Gender Differences in the Classroom

By: Zach Jensen

In today’s world college students, greek organizations, and the upper level education system in general is put into question every day. When we started these forum posts we were asked as a class to pick a movie about college and analyze it. I picked the movie Neighbors starring Seth Rogan and Zac Efron. This is a movie about a young couple that have just moved into a house and their neighbors turn out to be a group of fraternity men. After reading this you can probably see my topic wasn’t gender inequality at first. My original topic was stereotypes of Greek life at colleges in America. The topic of gender and racial inequality came later after reading an article by Deborah Tannen about the differences of girls and guys in the classroom.

Tannen’s article is more focused on how males have better public speaking skills than females. She makes several other claims that I agree with, such as males tend to speak out in class more than females.Through years of research, researchers and authors have learned that the way females and males perceive college or education in general is all based on influences from different people of things.

In Neighbors mostly showed males as the dominant character in the movie. It perceived the women as mostly the secondary characters such as Teddy’s girlfriend or Seth Rogan’s wife. There was also a lack of women in the movie. I understand that it was a movie about fraternities but there was still a surprising lack of female power. The only female power I saw was the Dean of Students at the college in the movie and she honestly was really laid back about everything and played the “3 strike system.” Meaning the fraternities had 3 chances before they got into serious trouble with the school.

We were then given the assignment to do more reading about what other authors who observed gender equalities thought. I then chose two articles to analyze about gender inequalities. The first article I chose was “Gender Inequalities in Education” which is one of the first articles I found. This article talked about research and perspective on how females are more educationally advanced today than men. In the past, men were seen as more advantage education wise than young women but, it is stated that girls and boys perform differently in different environments and when boys don’t like the learning environment, they’d act out aka “the class clown.” The article uses academic performance; gender gaps from kindergarten to high school and higher education, completing college aspects, family background, and gender role attitudes to distinguish and show how inequality among males and females in the educational environment has changed. The article focuses on how inequalities in education have changed over time in recent decades. The writers’ purpose is to examine gender inequalities in educational performance starting for early childhood development, to the college setting. They also want to see how the changes in gender roles have impacted males and females over time and what sparks these changes. It was noted that boys are affected more negatively than girls by not having a father in the home. (Buchmann and DiPrete)  Another thing I found interesting, in the year 2000, 60% of men were enrolled in college immediately after high school. 66% of women were enrolled in college immediately after high school. (Buchmann and DiPrete) It’s noted that women currently earn 58% of all bachelor’s degrees in the US, with African American women holding the largest advantage and Hispanics coming in 2nd, Native Americans coming in 3rd, Asians coming in 4th, and Whites coming in 5th. (Buchmann and DiPrete).

My second article I found was quite the opposite of the other article. This article, unlike all the others I have found, mostly took the side of the boys in the classroom instead of the girls. The article ,”Gender Inequality Shown in Classrooms, Boys left Shortchanged”, talks about how the years of efforts to create gender equality has once again failed. Now that girls have "caught up" boys are being passed by as the classroom has became a more inclusive environment for girls and a hostile one for boys. Boys are being disciplined more frequently than girls, boys are being disproportionately diagnosed with attention deficit disorder(ADD) and are less likely to graduate from high school. In the current classroom environment, it basically sucks to be a boy.The situation in this article is that boys are now being shafted in the classroom setting and are aren't getting educational equality.

The authors purpose is to expose this and show that just because girls are being treated fairly now doesn't mean that boys are too. Like other article I analyzed, this one also says that women are beginning to grasp the upper hand. After reading this article I see where the authors are coming from and agree that girls now have the upper hand in the classroom. This article connects to my issue the same as the other article did. This gave a little bit of a different approach at the issue of gender inequalities in the classroom even though they both agreed that women are slowly grasping the upper hand with education. This article talks about the needs of boys and girls in the classroom are extremely different. When boys are put into learning environments that don't fit their learning style they tend to act out and are then labeled as discipline problems which follows them all the way through high school. An English graduate student Sami Atassi said “Honestly, I’m not surprised that women are excelling over men, the generalization that girls mature faster than boys has been statistically proven, and boys are paying the price. Culture, language and pedagogy are always and should always be in flux in order to remedy the latest inequalities.” Atassi makes a good point about this issue but with that being said, should boys wait longer to enter school than girls? Do girls really have the upper hand or do boys still hold the dominance?