have somewhat higher self-esteem and higher achievement levels than boys. Girls self-esteem plummets in junior high school. Girls IQ falls about 13 points, boys fall around 3 points. Girls find out they are more valued for their appearance than for their talents. Ashley Reiter example page 203 In one survey, adolescent girls were about half as likely as boys to cite their talents as "the thing I like most about myself," but about twice as likely as the boys to cite some aspect of their appearance. Carolyn Heilbrun - girls sacrifice "truth on the altar of niceness." Results of this fall in esteem - 1 in 10 teenage girls becomes pregnant each year. Those fathers who are still students are likely to stay in school, the mother is likely to drop out and stay out.
Classroom, Sexually hostile environment - in 1980, nation's first survey of sexual harassment in schools, conducted by the Massachusetts State Department of Education, found widespread harassment of girls. 1986 Minnesota survey of predominantly white and middle class juniors and seniors in vocational schools found that between 1/3 and 3/5 of the girls had experienced sexual harassment. Tawnya example page 203 In spring of 1993, almost half of all the sexual harassment cases then being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights involved elementary and secondary schools. Study Commissioned by the American Association of University Women, nearly 4/5 of girls (78%) and over 2/3 of boys (68%) had been subjected to harassment. In both cases, it's almost invariably other boys who are the perpetrators. two examples on page 204 **** WHAT ABOUT THE BOYS? In elementary grades, boys are 4x more likely to be sent to child psychologists and far more likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia and attention deficit disorder than are girls. Boys receive poorer report cards, and are far more likely to repeat a grade. 9x more boys are diagnosed as hyperactive. Boys represent 58% of those in special education classrooms for the mentally retarded, 71% of the learning disabled, and 80% of the emotionally disturbed. Nearly 3/4 of all school suspensions are of boys. Girls are far more likely to participate in extracurricular activities, an indicator that they are more engaged. Gender inequality means that just at the moment when girls lose their voice, boys find one- but it is the inauthentic voice of bravado, of constant posturing, of foolish risk taking and gratuitous violence. Psychologist William Pollack, "boys learn they are supposed to be in power and thus begin to act like it." That girls "lose their voice" means that girls are more likely to undervalue their abilities, especially in the more traditionally "masculine" educational arenas such as math and science and the more traditionally masculine employment areas such as medicine, the military, or architecture. Sociologist Shelley Correll compared thousands of eighth graders in similar academic tracks and with identical grades and test scores. Boys were much more likely remember, their scores were identical- to say, "I have always done well in math" and "Mathematics is one of my best subjects" than were the girls. The boys were no better than the girls - they just thought they were. Too many boys overvalue their abilities remain in difficult math and science courses
longer than they should; they pull the boy's mean scores down. By contrast, few girls, who abilities and self-esteem are sufficient to enable them to "trespass" into a male domain, skew female data upward. Boys regard english as a "feminine" subject (research by Shelley Correll) "Reading is lame, sitting down and looking at words is pathetic," commented one boy. "Most guys who like English are faggots," commented another. Ernest Thompson Seton, was so concerned that modern life was turning, "robust, manly, self-reliant boyhood into a lot of flat chested cigarette smokers of shaky nerves and doubtful vitality." that he formed the boy scouts as a sort of boys liberation movement to enable boys to regain that hardly boyishness of the frontier. example page 209 Women now constitute the majority of students on college campuses passing men 1982, so that in eight years women will earn 58 percent of bachelor's degrees in U.S. Colleges but, in retrospect, more people are now going to college more than ever. example on page 210 many of the top colleges and units. tilt toward higher male enrollments - like Princeton (53%) Yale (51%) and MIT (52%). Nor does anyone seen drive to distraction about the gender disparities in nursing, social work, or education, traditionally far lower paid occupations than those professions where men still predominate (engineering and computer sciences.) "The idea that girl could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys," says Sara Mead, author of a report for Education Sector, a policy research center. "Deceptive Distinction" - a difference that appears to be about gender but is actually about something else - in this case, class or race. idea that if girls and women gain, boys and men lose. 1940 top disciplinary problems reported by teachers - talk out of turn, chewing gum, making noise, running in the hall, cutting in line, committing dress code violations, and littering. 1990 top disciplinary problems reported by teachers - drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. To my mind, those four words, "boys will be boys" may be the most depressing words in educational policy circles today. THE GENDER POLICE
When girls are asked questions about school success, they see high achievement, ambition, and competence as ungendered - and just as consistently, boys see any connection to school as "feminine" most common put down in school "that's so gay" and every student reading this book knows that such a statement has less to do with the presumed sexual orientation and more to do with performance of gender conformity Here is Dave, explaining how he "knows" if a guy is gay: "if they show any sign of weakness or compassion, then other people jump to conclusions and bring them down. So really it's a survival of the fittest. It's not very good to be sensitive. If you have no feeling or compassion of anything like that, you will survive" "That's so gay" has far less to do with aspersions of homosexuality and far more to do with "gender policing" - making sure that no one contravenes the rules of masculinity. High schools have become far more than academic testing grounds; they're the central terrain on which gender identity is tested and demonstrated. Survey of middle school students - 88% had observed bullying, 77% have been a victim, 70% sexually harassed by peers, 40 % experienced dating physical violence, 66% been victimized by emotional abuse in a dating relationship, 54% had been bullied. One quarter of kids in primary school, grades four to six admitted to bullying another student with some regularity in three months before the survey. Three tenths report that violence has increased in their schools in the past year More than half of all teens know somebody who has brought a weapon to school There were over one hundred hazing related deaths on high school and college campuses between 1995-2005 Nearly half (48%) of all students who belong to a group reported being subjected to hazing. 43% were subjected to humiliating activities, and fully 30% preformed possibly illegal acts as part of their initiation. THE SCHOOL AS A GENDERED WORKPLACE "separation of spheres" - meant that women were pushed out of other arenas of work, and they soon began to see elementary education as a way they could fulfill both their career aspirations and their domestic functions of maternal nurturance. example page 216 a boy taught by a woman, one admiral believed, would "render violence to nature," causing "feminized manhood, emotional, illogical, non-combative." Another worried that "the boy in America is not being brought up to punch another boy's head or to stand having his own punched in a healthy and proper manner."
In 1994, 72.5 % of all public and private school teachers were women, and 60% of women teachers were in the elementary grades