Essay: Gender inequalities among children at school

Every individual’s experiences during their school life largely shape their perspectives on who they want to be or how their life would look like in the rest of their life. They learn from every aspect of their experiences in school, such as the way they are treated, what they learn in class, what the teachers or peers tell them, and how they perceive others behave. And every individuals’ such experiences and perspectives are resulted from them altogether construct a variety of social dynamics in our society such as equalities in gender, religion, race, ethnicity, and class. In this sense, it is more than necessary to identify the influence of school on the social inequality students experience throughout their lives in order to recognize the root of various inequalities across individual’s identity. Especially, the most relevant aspect of identity for the students in school would be gender, as gender identity is usually determined during the school age. Recent studies show that women have overcome the disadvantages they used to have in the past and are doing better than boys in school. Under those circumstances, a school seems to subvert the gender patriarchy by advantaging women in social, cognitive, and academic aspects of their lives, and it is the outside-of-school factor that mostly contribute to the gender inequalities women would experience in the future.
Girls are generally advantaged in school than boys in a way that they do better in multiple aspects of their school life which have impacts on each other. When girls and boys are socialized in early elementary school, both of them are inclined to cling to the stereotypes about the group they belong to. Generally, boys are stigmatized with reading disabilities, antisocial behavior, attention disorders, and delayed speech (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008). According to Buchmann, DiPrete, and McDaniel (2008), poor reading skills and antisocial behaviors go hand in hand, and emotional and behavioral problems have impact on educational outcomes later in life. On the other hand, girls often demonstrate patience in completing tasks and enthusiasm for learning, which will bring more rapid reading gains for them (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008). In middle and high school, adolescent girls show higher levels of attentiveness, leadership qualities, and organizational skills and seem to put more effort into their learning, which explain why girls have been getting better grades than boys in school (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008). In effect, women have outpaced men in the number of bachelor’s degrees earned (Jacobs, 1996). Likewise, girls’ and boys’ social, cognitive, and academic aspects are all correlated with each other, bringing the outcome that girls are doing better than boys in terms of all of the aspects mentioned above.
However, children spend the majority of their time outside of school, and the quality of their non-school environments varies to a great extent, which makes it difficult to determine whether the gender inequalities women are subject to is because of school or non-school influences (Downey, Hippel, & Broh, 2004). Specifically, the students’ social background like socioeconomic class and family circumstances have a great influence on the gender inequalities women still face despite of their great educational performance. For example, family resources would not necessarily be equally distributed among the daughters and sons who live in the same household (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008). Buchmann, DiPrete, and McDaniel (2008) mentioned that “girls look more to their mothers and boys more to their fathers” as they think of their educational and occupational goals, and, as a consequence, girls with a better-educated mother do better than those in households with a better-educated father (p. 327).
In conclusion, a school is a significant factor that is looked for when discussing gender inequalities among the children, but as many studies show that schools are no longer disadvantaging girls but rather advantaging them. But there still exists gender inequalities in multiple sides of society despite of women’s improvement in educational outcome, which tells that there are still so many outside-of-school factors that contribute to the gender inequalities.