| Irenee Beattie
Washington State University
Gendered expectations and attainment in high poverty schools: Do school and family contexts help girls more than boys?
FINAL REPORT: Adolescent School/Family Contexts and Females' Advantage in College Completion
In recent decades, young womenÕs educational attainment has surpassed young menÕs, especially among youth from high poverty schools. Recent research highlights the importance of gender differences in behaviors among youth who enroll in college in generating a substantial female advantage in college completion, but the mechanisms behind these differences are not well understood. We argue that traditional gender socialization in families and schools hurts young men and helps young women complete college, net of pre-college achievement and family background. We expect these factors to be especially influential in explaining the gender gap in high poverty schools.
Our study uses National Educational Longitudinal Study data and logistic regression methods to predict college completion among college enrollees and to examine which factors help explain the female advantage in college completion. We find that traditional gender socialization in both families and schools contributes to the gender gap. With respect to families, we find that boys are significantly less likely to talk with their parents about education and experience less parental social control over their behaviors. These differences help explain some of the gender differences in college completion, since greater parent/student communication and family social control are both associated with greater odds of college completion. Family gender socialization is most useful for helping to understand gender gaps in average poverty schools, however, as it only attenuates a very small portion of the gender gap in high poverty schools. With respect to gendered school experiences, we find that boys are more frequently exposed to violence/threats and school discipline and that these experiences disadvantage their college outcomes relative to girlsÕ. Further, there is a significant interaction between violence and discipline which suggests that higher rates of discipline can be beneficial to youth in environments with high violence, but are detrimental in environments with limited violence. Gendered experiences with violence and discipline in schools are especially important for understanding the gender gap among youth from high poverty schools.
Therefore, we believe that anti-bullying policies aimed at curtailing fighting and threats in and around schools would especially help diminish the gender gap among youth from high poverty schools. Further, our findings suggest that schools that use discipline to crack down on minor (non-violent) offenses may be especially detrimental to young menÕs educational trajectories. Instead, reserving disciplinary sanctions for violent offenses appears to be beneficial to students, especially young men in high poverty schools. Finally, in low-to-average poverty schools, programs which help foster parent-student communication about educational matters and encourage parents to exert reasonable social control over student behaviors outside of school may be particularly beneficial for young men.
Back to Funded Research Grants Page |