Education and Gender Equality: A Critical View
| dc.contributor.author | Stockard, Jean | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-06-05T15:33:33Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-06-05T15:33:33Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1985 | |
| dc.description | 28 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | A number of authors have discussed how educational experiences influence gender inequality. To combat these influences the popular media and educators encourage women and girls to pursue advanced training if they want to "get ahead," often stressing the importance of training in mathematics. Educators design courses to help women overcome "math anxiety" and to encourage promising young girls to pursue mathematics training. Likewise, girls are encouraged to enter nontraditional vocations; and counselors and teachers, as well as parents, are reminded to encourage young women to enter fields typically seen as appropriate for men. Researchers urge teachers and counselors to monitor their interactions with male and female students so that males are not favored over females. Writers of textbooks and tests are encouraged to use equal numbers ofexamples about males and females, to picture members of both groups in equal numbers, and to avoid sex-typed descriptions of activities. Much of this advice appears to be based on the assumption that if women gain more education, train in typically male areas, increase their mathematical skills, are properly encouraged by adult role models, and/or are exposed to nongender-biased curricula, then gender inequality in the adult occupational world should lessen. The evidence to support this assumption, however, appears to be minimal. Each of these modifications may be laudable in and of itself, and each may produce some level of change. Nevertheless, I will show in what follows that the evidence suggests that it would be unreasonable to expect alterations in these areas of education to change segregation of males and females in the occupational world or to lessen the gender gap in income in any marked way. In other words, the linkage between gender differences in educational experiences and gender inequalities in the adult occupational world is probably much more tenuous than commonly believed. In this paper I first briefly review literature typical of that on gender • inequalities in education. Then I examine the research evidence regarding gender differences in academic achievement, attention received in school, educational attainment, and areas of study, and discuss how these differences are related to gender inequalities in occupational status and income in adulthood. Finally, I relate this discussion to theoretical explanations of the persistence of male dominance and explore the implications of the analysis. Because most of the arguments regarding the relation between education and gender inequality have dealt with the United States, the discussion will generally deal only with this country. In addition, it will not involve differences in educational and occupational experiences of men and women in various racial-ethnic groups (see Stockard, 1980; Almquist, 1984 for discussions of aspects of this issue), for the thesis of this paper probably applies to all such groups in this country. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29496 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US | en_US |
| dc.subject | gender inequality | en_US |
| dc.subject | educational experiences | en_US |
| dc.subject | academic achievement | en_US |
| dc.subject | gender typing | en_US |
| dc.title | Education and Gender Equality: A Critical View | en_US |
| dc.type | Book chapter | en_US |