Gender Regime
A post about the 'Gender Gap in Attainment', gender regime and Erikson's stages in psychosocial development. Potentially of interest to school and department managers.
I’m having a slightly weird experience trying to write this in the school library surrounded by 5th year pupils who are working on a Design Technology project (to be clear, I do have a free period, so I’m doing this on my time), whilst searching up on the computers about the moment of fertilisation. Hopefully I’ll find a biologist to check this, but from what I’ve read, the genetic makeup of the pupils around me was fixed within about 24 hours of sperm and egg cells meeting and their biological sex was determined by their chromosomes. In terms of the most significant days in a person’s life, that one has got to come right up there: so much about your physical characteristics, cognitive function, susceptibility to different physical and mental illnesses and all sort of other things, is formed for your future while the Earth rotates once on its axis for the first time in your life.
Although the extent to which nature or nurture is responsible for your future is still being debated and researched, I think we are mostly aware of how the results of the DNA lottery at conception predispose our characteristics at birth and throughout our lives. But was there anything in those 24 hours that could explain why all of the pupils sat around me that have chosen to do Design Technology, in a coeducational school, are boys?
In a previous school I was looking at data to try and understand why the boys I was responsible for in my house were receiving grades that were below the average of the eight houses of the school. The data I was looking at was from teacher-assessed attainment and effort grades, and it turned out that all of the 4 top performing houses were girls’ houses, leaving all the boys’ houses below average. I also looked at some data on behaviour and found that the boys were receiving, on average, over 4 times as many sanctions compared to the girls and this had been the case for the last 3 years of data that I looked at. These were huge, huge differences and when I put them to other teachers there were some raised eyebrows, but I got the impression that the feeling amongst senior staff was “well, what did you expect?” Girls outperforming boys is not at all unexpected, and in fact studies seem to show that this has pretty much always been the case since there has been a level-enough playing field to make valid comparisons. To this end I can understand why school leaders might not put addressing disparity in outcomes by gender high up their list of approaches to raising attainment as it would appear a forlorn hope. But I found the discrepancies that I was learning about pretty shocking, and it was enough to motivate me to try to form a group of teachers together to talk about the ‘Gender Gap’, and it was from there that I started reading about masculinities and femininities.
Biologically, there is no coherent explanation for why girls should outperform boys, and there is no difference in the average intelligence quotient between boys and girls (although the average boy estimates theirs statistically higher than the average girl does), but the evidence says that the difference in achievement and behaviour correlates with gender. If differing prospects are not something that a person is born with, then we have to look into the different experiences that boys and girls have that could determine their development, which bring us back again to constructions and performances of gender, and sex-role theory. This is the theory that our ideas of what it is to be a boy or a girl are formed through social norms, rather than through purely biological mechanisms.
I think the public is pretty well informed that boys perform less well than girls, but the explanations for why this happens are wide ranging, from social inequality, the changing nature of work, media, parenting styles, and some would even blame the ‘rise’ of women in the post-WW2 era for why men are doing less well. So much of this is unfounded however, because the Gender Gap in attainment has pretty much always been around: girls in nearly every country where they have had equal access to education are performing better than the boys at the equivalent of GCSE exams.
The last time I looked the countries which were exceptions were solidly patriarchal societies (Saudi Arabia and Russia I think), but otherwise it was girls who were statistically better and by about half a GCSE grade in most subjects in the UK. I think that these differences were never really seen however because of the systematic inequalities between male and female that have only recently moved towards parity, and not even in all countries. Importantly the disparity between boys and girls grows through the late primary school years, and is at its most significant around the time of GCSEs. In case it needs sign-posting, this is also a time in our development that many of us might choose to forget: puberty.
This second image is about entries and results at A Level in 2021. The subjects appearing below the 0% axis (almost all of them) are those in which girls achieved a greater proportion of the top grades. The graph is also useful for considering subject choice by gender, with boys generally representing a greater proportion of the candidates in the Sciences and Mathematics, but less likely to have chosen subjects in the Arts and Languages. The image is from the Education Policy Institute (2021)
Parents and teachers are all too aware of the big forces at play in the way young people behave, but often we can feel only a bit-part character in the drama. What role do schools play in how an adolescent develops? Between the ages of 5 and 16 I reckon that a person’s time is roughly split into thirds of sleeping, free time and at school. That’s not taking into account weekends and holidays, but even with those, school constitutes a massive chunk of a person’s life. Sociologists recognise the importance of school in development, but in considering Erikson’s stages, they also understand that it’s significance is nuanced. Very occasionally the intervention of a teacher might make a real difference (positive or negative) to a pupil but for most people, it is the other pupils, and particularly the peer group around them that can have the biggest effect on the way a person grows up. Do they find a group of friends that supports them? Is there a girl or boy that they fancy, who will quickly come to dominate their thoughts? Are they unlucky enough to be the subject of bullying? School is then the stage upon which all of these social interactions take place, as well as the theatre in which their future careers, interests, habits surrounding their health and opinions of the world will, for the most part, be determined.
I first read about this idea of school as the stage and young people as the performers in The Men and the Boys which is written by Connell. Connell makes it clear that schools are not the main variables in determining a person’s future (I think when pushed she would put that on parents) but in considering the impact of school life she said that educators need to be aware of the role of school in the constructions of a young person’s identity. Gender regime is a concept that I think all teachers can take a moment to consider with respect to their own school. This is from Advancing Gender Reform in Large-scale Organisations: A New Approach for Practitioners and Researchers by Connell:
By the “gender regime” of an institution we mean the patterning of gender relations in that institution, and especially the continuing pattern, which provides the structural context of particular relationships and individual practices. (p6)
‘Patterning of gender relations’ describes how our ideas of ‘men’ and ‘women’ are formed in conjunction to one another through the things we do, and the ‘continuing pattern’ I interpret as the longstanding atmosphere, or climate in a school. We don’t describe schools based on their achievements over the last year or so, but rather their enduring culture: parents when talking about certain secondary schools for their children will use the same sorts of adjectives that they heard their parents using. Gender is historical, as are gender regimes in schools.
Connell distinguishes four different dimensions to her gender regime model: Divisions of Labour, Relations of Power, Emotion and Human Relations, and Culture and Symbolism. It is an interesting and useful exercise to run through these dimensions considering your school’s position.
Divisions of Labour (which describes how the production and consumption of the work is gendered in an institution): Do you have dinner ladies, cleaning ladies but then handymen? Is it more stay at home mums supporting career driven male teachers, or is it the other way around ? Do teachers have to put more of their efforts into keeping the boys working? Are some classes, sports or clubs single sex? Is it boys or girls that you expect to produce the most work when given a task?
Relations of Power (which describes how control and authority is gendered): Who are the dominant pupils in each class? Is there bullying, or mickey-taking in your school? What is the distribution of male and female senior leaders? Is there a ‘chain of command’ document, or does everyone just understand their role? Is there an emphasis on or systems in place that distinguishes the health needs of boys and girls, like promoting strength for boys and fitness for girls?
Emotion and Human relations (I find this a little trickier to conceptualise, but I think it describes how expressions of emotion and attachment to relationships are gendered): Are counsellors and support staff mostly female, but those enforcing sanctions mostly male? Is a display of emotion seen as more acceptable from girls than boys? Are boys expected to ‘stand up straight’ or led to understand that they shouldn’t be crying by the time they’re in secondary school? Do girls get upset during a relationship breakdown where boys just get on with it? Are the vast majority of friendship groups single sex?
Culture and Symbolism (which describes the attitudes and beliefs about gender): Do assemblies laud the courageous endeavours of old-boys, or save the loudest cheers for the rugby results? Do you have a gender-based uniform? Is it normal for just the boys to have a kick about at lunchtime? Are particular subjects preferred by boys and others by girls? Does your school have an imbalance of sanctions given to boys and girls without raising it as a problem?
I think gender regime is a really interesting area to talk about in schools because it is pretty accessible for school leaders to consider, and to consider how to change things up. But it’s also something that they would have to want to do, because a lot of the time schools are selling what their gender regime offers. Schools that ‘turn a boy into a man’ might be a little outdated now, but you don’t have to look too far for crazy ‘flag in the sand’ approaches, such as the headmistress who just a few weeks ago said that Physics wasn’t a popular subject at her school because “girls don’t like it”, and “girls don’t like hard maths”. For the girls in her school that might have wanted to choose the subject, this is a such a damaging message, particularly when it comes from someone in a powerful position. I reckon that she’s had the time to reflect on this now, particularly as the papers reported quite a bit on it.
It’s messed up that the gender gap exists, and it’s even more messed up that most schools aren’t yet addressing it. I wonder what subjects I would have picked if my school had been different. I also think it would be fantastic to have more girls studying physics and more boys art. There is a momentum behind schemes to encourage more girls into STEM fields, but not nearly the same efforts are put into encouraging male engagement in areas that they are under represented. I hope that schools can consider their approaches to gender as a means to helping young people determine their own sense of self and choose the paths that they want to, free from the pressure to conform.
References include, and ideas from:
Connell, R., & Connell, R. (2000). The Men and the Boys. California: University of California Press.
Connell (2005) Advancing Gender Reform in Large-scale Organisations: A New Approach for Practitioners and Researchers, Policy and Society, 24:4, 5-24, DOI: 10.1016/S1449-4035(05)70066-7
Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society (1st ed.). New York: Norton
GCSE pass rate in UK by gender 2021 | Statista. (2022). Retrieved 29 June 2022, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/282484/gcse-pass-rate-in-uk-by-gender/
Giordano, C. (2022). Retrieved 29 June 2022, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/girls-physics-stem-subjects-katharine-birbalsingh-b2066864.html?amp.
Institute, E. (2022). Analysis: A Level Results 2021 - Education Policy Institute. Retrieved 29 June 2022, from https://epi.org.uk/publications-and-research/analysis-a-level-results-2021/
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