Gendered Curriculum

In the past, the sociology of education has looked at examination differences between males and females to illustrate various outcomes of the hidden curriculum. Over the past few years, however, both males and females seem to perform equally well (or equally badly) in both GCSE and A-level examinations.

In the light of these changes, the focus now has moved away from educational performance to a less apparent manifestation of the hidden curriculum, namely a gendered curriculum. This is the idea that males and females are encouraged to study different subjects. Some subjects becoming seen as male, some as female and some as gender neutral (that is, favoured equally by both males and females).

This is, as you might expect given the changes in the curriculum over the past 25 years, a "problem" mainly related to post-16 education. This is because it is at this level that students do not have to take a compulsory range of subjects.

However, given that a gendered curriculum does seem to develop in post-16 education, one explanation for the fact that girls perform as well as boys academically, but tend to avoid certain subjects, is that when girls enter education they have a problem:

• They are taught, as part of the secondary socialisation process in schools, that they are the equal of boys and that their eventual achievement will be on merit (that is, girls are not actively discriminated against - although there is evidence of passive forms of gender discrimination).
  
• Their primary socialisation, however, has taught them there are some areas of the social world that are not considered, in our society, to be feminine.
  

This situation creates a problem of anomie. In this instance, a conflict over role expectations and the ideology that surrounds male and female roles. For example:

• As a schoolgirl, she is expected to try her best to achieve academically.
  
• As a female, girls are not expected to enter areas of the curriculum (and by extension the workforce) associated with masculine gender characteristics.
  

Thus, girls are secondary socialised into ideological assumptions about competing and succeeding at school. Primary socialisation, however, teaches them that some areas of work (and the curriculum) are off-limits. If they insist on studying those areas then they run the risk of attracting a deviant label ("unfeminine").

Girls resolve this problem by avoiding certain subjects classified as masculine (such as the natural sciences) and opting for subjects classified as feminine (such as modern languages) or socially neutral (such as English Literature). For males the above process also holds true, except it is largely reversed.

The significance of a gendered curriculum is that boys and girls become segregated within the school in a way that channels girls into a relatively narrow range of future occupations (usually those that reflect social stereotypes about women and affective roles - the teaching, nursing and social work professions, for example).