Underperformance or ‘getting it right’? Constructions of gender and achievement in the Australian inquiry into boys’ education

“Brains before ‘beauty’?” High achieving girls, school and gender identities

“…After more than 10 years, there continues to be concerns expressed about and interventions introduced by educational policymakers to remedy boys' underachievement (DfES 2007;Hodgetts 2008;Lahelma, Arnesen, and Öhrn 2008). Although the gender gap in the educational performance of boys and girls is not a straightforward matter of "girls succeed" and "boys fail", the notion of boys' underachievement has proved to be a powerful discourse, with particularly negative consequences for girls.…”

‘I sat back on my computer … with a bottle of whisky next to me’: constructing ‘cool’ masculinity through ‘effortless’ achievement in secondary and higher education

“…Furthermore, if these same students were successful they could present themselves as effortless achievers, which, as we have seen, is regarded as the 'pinnacle of accomplishment' (Dweck 2000, p. 121), and represents 'authentic' masculine achievement (Hodgetts 2008).…”

Diferencias de género en rendimiento matemático en Chile

“…A question raised by these data is whether the actual size of the differences really justifies a public discourse that positions girls as failing (see a discussion of these social positioning for example in Hodgetts, 2008); in other words, whether such discourse reinforces existing cultural stereotypes, instead of reflecting the real dimension of the problem. A couple of recent studies show that stereotypes of mathematics being a male domain are present even in early stages of the Chilean school career (del Rio & Strasser, 2013), when differences in attainment are non-existent-or, as shown by this study, they are smaller.…”