"English Comes So Naturally to Me": How School Processes Shape Middle School Girls' Career Aspirations

• In Event: Racialized and Gendered Constructions of Ability and Behavior

Abstract

Objectives

This project identifies how the hidden curriculum embedded in a school’s electives and extracurricular courses contributed to girls’ declining interest in STEM in early adolescence.

Theoretical Framework

Middle school is a time when girls experience sharp declines in their interest and confidence in STEM (Catsambis, 1994; Perry, Link, Boelter, & Leukefeld, 2012). By high school, boys are overrepresented in many Advanced Placement STEM courses and spend more time engaging in STEM-related activities (Buchmann, DiPrete, & McDaniel, 2008; Riegle-Crumb & Grodsky, 2010; Xie, Fang, & Shauman, 2015). Existing research – which tends to rely on quantitative analysis of students’ grades, test scores, and self-reported interest – identifies gender stereotypes as an overarching reason boys aspire to STEM careers at greater rates than girls (Cech, 2013; Charles & Bradley, 2009; Charles, Harr, Cech, & Hendley, 2014; Correll, 2004). Students, however, are full social actors, who actively negotiate adult-generated meanings during their everyday experiences in school (Corsaro, 2003; Pugh, 2014; Thorne, 1993). By opening the “black box” on students’ routine interactions in school classrooms, this project develops a new theoretical understanding of how school processes magnify gender and racial differences between students’ perceived academic interests and career aspirations in early adolescence.

Data & Methods

This project draws upon 2.5 years of longitudinal ethnography and 196 semi-structured interviews I collected with the same cohort of 6th through 8th graders at Mountain Heights Middle School [MHMS], a high-performing, racially-diverse public middle school in Los Angles.

Findings

At MHMS, I found that 6th- and 7th-grade boys used rule-breaking to push most girls to the periphery of activities stereotypically associated with masculinity, including STEM electives. However, in activities that are stereotypically associated with femininity – including art, musical theater, and choir – boys distanced themselves from “girly” activities. Over the course of middle school, boys’ distancing strategies enabled affluent, White girls – who had more prior exposure to artistic endeavors via expensive, out-of-school extracurricular activities than Asian American or Latinx girls – to dominate these spaces. As 8th graders, MHMS students perceived girls as more “creative” than boys, with 8th graders associating the most superlatives to White girls’ expressiveness. School processes thus played an important role in encouraging girls – especially affluent, White girls – to develop a passion for “creative” careers in fields like fashion or design than “boring” careers in fields like STEM.

Significance

This project makes three contributions to scholarly understandings of gender and education. First, I illuminate how girls’ experiences outside of STEM play an equally important role in shaping their academic interests when compared to their experiences inside STEM courses. Second, I show how girls’ interest in STEM – or lack thereof – is shaped by the actions of boys. Third, my project highlights how previous accounts of gender inequality in STEM – which posit adolescent girls as “preferring” self-expressive careers – are most applicable to the experiences of affluent, White girls.

Author

• Michela Musto, Stanford University