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Gender issue in schools
Gender difference in education
Gender inequality in schools
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What’s Happened To All the Boys? Writer Michelle Conlin wrote the article “The New Gender Gap” for Business Week about the way boys are learning and how they are having difficulties in all aspects of academics. Similarly, Elaine McArdle wrote the article “The Lost Boys” for Boston Globe, describing the female to male ratio in college and why it is slowly but surely becoming a concern. The imbalances of genders in college are a result of how boys and girls are being educated from as early as Kindergarten. Because of how the education system is set up, boys are slowly but surely becoming the second sex. Historically, males have been the primary beneficiaries of education. Statistics show that it was not until a few decades ago that females …show more content…
The education shift to females started taking its place. According to Conlin:
Thirty years ago, educational experts launched what’s known as the “Girl Project.” The…objective was to help girls wipe out their weaknesses in math and science, build self-esteem, and give them the undisputed message: The opportunities are yours; take them…Schools focused on making the school more girl-friendly…Once the chains were off, girls soared. (Conlin
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The lack of care for education relies mainly in that the system has shifted to help out girls but completely forget about boys. Boys learn at a different rate causing men to become less successful. Conlin states, “Developmental differences often un-fairly sideline boys as slow or dumb, planting distaste for school as early as the first grade” (Conlin 177). Boys are growing up learning that maybe school isn’t for them leading them to even drop out or not enroll in college.
In addition, some may argue that pop-culture suggest that it’s not cool to be educated or go to college. Some argue that because biologically speaking, boys learn to read and write way after girls do. According to McArdle, “Boys, who already find school difficult, fall behind, become discouraged and give up” (McArdle 167). There are many things that may influence why boys can’t seem to be interested in school. There is no definite understanding of why boys are having this much trouble, one can almost say the reason that it’s hard to figure it out, is a problem in
“In the United States and several other countries, women now actually surpass men in educational achievements” (Josh, “Harvard Summer School”). Some women are more educated and qualified for most
Through the article, "How the School Shortchange Boys," by Gerry Garibaldi implies that the school setting has experienced a transformation towards feminization. In the past, the child faced numerous conditions that vindicated her trouble in a male dominated society. However, after the deceitful discharge processes, the woman was finally free and all institutions welcomed her input seeking to create a fair society. According to Garibaldi (2006), the modern school setting deprives the boy child freedom to interact and relate in a natural environment (Garibaldi 54). Girls are kind, complacent, understanding and conform to salient regulations without emphasis. With these elements, girls comply with school regulations delivering assignments on time. The boy child is inquisitive, rational and desires logical explanations explaining the reason behind every instruction. The modern school setting does shortchange boys as it creates an unequal platform where teachers favor girls and victimize boys because of their inherent traits.
Gerry Garibaldi, a high school teacher and Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology both explain how the consequences of the feminism movement are harming boys in school and later in life. Kimmel and Garibaldi present their views on the gender education problems in their articles “How The Schools Shortchange Boys” and “A War Against Boys”. Both make passionate arguments and prove that boys are at a disadvantage in modern feminized classrooms. Kimmel’s arguments about the problems boys face in the American educational system are more convincing than Garibaldi’s, because his style of argumentation is more objective, supported by more statistics, and provides unbiased restatement of opposing views.
The once male dominated, corporate, "white collar" America has seen a phenomenal influx of women within the last thirty years. Although a female lawyer, physician, or CEO is no longer considered a rarity in our times, women still face quite a deal of oppression in comparison to their male counterparts. In retrospect, some professions have always been controlled by women, and men have not made a noticeable advance in these fields. In 1970, finding a female lawyer to represent you would be a difficult task, since less than five percent of the profession were women. Today, that number has risen to almost thirty percent. The percentage of female doctors has almost tripled in the course of thirty years. African Americans have not made such a conspicuous progression within the last fifty years, while women have made a tremendous impact on the corporate world. One may wonder, how did women make these extraordinary advances? For the most part, it is due to the education they receive. At the present time young girls are encouraged to enroll in classes dealing with math and science, rather than home economics and typing. As pointed out by Nanette Asimov, in her essay "Fewer Teen Girls Enrolling in Technology Classes", school officials are advocating the necessity of advanced placement, and honor classes for teenage girls, in both the arts and sciences. This support and reassurance than carries over onto college, and finds a permanent fixture in a woman’s life. While women are continuing their success in once exclusively male oriented professions, they are still lacking the respect and equality from their peers, coworkers, and society. The average male lawyer, and doctor make twenty-five percent more money than their female equivalent. Women have always lived with the reputation of being intellectually inferior to, and physically submissive to men. This medieval, ignorant notion is far fetched from the truth. In 1999, high school men and women posted similar SAT scores, being separated by a only a few points. In addition to posting similar scores on the SAT, the average males score was a mere two-tenths of a point higher than an average females score on the ACT. Even though a woman maybe as qualified as a male for a certain occupation , women receive unwanted harassment, and are under strict scrutiny. A good illustration of this would be the women represented in "Two Women Cadets Leave the Citadel.
The argument David Brooks delivers about the gender gap at school regarding males reading comprehension is irrelevant. As students beginning their education they need to be able to create their own study set, regardless of the material. Despite, "what field males are interested in, they will have to read. And the better they can read, the easier it will be for them to learn new subject matter and to effectively communicate their knowledge"
Education is for boys as well because they are the husbands who will lead the communities. This time, the women want to choose their husbands, go to school, don’t want to be cut anymore, make their decisions for themselves, to be involved in politics and to be equal.
Sadker, Myra, David Sadker, and Susan Klein. "The Issue of Gender in Elementary and Secondary Education." Review of Research in Education 17 (1991): 269. JSTOR. Web. 14 Mar. 2012.
Imagine living in a time when your only role is to get married, bear children, and take care of your house and husband. Adrienne Rich proposes an ulterior idea in her essay “Taking Women Students Seriously” Women should not only question the gender standards but discuss the gender norms that society has created; by discussion and attention to the matter we can eliminate it all together. Women are not represented in school curriculums enough and have a large misrepresentation in society. Rich draws attention to: What women have working against them in education, how women are perceived in the world by the media and advertising, and the gender roles that society pressures young children to contort to. By striking up a discussion
School went from half an hour after daybreak to half an hour before the sun set. Physical education is a big part of a boys education (Connolly, 34). When the boys were 18, they no longer went to school; instead they began their 2 year military training. Young girls did not go to school. Middle and upper class girls learned to read and write from a female tutor at home (Connolly, 35).
If one takes a closer look at the issues surrounding the differences between the male and female roles in the workforce and in education, one will notice that women tend to be one step below men on the "status" or "importance" ladder.
Bonomo, V. (2010). Gender matters in elementary education: Research-based strategies to meet the distinctive learning needs of boys and girls. Educational Horizons, 88(4), 257-264
Boys and men have been outnumbered and outperformed at all levels of schooling for decades in many countries. That being said, women are educated enough to know they should not be involved in acts of trafficking, early marriage, etc. The world is constantly changing, so relying on something created thirty years ago, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), would be unethical. In essence, it is possible to make advances in categories such as education without having to rely so much on fixing failures within the health systems.
Girls are seen as caring, nurturing, quiet, and helpful. They place other’s needs above their own. Girls get ahead by hard work, not by being naturally gifted. Boys are seen as lazy, but girls are seen as not capable. In class, teacher will call on boys more than they call on girls. Boys are seen as better at math and science; while girls are better at reading and art. This bias is still at work even out of the classroom. There are more males employed at computer firms than women. The ratio of male to female workers in STEM fields is 3-1. In college, more women major in the humanities than in the sciences. In education, women are often seen as lesser than; even though 65% of all college degrees are earned by women. Women are still often seen as needing to be more decorative than intellectual, as represented by the Barbie who included the phrase, “Math is hard!” and the shirt that JC Penneys sold that said, “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me.” While there was a backlash on both items, it points out that there is a great deal of work to do on the educational gender bias to be
The first all female schools began in the early 1800’s. These academies favored more traditional gender roles, women being the home makers and the men being the bread winners. The first generation of educated women was the result of single-sex colleges in 1873. Wendy Kaminer, an investigative journalist, states that “single-sex education was not exactly a choice; it was a cultural mandate at a time when sexual segregation was considered only natural” (1). Women of this time were technically not allowed to attend school with males. Feminists of this time worked hard to integrate the school system and by the early 1900’s, single sex classrooms were a thing of the past. In 1910, twenty-seven percent of colleges were for men only, fifteen percent were for women only and the remainders were coed. Today, women outnumber men among college graduates (Kaminer 1). After all the hard work of early feminists, there are thousands of people today who advocate bringing back the single sex classroom.
Women have had quite a few hurdles to get over since the 1950's. In 1958 the proportion of women attending college in comparison with men was 35 percent. (Friedan,