The document discusses how education is a gendered institution that can both positively and negatively influence lives. It explores how teachers' and students' core beliefs and values shape the transmission and acquisition of knowledge. It also examines how public education has historically reinforced stereotypes through hidden curriculums and educational materials. While education also has the potential to challenge cultural stereotypes, the gendering of subjects, sports, and behaviors from a young age influences students' identities and opportunities.

1. Education
“E D U C A T I O N
PROFOUNDLY AFFECTS PERSON’S LIVES,
AND THE GENDERED NATURE OF EDUCATION CAN
POSITIVELY AND NEGATIVELY INFLUENCE THOSE
LIVES” (175)
GENDER COMMUNICATION IN SOCIAL
INTUITIONS
BY: TANYA IVERSON
CMS 498

2. Influences on Education
Teachers and students core beliefs,
values, and resulting behaviors influence
the transmission and acquisition of
knowledge.
“When those values include essentialist
views regarding gender/sex, race, and
class, a contradiction emerges in the
heart of education ideals”(176)
Public Education is a political tool in
society to legitimize ideologies, such as
particular types of knowledge and
learning, at time reinforcing stereotypes.

3. Education is an Institution
According to Sociologist Margaret Andresen(2006)
“Institutions define reality for us”
 Institutions are an established pattern of behavior
with particular and recognized purpose
 Institutions include specific participants who share
expectations and act in specific roles, with rights and
duties attached to them

4. Education as a Gendered Institution
 Education has a long history of teaching gender/sex identity
 1800’s –British Public School Model of preparing boys how to be
ruling-class men, preparing them for leadership in the armed services
and business. (176)
 This British model became the basis for schools in formerly colonized
countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa,
and the United States (Kimmel, 2004; Swain, 2005). (176)
 U.S. public education originally was intended exclusively for White,
upper-class boys. (176)

5. Early Women’s Education
 Before the 1900’s- only White women from wealthy families could
obtain higher education
 They were discouraged from taking courses in what were considered
the masculine domains of business, science, and mathematics.
 Training in mathematics and the sciences was virtually nonexistent.
College for women consisted of courses
consistent with women’s domain,
focusing on domestic skills.

6. Common Arguments
Females and males minds were radically different
 Harm girls by assimilating them to boys ways and works robbing them of their
sense of feminine character.
 Harm boys by feminizing them when they need to be working off their brute
animal element and lead to homosexuality.
“Some worried that educating women and men together would emasculate
the collegiate curriculum, watering it down by forcing the inclusion of
subjects and temperaments better omitted, slowing down the pace, or
otherwise reducing standards that would allow women to keep up”
(Kimmel, 2004, P. 160)

7. Common Hidden Curriculum
Educational practices that implicitly
assume a white, male, middle class
standard for both the knower and that
which needs to be known.
Examples:
 History texts that do not acknowledge women & minorities contributions
(Lowen 1995)
 Children's storybook portraying gender/sex careers.(Gooden & Gooden ,
2001)
 Teachers who discourage boys from arts and girls from math & science
(AAUW, 1992)
 Most elementary teachers are female and underpaid (NEA Research, 2003)
“Such omissions help to maintain stereotypes, inequalities, and privileges
tied to gender/sex, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, social class, and
physical ability.”(177)

8. Interlocking Institutions
The institution of education influences
work, government, family, and media,
and is influenced by each of these. (177)
Women now account for more than 50% of students.
Educational Opportunities = Future Job Opportunities
Many majors continue to be dominated by one sex:
 Computer sciences (28% women 72% men )
 Education (77% women 23% men)
 Engineering (20% women 80% men )
 Foreign languages (71% women 29% men)
(US Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, 2003).

9. Hegemonic Power
A critical gender analysis of communication in and about education
explores the very way societies conceive of and pursue truth and
knowledge. …Hegemonic power is at play in the very construction of
truth, reality, and wisdom: that is, knowledge construction. (178)
 Epistemology- asks a communication question: How do humans
know what they claim to know?
 This area of study recognizes more than one way of knowing and
that there are fewer absolute truths than the institution of education
and the predominant culture recognize. The process by which a
belief comes to be labeled as “the truth” is a rhetorical process.(178)
“THE RECIEVER SHOULD BE AWARE OF THE SOURCE OF
KNOWLEDGE AND THE PROCESS USED IN CONSTRUCTION”

10. Knowledge Creators
Most “knowledge” in the U.S. is the product of White,
Western, Capitalist, Masculine viewpoints.
What society comes to recognize as legitimate knowledge and
useful information are the reflections of their makers’ views of
the world, silencing other was of knowing” (179)

11. Challenging Knowledge
Even as education maintains Feminist theorists employed
and transmits predominant this capacity to challenge when
social beliefs, It also can they critiqued the theories and
research methods used by
challenge cultural stereotypes traditional academic discipline
such as the binary view of to produce biases
gender/sex. knowledge.(178)

12. Feminist Epistemology
1. It rejects rigid disciplinary boundaries in research.
2. It recognizes that insider views may not be the same
as outside researcher views.
3. Insider does not mean biased, and outsider does not
mean bias free.
4.It embraces collaborative rather than hierarchical
control of learning.
5. It includes researchers’ values and perspectives as
part of the research instead of pretending that
researchers are all-knowing and objective.

13. Cognitive Developmental Psychology Studies
Women's Study Men's Study
(Belenky & Assoc. 1986) (Perry 1970)
Stages of Knowing Hierarchical Model
1. Silence 1. Simplistic perspective
2. Received or passive 2. Multiple perspectives
3. Subjective ways 3. Social perspectives
4. Procedural 4. Personal perspective
5. Constructed
Limitations-----If one truly wants to question knowledge construction, it is important
not to assume that any single set of participates can speak for all persons

14. Oppressive vs Empowering Examples
Empowering-
Constructing Knowing
Discussion
Practice Doing
Teaching Others
Oppressive-
Silenced / Passive learning
Lecture,
Reading,
Audiovisual

15. Elementary Education
No other social institution promotes the notion that girls
and boys are different as constantly as education.(181)
Sex distinctions a central part of children’s identities, with sex segregation
Boys and Girls in separate lines
Division of class for tasks
Sports teams
Teachers reinforce the notion of difference by referring to their
class as girls and boys, rather than students. These practices also
reinforce the assumption that one is only a boy or only a girl.

16. Research
Adults often assume that children have same-sex preferences
for friends, whether they do or not, and plan activities
accordingly (Frawley, 2005).
Teaching styles can enforce gender lessons for children.
Competition, constant testing, strict discipline, and hierarchy
emulated by many women and men teachers reflects
traditional masculine qualities and teaches these qualities
particularly to boys (p. 216). (Jon Swain (2005)

18. Sports
Cultural identity of an athlete = gender stereotypes.
The better the male athletes are, the more masculine
they are perceived to be.
The better the female athletes are
the less feminine they are.

19. Educational Materials-Storybooks
Story books:
 Female characters are much more likely than male
characters to be seen caring for children or doing
household chores. Male characters are portrayed in a
wider variety of roles and careers (Gooden &
Gooden, 2001).
 Male characters are significantly more likely than
female characters to be portrayed as possessing
traditional masculine traits, such as
argumentativeness (Evans & Davies, 2000).
 Women may pursue diverse careers, portrayals of
boys and men remain rigid, omitting them from
nurturing roles (Kimmel, 2004).(183)

20. Textbooks
Primary Textbooks
 Male characters, references to male authors, and male
depictions still greatly exceed those for females.
 Whites still are portrayed in texts more than other racial
and ethnic groups.(Cheri Simonds and Pamela Cooper
(2001)
College Textbook
 Out of 15 educational psychology texts to train teachers, no
gender/sex stereotypes (Yanowitz, Weathers (2004))
 EXCEPT-Boys students as troublemakers

21. Gender Stereotypes in Curriculum
FEMALE CLASSES MALE CLASSES
 Home economics  Auto Mechanics
 Literature  Shop Class
 Language arts  Math
 Reading  Science
 Writing
Curriculum’s history of gender/sex typing alone cannot explain girls’ and
boys’ gravitation toward these subjects and tendencies to excel in those
consistent with traditional gender expectations, nor can it explain why
many children do not follow these patterns. (184)
Other explanations are needed, such as students’ own contributions to their
identities and the influences of teachers, administrators, parents, and society.

22. Higher Education
Many studies document discrimination experienced by women
in higher education (Fox, 2001; Sandler, Silverberg, & Hall,
1996; Statham, Richardson, & Cook, 1991).
This discrimination is not just relevant
to students. The university professorship
traditionally has been considered a male
position, and men continue to dominate
this profession (Fox, 2001). (185)
Women and minority faculty continues to have a difficult time:
•Getting Hired
•Being evaluated positively students & administrators
•Getting Promote

23. Gender Gap

24. Gender Wars- Females
American Association of University Women Research (1992)
Girls self esteem suffered due to less attention from teachers.
“ Self-esteem, or how one feels about oneself, affects nearly every
aspect of a person’s life, including the ability to learn. People
with high or positive self-esteem tend to experience greater
social popularity, attractiveness, confidence, competence,
grades in school, and mental and physical health (Payne, 2001).

25. Gender Wars-Males
Research by Klienflied (1998)
“The over-representation of males in special education
classes and in virtually every other category of
emotional, behavioral, or neurological impairment is
undisputed” (Kleinfeld, 1998, p. 8).

26. Race/Class War??
African American boys lag the farthest behind in U.S. education.
A 2001 report by the National Center for Education Statistics found in
grades 1-12 Black-White reading gaps did not differ consistently for
boys and girls. What differed was White students consistently did
better as a group than Black students (“Educational Achievement and
Black-White Inequality,” Washington, DC)
Many young African American boys and men contribute to educational
underperformance because of the way they construct their masculinity:
as a masculinity that challenges a school climate that excludes and
labels them as having academic problems. They may perform a
hypermasculinity to protest and defy authorities.
James Earl Davis (2001),

27. Winners?
The gender gap in education exists for both girls and boys, but
because they tend to be socialized in different ways and
because observers have gendered expectations, the gender
gaps tend to be manifested in different ways (Sadker &
Zittleman, 2005).
Gender Wars distracts from the reality that both boys and
girls are being shortchanged in education, especially if of a
minority or lower economic class.

28. Single Sex Education
WHY?- belief is that it will help counter a multitude of
social problems: underachievement, low self-esteem
“This movement is relevant to our study of gender in
communication because several of its underlying
assumptions reflect stereotypes about gender/sex
differences addressed in this text. Furthermore, the
movement may reinforce such stereotypes and maintain
gender/sex norms in communication.”(187)

29. National Association for Single Sex Public Education
Assumptions is
that universal
gender/sex
differences appear
in the learning
styles students
prefer which are
tied to
physiological
differences.
(Sax, Executive
director NASSPE)

30. Results
The NASSPE (2006b) assumes that
females and males have differently
wired brains, which calls for teaching
math separately:
“In girls, navigational tasks are
assigned to the cerebral cortex, the
same general section of the brain
which is responsible for language. In
boys, the same tasks are handled by
the hippocampus, an ancient nucleus
buried deep in the brain, with few
direct connections to the cortex”
(“Teaching Math”). With girls, the
wiring calls for more applied
examples; with boys, teaching should
focus on the numbers and less on the
context.(188)

31. Limitations
The NASSPE website cites cases of improved grade performance
for students in single-sex education programs around the United
States and abroad. However, these examples have limitations:
1) The sex-segregated education is based on sex, not gender
and/or sexual orientation. It assumes that sex equals gender
2) Truth that any improvement is a combination of factors used to
improve student performance: having the same teacher for multiple
years, requiring uniforms, involving parents ect.
3) Single-sex education will not address the problem of
essentializing gender/sex and related inequalities.
“If the goal is to improve gender relations, studenets need
opportunities to build their communication skills, trust, and
respect by working togther”(189)

32. Peer Pressure
Peer groups provide boys and girls with collective meanings and
influences on what it means to be a boy or a girl. At this point
peer groups have more influence on gender than parents, or
individuals.
If a battle is being waged, it is
not between girls and boys but
among them. By the third grade,
students have been found to
migrate to same-sex groups and
to chastise those who do not.
“Adolescents tend to experience intense peer pressure to conform
to group norms in order to be part of the group.(Swain 2005)Thus
one’s gender identity construction is more a collective process than
an individual one.”(Connell,200)

33. Bullying
Bullying is “physical, psychological, and/or verbal intimidation or
attack that is meant to cause distress and/or harm to an intended
victim” (Christie-Mizell, 2003, p. 237).
 Bullying is usually done by older children against younger or physically
smaller children and by boys against girls and effeminate boys.
 Internet is now use cyber bullying by girls.
 The estimated number of students who experience bullying in a given
school year ranges from 20% to 30%.
 Students surveyed, 75% report being bullied at some time in their
elementary and junior high school years (AAUW 1993)(190)

34. Bullying link to Sexual Harassment
Bullying creates a cultural context in which sexual harassment is
common, and that schools become training grounds for domestic
violence. Nan Stein (2005)
AAUW (1993) defined sexual harassment as “unwanted and unwelcome
sexual behavior which interferes with your life” (AAUW, 1993, p. 6).
 Most students reported doing the harassment simply because it was a part of
the school culture.
 Students overwhelmingly acknowledge the existence of bullying and sexual
harassment in schools, but they are not likely to report it because they see it
as normal and/or they are afraid to come forward. (Hand & Sanchez, 2000;
Stein, 2003, 2005).
 Sexual minority students in public schools, face a high risk of abuse,
particularly by peers.
 Existing research finds that female forms of harassment tend be less
physical, relying more on mean-spirited words (“slut”) and actions of
exclusion.(190)

35. AAUW college survey (2006):
 62% of all college students report being harassed in some
way, including having sexual rumors spread about them,
being forced into unwanted physical contact (from
ostensibly accidental touching to rape), enduring sexual
comments, and being spied on.
 Female and male students were nearly equally likely to
be sexually harassed on campus.
 Females were more likely to be the target of sexual jokes,
comments, gestures, and looks.
 Males were more likely to be called gay or a homophobic
name.(192)

36. Sexual Violence on College Campuses
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ, 2000) published
The Sexual Victimization of College Women (Fisher,
Cullen, & Turner), which summarizes a national study
based on 4,446 randomly selected women students from
college campuses across the country.(193)
“Jackson Katz (1999), a national gender violence
educator who works with U.S. college campuses and
military groups, argues that the predominant culture’s
definition of masculinity as aggressive, virile, and
dominant perpetuates violence against women, LGBT
persons, and other men.” (194)
*Warning the following video is graphic and eye-opening*

38. Emancipatory Education
Bias in education in the
form of gender/sex, race,
ethnicity, and class must
be eliminated.
Education researcher Jane Rolland Martin (1991) calls
for “a gender sensitive model of an educated person”
that does not fall into the simplistic trap of biological
determinism and false dichotomies (p. 10).(194)

39. Gender Sensitive Model
 Children should be exposed to a variety of teaching styles
 Children need to learn to work together
 Classroom and playground environment need to reflect
inclusive, nonstereotypical message
 Use gender relevant approach vs. gender specific
approaches

40. Distinction
Gender Specific Gender Relevent
Most of the existing Educators directly
changes in education address stereotypical
and curriculum have assumptions as a part
embraced a gender- of the lesson, be it
specific model that reading, writing, math,
targets only one sex. or science.

41. Why?
“The Symbolic gendering of knowledge, the
distinction between “boys subjects” and “girl
subjects” and the unbalance curriculum that
follows, require a gender relevant not gender-
specific response– a broad redesign of curriculum,
timetable, division of labour among teachers, ect.
The definition of masculinities in peer group life,
and the creation of hierarchies of masculinity, is a
process that involves girls as well as boys. It can
hardly be addressed with one of these groups in
isolation form the other.(Connell, 2000, pp168-
169)(195)

42. Teaching Styles
Lecture based instruction can be Connected teaching can be
oppressive to those already liberating when topics are
marginalized and silenced. concretely related to learners
individual life experiences.
Bank Model – Teachers role is to
deposit knowledge into a Connect model-The teacher
students brain, in which the works with the students to
student is expected to retain construct knowledge through
for future withdrawal interaction.

43. Global Education
 “The United Nations and many nongovermental organizations
have long recognized the intersecting, systemic influences of
gender/sex oppression in education, family, poverty, health,
and other social factors that contribute to human rights and
livable lives.”(196)
 “Focusing on girls education is important because females are
the caretakers and educators of children; when organization
invest in girls and women's literacy and education, they invest
in families and communities”(196)
 “It reminds us that the strategies and solutions developed in
the United States should be informed by what is happening
elsewhere and should be held globally accountable.”(196)

44. Conclusion
 Education has a long history as an institution of
communication practices including: lectures, books,
and activates, that teach children to perform gender
 Acceptable knowledge itself can be gendered/sexed
 Children reinforce these gender roles amongst
themselves through peer pressure, bullying
harassment, and violence.
 Gender sensitive model in which educators address
stereotypes and use alternative teaching methods
will help alter needs to perform.
 Global education practices influence steortypes

45. Sources
All quotes where obtained from
DeFrancisco, Victoria L, and Catherine H. Palczewski. Communicating Gender
Diversity: A Critical Approach. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007. Print.
 All photos where obtained through Google image searches
 All videos where obtained via Utube