An Investigation of the Gender Gap of Boys' Underachieving in Literacy

“The world has gotten more verbal; boys haven’t,” Richard Whitmire. Educators and administrators always had a desire to notice which students were facing difficulties within the classroom. Since the 1990s, they were able to specifically pinpoint what students were struggling; the female students. Years later, educators began to look at, what they called the gender gap, yet again to see if female students were improving their performances within the classrooms. Female students were improving their performances with flying colors, yet the male students scores and results showed concerning data. The gender gap, between male and female students, within education is a debate that has been researched habitually over the years only to show evidence

Evidence suggests that girls are more likely to spend their leisure time in ways which compliment their education and contribute to educational achievements. Mitsos and Browne place considerable emphasis on reading. Women are more likely to read than men, and mothers are more likely than fathers to read to their children. Therefore girls are more likely to have same-sex role models to encourage them to read. Poor language and literacy skills are likely to affect boys' performance across a wide range of subjects.

Historically boys were top of the class. Today that is no longer the case. A recent article in The Economist discusses a 2009 study by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) that examined how 15-year-old boys and girls performed in reading, mathematics and science. They found that girls are performing better than their male classmates. This gender gap is worldwide. Girls score higher than boys on tests measuring reading ability in every country in the world (Loveless).

When hearing the words boy and girl, two different images pop into your head. The image for girl is wearing a pink dress, has long hair, is nice but less intelligent. The image for a boy is short hair, pants, confident and very intelligent. When thinking of genders intelligence, or lack there-of, is associated with them. Men are typically thought of as more intelligent, whereas, woman are thought of as intellectually inferior to men. This stigma is perpetuated by only seeing men in high academic, scientific or leadership roles. The idea that it is expected of a man to receive education and not expected of woman is prevalent in Staceyann Chin’s book “The Other Side of Paradise; the author of “Ideology, Myth, and Magic: Femininity, Masculinity, and “Gender Roles””, Allan Johnson would agree that the unfair bias towards education in Chin’s book is aggreges.

Lately this “boy code” increases a problem of the gender gap between boys and girls in terms of academic, social, and work performance.

Gender differences in achievement can be explained best by changes that have occurred in factors outside of school, known as external factors. A DfES (2007) bar chart showed that throughout the years (1985 – 2007), there has been a higher percentage of females that achieved five or more A*-C grades at GCSE. The percentage has been constantly increasing at a faster rate than the male percentage. This proves that changes in wider society have affected both genders differently, but girl’s achievement has benefited from this more.

There is a lot of compelling evidence to support the view that changes in the education system has resulted in differences in educational achievement between males and females. There is no denying that the statistics show girls are outperforming boys at every level in education, but the question is whether this is largely related to changes in the assessment process and the way each of the genders is educated or whether there are other factors causing the differences.

She mostly had students in her class right before they hit puberty, which eliminated many potential issues. Still, she noticed “girls tended to be better behaved. Boys [were] more of the troubled, really difficult one” (Huffman). Of course, studies have shown that, for most boys, “testosterone isn’t causing aggression, it’s exaggerating the aggression that’s already there” (Testosterone Rules). Carolyn also observed that “girls tended to be more studious; but a lot of the time really brilliant ones were boys. Girls tended to work harder, so more of them would have been better” (Huffman). This observation aligns with current interest in why girls perform better academically. The “last decade has seen a growing popular and academic obsession with boys’ underachievement” (Reay). Carolyn made specific efforts in her classroom to treat students fairly and equally, regardless of their gender or academic success. She also intentionally taught units on famous women and famous African Americans, hoping to ignite the same desire for equality in her students that she herself

Due to this gender stereotyping it could have been this which had a dramatic effect on the girls causing them to have less value to education compared to the boys. (Selfe,1983)

Summary: This essay is about how reading gender stereotypes will influence children and how kids are influenced in books. I will provide examples of books and studies that have gender stereotypes and what it does to the children that read it. In the end I will talk about how progress had been made in gendered reading and now there are even publications dedicated to helping the LGTBC.

To begin with, separating gender at schools is the mains factors of inequality in education. If they were taught with different teaching techniques and subjects to face on. To illustrate, it it generally seen that boys are more stronger than girls, so they will focus on the PE, that does not automatically mean

Gender differences in education is something of a common topic among educational studies since intensification in the 1970’s (Breakwell, 2003, p. 437). Gender differences among the subjects taught in school has been found to be somewhat more of a social construct rather than a concept that has any kind of scientific explanation because of the idea of gender differences being taken and changed into the idea of a gender stereotype in most parts of education (Crilly, 2013, p. 1).

Surprisingly in Turkey a near 7% of girls, ages 8 to 12 do not attend school, whereas only 2% of boys do not attend school. By the time the girls have reached their early teen years the number of girls attending school is 20% below that of the boys attending school. That means only 77 females out of 100 men were enrolled, which is lower than many countries. Turkey remains to be the one of the few countries were the huge gender gap of girls is still so very present. The research behind the curiosity and explanation of gender roles has created an explanation for the observation in the education field as well as the labor market outcomes. Thus, many have

Gender differences occur in many aspects of a person’s life whether it is culture, politics, occupation, family and relationships, or the economy (just to name a few). One major difference in gender occurs in learning and education in the elementary and secondary levels. Research has found that males and females learn differently in many aspects of education. First of all, female and male brains are constructed differently affecting the way they learn; this leads to basic differences in learning and also gives an introduction into why the way one learns differs according to gender and how males and females learn subjects and tasks differently. Second, males and females are treated differently, sometimes unconsciously, in educational

Worldwide, women are achieving higher representation and success. At the post-secondary level women are earning most of the degrees awarded. Where did our males disappear to? Gender inequality is an extensive, complex and often vague concept. Simply it is defined as the ranking of a particular gender, whether male or female, over the other and how they are treated based on their gender. Gender inequality and the result of male underperformance in schools have become major issues in the Caribbean, and affect the individuals involved and the society on a whole. Boys’ underachievement therefore should not be ignored and an analysis of