Mean Boys? Gender and Unpopularity for Trying Hard in High School

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Gender and Sexualities in Education

Abstract

In many Western industrialized countries male students lag behind female students on various indicators of academic success such as grades or level of educational attainment. A gender gap in academic effort explains why female students tend to earn higher grades than equally competent male students (Downey & Vogt Yuan, 2005; Lam et al., 2012).
Educational scholars do not fully understand why female students put in greater effort in school than male students. Sociological interview studies (e.g., Jackson & Dempster, 2009) argued that low effort signalizes masculinity and that larger social benefits of showing low academic effort for male than female students are behind boys’ lower academic effort. These assumptions were already partly supported by quantitative experimental research from the field of psychology (Heyder & Kessels, 2016). In particular, showing low effort was considered as masculine and unfeminine and rewarded with popularity among peers.
This paper investigates the relation between gender, students’ perceived social costs attached to academic effort and achievement, students’ effort, and students’ achievement in a large sample and from an interdisciplinary, quantitative perspective. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS: 09) we find female students experience less social pressure against academic effort than male students. Social pressure is directly associated with less rigorous mathematics course-taking and indirectly associated with lower GPA in STEM courses through lower academic effort. However, overall, social pressure against academic effort explains only a modest portion of the female advantage in academic outcomes.

Authors

• Joseph Workman, University of Missouri, Kansas City

• Anke Heyder, University of Dortmund