By Daniela Blei, Stanford Social Innovation Review, December 26, 2019
Today, girls outperform boys in almost every academic subject. On average, girls earn higher grades and graduate from high school at higher rates, and women enroll in college in much greater numbers. While these gendered achievement gaps have created the impression that boys are the newly disadvantaged at school, education researchers say that growing talk of a “boy crisis” belies reality in the classroom. They have consistently found that from kindergarten through college, students view boys and men as more intelligent than girls and women. How does school reproduce this traditional gender hierarchy?
To better understand how school practices contribute to gendered status beliefs, Michela Musto, a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, embedded herself in a racially diverse suburban middle school in Los Angeles for two-and-a-half years. Most sociological studies of schools examine low-income urban areas, but Mountain Heights Middle School, where Musto conducted ethnographic research and 196 interviews, is a high-performing public institution with an enrollment of more than 1,000 students that includes both affluent and nonaffluent families.
And while many sociologists have studied the relationship between gender and academic achievement in K-12 settings, the bulk of this research looks at teachers, administrators, or parents. Instead, Musto says, “I wanted to understand school from the student’s perspective.” To capture everyday experience, she observed classes and joined students at lunch, dances, and extracurricular activities.
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