Today, girls outperform boys in almost every academic subject. On average, girls earn higher grades and graduate from high school at higher rates, and women enroll in college in much greater numbers. While these gendered achievement gaps have created the impression that boys are the newly disadvantaged at school, education researchers say that growing talk of a “boy crisis” belies reality in the classroom. They have consistently found that from kindergarten through college, students view boys and men as more intelligent than girls and women. How does school reproduce this traditional gender hierarchy?
To better understand how school practices contribute to gendered status beliefs, Michela Musto, a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, embedded herself in a racially diverse suburban middle school in Los Angeles for two-and-a-half years. Most sociological studies of schools examine low-income urban areas, but Mountain Heights Middle School, where Musto conducted ethnographic research and 196 interviews, is a high-performing public institution with an enrollment of more than 1,000 students that includes both affluent and nonaffluent families.
And while many sociologists have studied the relationship between gender and academic achievement in K-12 settings, the bulk of this research looks at teachers, administrators, or parents. Instead, Musto says, “I wanted to understand school from the student’s perspective.” To capture everyday experience, she observed classes and joined students at lunch, dances, and extracurricular activities.
Musto was interested in middle school because “what happens there sets the stage for broader patterns of inequality that continue throughout the entire educational experience and even into the workforce,” she says. Early adolescence is a formative time, when students “try on various identities and make important decisions about their anticipated career paths,” Musto writes.
Musto’s research scrutinized two classroom dynamics in particular: first, how educators—mostly white college-educated women—enforced rules or responded to boys breaking them; and second, how educators disciplined white, Asian-American, and Latino boys differently.
In an “exquisitely nuanced investigation,” says Andrei Cimpian, professor of psychology at New York University, Musto “illustrates how gender-brilliance stereotypes emerge out of the dynamics of teacher-student interactions in school, how they intersect with children’s racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, and how they shape children’s behaviors and aspirations over time.”
Musto uncovered major differences in students’ perceptions of intelligence, depending on race and course level. In sixth-grade higher-level (honors or advanced) courses, where affluent students identifying as white or Asian-American were overrepresented, teachers tolerated rule-breaking by boys, allowing them to disrupt and monopolize classroom discussion. This was especially the case for white boys, who were tacitly rewarded for their interruptions. Meanwhile, their Asian-American peers were discouraged from talking out of turn. Girls in higher-level courses had fewer opportunities to speak, and by eighth grade, students believed that boys were smarter and the best boys were “exceptional.” By the end of middle school, girls expressed less confidence in their public speaking abilities.
But in sixth-grade lower-level (standard or remedial) courses, where less affluent students identifying as Latinx were overrepresented, a stricter classroom environment prevailed. Teachers did not tolerate boys’ disruptions. Girls were more active participants in classroom discussion and were less likely to have their views challenged by interrupting boys. Fearing punishment, the boys became disengaged and even marginalized. By eighth grade, students described girls as smarter, and girls expressed more confidence when it came to public speaking, but students did not regard any girls as “exceptional.”
“Musto’s research fills an important gap,” Cimpian says. “We knew that gender-brilliance stereotypes are widespread, that they are acquired early in life, and that they present an obstacle to women’s success in many prestigious careers, including those in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). What we knew much less about—and this is why Musto’s research is so valuable—is how they play out in and are reinforced by children’s everyday experiences.”
Musto’s research also illuminates the many dynamics that generate and reinforce inequality. Her findings highlight the race and class privileges enjoyed by white boys as well as the disadvantages that Latinx boys encounter. “If we’re not looking at how gender and race intersect to shape students’ experiences,” Musto says, “it’s possible to miss that certain boys are doing very well, and that school is set up to help these boys get ahead, even as other boys are falling behind.” Her classroom-level analysis shows the extent to which academic tracking reproduces inequality, benefiting some students at the expense of others.
Michela Musto, “Brilliant or Bad: The Gendered Social Construction of Exceptionalism in Early Adolescence,” American Sociological Review, vol. 84, no. 3, 2019, pp. 369–393.
This article appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of the magazine with the headline: "Brilliant Rule-Breakers"
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.