Schooling and Sex Roles: the case of GCE ‘0’ level mathematics

It is during the secondary years of schooling that most girls experience an everdecreasing set of educational possibilities and consequential achievements. A parallel feature is that their occupational life chances gradually become channelled into the narrow range of six main possibilities; teaching, especially in Primary Schools, nursing, catering, office work, retail organisations and hairdressing (Davies & Meighan, 1975). Therefore the secondary school appears to be decisive in defining the futures of girls. selection of subjects to study and decisions about examination targets are critical in routing pupils into alternative further education courses or out into work. subject of mathematics holds a key place in such routings, being held to be a basic requirement for many courses and occupations. Girls tend to perform at least as well as boys in mathematical reasoning up to the age of eleven. Studies in the United States (Maccoby, 1966) and the United Kingdom (Douglas, 1964) have supported this proposition of parity of achievement. Douglas commented: The tests which are mainly based on performance in school subjects, show the girls as being slightly superior to the boys at both eight and eleven years. later report by Douglas et al. (1971) on the progress of the same cohort of pupils through secondary school concludes: test scores of the girls, on the average, fall below those of the boys between the ages of eleven and fifteen--with the one exception of the verbal intelligence test. Their disadvantage in each social class is greatest in mathematics.