Handbook of psychology volume 7 educational psychology

264

Gender Issues in the Classroom

sociology, psychology, foreign languages, and fine arts. Girls

take more AP courses in English, biology, and foreign lan-

guages. More girls than boys take voluntary AP tests to earn

college credit; in fact, African American girls are far more

likely to take AP exams than are African American boys (by

a factor of almost two to one). Girls, however, receive fewer

scores of 3 or higher, the score needed to receive college

credit. This is true even in subjects like English in which girls

traditionally earn top grades. Girls lag behind boys in partic-

ipation in AP physical science classes and in computer sci-

ence and computer design classes. Girls make up only a small

percentage of students in computer science and computer

design classes. In 1996, girls comprised only 17% of AP test

takers in computer science.

In the college-bound population, males of all racial and

ethnic backgrounds score higher than do females on the math

section and on the verbal section of the Scholastic Achieve-

ment Test (SAT) (AAUW, 1998a). The gender gaps are

widest among high-achieving students. On the verbal section

of the American College Testing Program (ACT), girls

outscore boys on the verbal section.

THE CLASSROOM CLIMATE

The research on gender issues in the classrooms describes dif-

ferential treatment of males and females who sit the same

classroom, use the same materials, and work with the same

teacher. The central questions remains To what extent do

classroom teachers, school administrators, counselors, and

peers limit the development of females and males through pro-

moting gender stereotyping and gender-biased classroom

practices and school policies?

Gender Bias in Student-Teacher Interactions

Gender bias in student-teacher interactions has been docu-

mented in classrooms from kindergarten through the end of

high school. Areas of gender-differentiated instruction include:

• Teacher questions and student responses.

• Types of teacher questions and sanctions.

• Student voice or air time, so to speak.

• Teacher attention to student appearance.

• Amount of wait time.

• Teacher-student coaching.

• Teacher assigned jobs.

A significant finding has been that classroom teachers

engage boys in question-and-answer periods more frequently

than they engage girls. Involving boys more actively in the

classroom dialogue has been seen as a way to control male be-

havior in the classroom and has often been a response to male

aggressiveness. Studies found that in classroom discourse,

boys frequently raised their hands—sometimes impulsively

and sometimes without even knowing the answer. Con-

versely, studies found that girls tended not to raise their hands

as often; when they did, they were overlooked frequently and

male students were chosen instead. Teachers, when asked to

monitor their interactions with students, consciously changed

this pattern, but only after active participation in a gender

workshop or related intervention. Several teacher education

institutions offer courses addressing gender issues in the

classroom, and pre- and postcourse assessments indicate that

teachers make adjustments to their own student interactions

after learning the ways in which their unintentionally biased

behaviors affect girls and boys’ self-concepts in classrooms.

For example, in teacher training courses on gender and

schooling, teachers are asked to examine their classroom in-

teractions and to tape themselves. Often, they notice that they

call on boys more frequently for responses and coach boys for

correct responses more frequently than they do with girls.

Teachers tend to change their interactions when they are made

aware of their practices. For example, some elementary

school teachers tend to praise girls for how they dress and

wear their hair. In courses and workshops, however, teachers

are encouraged to extend more praise to girls’ problem-

solving skills and performance in class. Similarly, teachers are

encouraged to acknowledge boys’ skills in working well in co-

operative groups and to praise their capacity to work in a team

within the classroom context. Teachers report that they

change those behaviors when made aware of them (Koch,

1998a).

A related finding revealed that teachers tended to ask boys

more open-ended, thought-provoking questions than they

asked girls, demonstrating the expectation that boys were

capable of greater abstract thinking. As noted later in this

chapter, these findings become exaggerated in different sub-

ject area classes in middle and high school, especially math-

ematics, science, and technology.

Several studies revealed that although the classroom

helpers selected by teachers are carefully selected girls, the

boys are more likely to demonstrate and use technical equip-

ment and actively engage with materials during experiments.

When girls exhibited boisterous behavior and impulsively

called out a response, they were reprimanded in ways in

which boys who routinely exhibited the same behaviors were

not. One study described third-grade elementary school girls

as suffering from overcontrol, a term used to indicate the

silence of girls and their reluctance to ask questions even

when they did not understand a concept (Harvard Education

Newsletter, 1989).

Gender Equity in Early Childhood Environments

265

Research studies affirm repeatedly that males receive more

of all types of the teacher’s attention in classrooms and are

given more time to talk in class from preschool through high

school. Teachers tend to offer more praise, criticism, remedi-

ation, and acceptance to boys than to girls. Although males

receive harsher punishment than do females for the same of-

fense, females are often unduly punished when they exhibit

male social behavior. Teachers are often invested in the si-

lence of the girls. Girls tend not to call attention to themselves

and to be quiet, social, and well behaved in classrooms. Even

when they are sure of an answer, they are not apt to volunteer.

Teachers often sanction so-called good girl behavior in ele-

mentary classrooms as a way of maintaining their vision of

proper classroom management. Teachers tend to offer differ-

ent types of praise—rewarding girls for their appearance or

the appearance of their work and praising boys for the ways in

which they solve a problem or accomplish a task. Girls learn

early on that their appearance matters in ways that are not

valid for the boys. Being pretty, cute, thin, charming, alluring,

well-dressed, and sexy are attributes to which girls aspire

because such attributes are valued by adults and media

messages. Classrooms reinforce those values when girls are

praised for appearance and dress on a consistent basis.

When asking the class questions, teachers tend to exhibit

longer wait times for boys than for girls. Wait time refers to

the period of time between asking a question and calling on a

student for a response. Research has found that wait time is an

important teacher technique for encouraging full participa-

tion of all students and promoting higher order thinking rather

than simple recall (Rowe, 1987). Whereas some researchers

assert that teachers give males longer wait time than they give

females to keep males’ interest and manage classroom behav-

ior, other researchers believe that teachers expect more ab-

stract or higher order thinking from the males and that those

expectations are manifested in longer wait times. Studies re-

veal that teachers tend to coach boys for the correct answers

through prodding and cajoling, but they go on to the next stu-

dent when a girl has an incorrect response (Sadker & Sadker,

1994; Sandler, Silverberg, & Hall, 1996).

Most teachers believe that they treat girls and boys

the same; research reveals that they frequently do not. The

teacher’s gender has little bearing on the outcome; it is the

gender of the student that determines the differential behav-

ior (Sadker & Sadker, 1994).

GENDER EQUITY IN EARLY

CHILDHOOD ENVIRONMENTS

The classroom is a place where students are socialized into

behaving in certain ways. Children arrive at school with early

gender socialization patterns that often influence the life of

the classroom. The structure and climate created in the class-

room need to mitigate these social differences in order to cap-

italize on strengths of each gender and build skills that may

be lacking due to stereotyping. One study explored the lives

of girls and boys in kindergarten classrooms (Greenberg,

1985). Observations of early childhood teachers reveal that

girls are praised in kindergarten for arriving to school willing

and able to conform to classroom structures and rules. Teach-

ers spend more time socializing boys into classroom life, and

the result is that girls get less teacher attention. Boys receive

what they need—additional work on obeying rules, follow-

ing classroom protocols, controlling unruly impulses, and

establishing the preconditions for learning.

Girls’ needs are more subtle and tend to be overlooked.

For example, most girls arrive into kindergarten with better

development of fine motor skills than most boys have. They

often do not have as well-developed gross motor skills, al-

though that steadily improved in the 1990s with the institu-

tionalization of organized sports for girls. Early childhood

environments would serve little girls well by exposing them

purposefully to activities requiring large motor skills, ranging

from block corner activities to climbing and running during

recess. Instead, researchers noted that the activities girls

needed most in early childhood were relegated to free play or

recess time. The needs of boys, however, were met during the

instructional class time (Klein, 1985).

Segregated play in early educational environments does

not meet the needs of both genders. For example, one study

revealed that boys wanted to enter the doll corner but only

got there by invading as superheroes (Paley, 1993). For boys,

this type of aggressive behavior can be lessened—not

accentuated—by doll corner play. Other studies explore the

affect on playtime of setting up the early childhood class-

room in ways that encourage cooperative play between

girls and boys (Gallas, 1998; Greenberg, 1985; Schlank &

Metzger, 1997). One study followed a group of kindergarten

boys whose boys-only club exclusively limited enrollment to

athletic boys (Best, 1983). Belonging to the boys’ club was

directly correlated with higher achievement. This type of all-

boys group adversely affects those who do not belong.

Furthermore, segregated play activities are encouraged by

heavy media promotion of so-called girls’ toys and boys’

toys; this further differentiates interactions and communi-

cation styles of girls and boys. This differentiation disad-

vantages girls and boys as they participate in learning

communities because it limits the range of behaviors, skills,

speech patterns, communication styles, and ways of knowing

to same gender groupings. Early childhood classrooms that

are structured to maximize boy-girl interaction during free

time as well as instructional time help both girls and boys to

develop with fewer restrictions.

266

Gender Issues in the Classroom

In one kindergarten classroom, a girls’ group was building

a tall tower in the block corner when it suddenly fell over;

they left the task in dismay. A group of boys had built a tower

and knocked it down purposely for the sheer joy of building

it back up again. Risk taking and building confidence are im-

portant attributes for all students to acquire. Testing ideas and

risking error are significant components of learning. Simi-

larly, the kind of family-like communication that occurs in

the doll corner provides important experiences for little boys

who are not traditionally socialized to develop their verbal

expression skills in ways in which girls are (Best, 1983;

Greenberg, 1985; Paley, 1993).

Boys need to recognize the value and importance of atti-

tudes and competencies stereotypically associated with the

feminine. Girls need to acquire many of the attitudes and

competencies associated with the masculine. Classrooms are

places where mixed-gender grouping can foster an apprecia-

tion for qualities each gender has been socialized to acquire

from birth. Instead, gender teachings (McIntosh, 2000) are

full of inherited ideas that comprise a set of rules each

biological sex must follow. These rules are invented, differ

across cultures, and can change over time. As the years go

on, girls and boys come to see their gender teachings (e.g.,

boys don’t cry) as a part of their sex and hence natural for

their sex. To the extent that early childhood classrooms can

begin to deconstruct restricted notions about how to be a boy

or how to be a girl, it is possible to achieve gender-equitable

learning communities. Although progress was made in the

last decade of the twentieth century, the White Western soci-

etal belief persists that the sexes are somehow opposite.

Classroom communities that reflect this belief tacitly

encourage separate gender play, with boys persisting in the

block corner and girls remaining in the dramatic play or

house corner. This chapter is informed by the belief that

classroom communities can challenge existing beliefs of

what is natural for girls and boys and hence broaden oppor-

tunities for children.

Gender and Identity in the Primary Grades

“Girls are usually sitting in a tree when they are told, ‘Girls

don’t climb trees’. . . Women who do not climb, literally or

figuratively, come to feel it is natural to the female sex that

women do not ‘climb’” (McIntosh, 2000, p. 1). This quote

represents an important connection between the messages

girls and boys receive about what they can and cannot do

and the abilities they refine as they mature. How do teachers

and the classroom climates they create encourage girls and

boys to move beyond gender-stereotyped expectations and

expand their abilities? This section explores the effects of

sex-role stereotyping and social roles on the behavior of girls

and boys in classrooms.

Bad Boys and Silent Girls

Social stereotyping and bias influence children’s self-

concepts and attitudes toward others. Although sweeping

generalizations currently categorize the lives of little boys

and little girls, this chapter seeks to highlight the tendency

toward oversimplification that the field of gender equity—

well-intentioned and significant—has wrought upon class-

room contexts.

At age 30 months, children are learning to use gender

labels (boy-girl) and by 3–5 years of age, children try to fig-

ure out if they will remain a boy or a girl or if that is subject

to change. They possess internalized gender roles (Derman-

Sparks, 1989) and arrive at school having already acquired a

set of values, attitudes, and expectations of what girls and

boys can do. Research findings reveal that teacher attitudes

and interactions and the ways in which the classroom com-

munity is established can reinforce prevailing gender norms,

positing masculine as opposite to feminine, or they can ex-

pand the boundaries of sex role stereotyping by providing all

children with a wide range of experiences and possibilities.

We know that the differences among boys and among girls

are far greater than the actual differences between the

sexes (Golumbok & Fivusch, 1996). Much of what we know

as gender teachings may be unnatural for individual children

of either sex. For example, a very artistic boy may be dis-

couraged from refining his talents by adults whose expecta-

tions are that as a young boy, he should be playing ball rather

than drawing pictures.

Consequently, a gender agenda becomes crucial to the

primary teacher as he or she sets out to actively listen to the

voices of girls and boys and empower them with new

possibilities. Children differentiate between appropriate be-

haviors for girls and boys in the areas of physical appearance,

toy choices, play activities, and peer preferences (AAUW,

1993; Sadker & Sadker, 1986). Consequently, children are

placed in a suboptimal position—wanting to participate in

activities that they perceive they should not want because of

their sex. These conflicts between personal likes and doing

what they are led to think they should do need to be made

visible in the primary grades and throughout schooling.

Unfortunately, much of the gender equity research has

revealed that boys dominate and silence girls and that teach-

ers collude with this agenda. This teacher collusion—

allowing boys to dominate—ignores the complexities of

small children’s behaviors, conflicts, and needs for accep-

tance. A gender agenda in a primary classroom would include

Gender Equity in Early Childhood Environments

267

using gender-inclusive language, arranging the primary

classroom in a way that encourages mixed-gender play, and

providing children with classroom rules that disallow exclu-

sions by gender. For example, explicitly stating that all chil-

dren can play with all toys in all activity areas and that no

children may be kept from playing because of something they

cannot change—such as gender, skin color, or disability are

two rules that provide children with the freedom to explore all

areas and try out many different roles (Schlank & Metzger,

1997).

Karen Gallas (1998), however, in her extended classroom

research work with her own first and second graders, reminds

us that the construction of a gender-balanced classroom is a

goal that reflects incomplete understandings of classroom life

and denies the cultural dynamic of today’s classrooms (p. 3).

Although proactive methods of instruction to promote gender

consciousness and employ gender-neutral materials are tools

that can help teachers, Gallas asserts that in fact the social cli-

mate of the classroom is highly complex and that teachers are

well served by exploring the conditions within their own

classrooms that promote certain social relations over others.

In other words, to be gender equitable, primary teachers need

to know how the dynamics of gender identity and power re-

lations plays out in their specific classroom contexts. There

are no simple formulas for creating equitable classroom

environments.

Gallas’s research presents a more complex response to cre-

ating equitable climates; she describes the underlying causes

of boy dominance in her 7- and 8-year-olds and the purposes

they serve for attaining power in the classroom (Gallas, 1994,

1998). Boys appear to suffer more from their early indoctri-

nation into school structures than do girls. Sitting and listen-

ing for long periods of time is seen as possible—even

easy—for girls and torture for boys. Working quietly on a pro-

ject and taking turns almost seems to satisfy the girls, whereas

it becomes an occasion for shouting out, pushing, or running

for the boys. Gallas describes the so-called bad boys in her

first- and second-grade classes as those outspoken boys who

use physical and verbal intrusions in the classroom to rebel

against prevailing power. She notes, as others have (Best,

1983; Paley, 1993; Sadker & Sadker, 1994), that while signal-

ing their power, these boys are also lost to the community of

learning. Boys who are more physical and verbal also tend to

spend more time attempting to garner adulation from the less

aggressive boys and popular girls; consequently, they pay the

price of isolation from the community of the classroom.

As they [bad boys] develop and refine their ability to use lan-

guage to critique, judge, and embarrass, they also disrupt ins-

truction, intimidate classmates, and force a code of detachment

on themselves that denies their potential as learners and thinkers.

(Gallas, 1998, p. 35)

Silence can be another way to negotiate power in the gender

relations of the first-grade classroom. The gender stereotype

pervading elementary school classrooms provides images of

silent girls and bad boys. Boys may be quiet and shy, but they

are rarely silent, whereas girls who are silent or whose voices

are so low they are barely audible are not uncommon. One

oversimplification of this phenomenon includes the belief

that girls are silenced by the boys and somehow—if the

teacher only intervenes—the girls will no longer be so quiet.

Another oversimplification describes the gendered di-

chotomies of classroom discourse as originating in the class-

room, as though the gender relations suppress the girls’

voices. There is a lack of research on girls’ silence, and an

acceptance of their silence in the early grades remains. As a

result, early childhood teachers see the need to manage the

boys while the girls remain compliant and quiet. Teachers do

not attempt to examine the possible causes of the girls’

silences because the silences are not seen as problematic.

In fact, girls’ silences serve to isolate them from a learning

community and leave them out of the loop in the same way

that boys’ aggression isolates boys. Some classroom re-

searchers have observed that for girls, the shrinking from the

limelight of the classroom is connected to many complex

factors—not just the reluctance to call attention to them-

selves. For some girls, remaining silent in the face of a class-

room dynamic that includes outspoken and judgmental boys

can be the only way they feel psychologically safe. 

Bad boys, like most children, are not naturally mean-spirited;

they are experimental. They are small social scientists studying

the effects of their behavior on others. (Gallas, 1998, p. 44)

Hence, the status of dominance among the children often

determines who gets to have public voice in the classroom.

Understanding how a child’s classroom status can determine

how that child gets to dominate the public voice in the class-

room allows teachers the opportunity to reflect on those who

are most frequently heard in the classroom—not only as a

taken-for-granted gender issue, but also through the lens of

social relations within and between genders in the class-

rooms. Because having a public voice is important to the de-

velopment of all children, studying the classroom contexts

that provide or discourage opportunities for voice is a neces-

sary prerequisite to exploring the inner lives of silent girls

and mediating the behaviors of outspoken boys.

Although researchers have observed patterns of girl and

boy behaviors in early childhood environments that conform