Gender: Girls and achievement

Six internal factors explaining girl's achievement
1. Positive role models.
2. GCSE and Course-work
3. Equal Opportunities for both genders.
  1. Challenging stereotypes in the curriculum
4. Sellection + League Tables.
5. Teacher and student interactions + support
Four changes in the family that affect girls attitudes to education.
1. Increasing divorce rates
2. Increasing lone parent households.
3. Smaller families
4. Increase in cohabitation
Four external factors of girl achievement
1. Femanisation of Education
  1. Sewell found that girls were favoured in school due to the amount of written coursework etc.. Boys are put in disadvantaged position as girls find coursework easier
    1. Sociologist, Gorad theorises that the gender gap has actually increased because of the introduction to coursework but now boys are disadvantaged.
2. Changes in the family
3. Girls changing perception + ambitions
  1. Sociologist, Sharpe conducted an interview on girls in the 1970s and the 1990s. In the 1970s girls aspired for marriage, love etc... In the 1990 interview, Sharpe found that careers were more important and independence was promoted strongly.
4. Changes in women's employement
  1. The Equal Pay Act encourages girls to see a future in the workplace based on money and equal pay for all genders.
Symbolic capital; Identity, class and girls achievement.
1. Louise Archer theorises that due to symbolic capital, working class girls try to get recognition from peers.
  1. Hyper-heterosexual feminine identities
    1. Many girls invested most amount of time to make themselves look 'better'. It lowered the chance of them being called 'tramps' for wearing the wrong brand. However, it also bought them into conflict with the school, they were often punished for having the wrong appearance.
      1. Bourdieu described symbolic violence as teachers dismissed those girls as 'others' therefore they are denying the girls symbolic capital.
  2. Boyfriends
    1. Due to working glass girls having boyfriends, it got in the way of schoolwork and lowered ambitions; losing interesting in Universities, in studying 'masculine' subjects and gaining a professional career.
  3. Being 'loud'
    1. Girls questioned teacher's authority therefore failing to conform to school's rules and ideal student persona. Bringing conflict with teachers.
  4. Working class girls' dilema
    1. Gaining educational capital
    2. Either gaining symbolic capital

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Gender: Girls and achievement

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	Created by Paula Ambrozej almost 7 years ago