1. Sociology: Learning and Gender
Week 3 – Gender Identity and the Hidden Curriculum

2. Learning objectives:
To assess the role of the hidden curriculum in contributing to gender identity.
To examine the nature of sexual harassment in school.

3. Gender Identity
We have seen how early socialisation into a gender identity strongly influences pupil’s subject preferences.
Now we will look at how pupils’ experiences in school reinforce their gender and sexual identities.

4. Verbal abuse
What Connell calls “a rich vocabulary of abuse” is one of the ways in which dominant gender and sexual identities are reinforced.
For example, boys use name-calling to put girls down if they behave or dress in certain ways. Sue Lees (1986) found that boys called girls ‘slags’ if they appeared to be sexually available. Similarly, Paetcher sees name-calling as helping to shape gender identify and maintain male power. The use of negative labels such as ‘gay’, ‘queer’ and ‘lezzie’ are ways in which pupils ‘police’ each other’s sexual identities.
These labels often bear no resemblance to pupils’ actual sexual behaviour but are used simply to reinforce gender norms.

5. Male peer pressure
Male peer groups also use verbal abuse to reinforce definitions of masculinity. Mairtin Mac an Ghaill’s (1994) study of Parnell School examines how peer groups reproduce a range of class-based masculine identities.
For example, the working-class ‘macho lads’ were dismissive of other working-class boys who worked hard by referring to them as ‘d***head achievers’.
By contrast the middle-class boys tried to project an image of ‘effortless achievement’, although some actually worked really hard ‘on the quiet’.

6. Teacher and discipline
Research shows that teachers also play a part in reinforcing dominant definitions of gender identity. Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (1996) found that male teachers told boys off for ‘behaving like girls’ and that teachers tended to ignore boys’ verbal abuse of girls.
Sue Askew and Carol Ross (1988) found that male teachers often have a protective attitude towards female teachers, coming to their classes to ‘rescue’ them, reinforcing the idea that women cannot cope alone.

7. ‘The male gaze’
There is also a visual aspect to the way pupils control each other’s identities. Mac an Ghaill refers to this as the ‘male gaze’: the way male pupils and teachers look girls up and down, seeing them as sexual objects and making judgements about their appearance.

8. The feminist perspective
Feminists see double standards as an example of a patriarchal ideology that justifies male power and devalues women. Along with verbal abuse, the male gaze and school discipline, double standards can be seen as a form of social control that reinforces gender inequality by keeping females subordinate to males.