ABSTRACT
This study assesses the effect of secondary schools’ sex-composition on boys’ and girls’ felt pressure for gender-conformity. Whereas gender-conformity pressure affects adolescents’ well-being, little large-scale research examines school features’ influence. Multilevel-analyses are conducted on representative Flemish data of first grade students, 2688 boys and 2430 girls, in 57 secondary schools, gathered at the beginning of school-year 2012/13 and the end of 2013/14. When estimating the effects on gender-conformity pressure at time 2, the gender-conformity pressure at time 1 is accounted for. For girls, no effects of the school’s sex-composition are found. Boys in schools with more girls display lower levels of felt pressure at the start of secondary education. The felt pressure at time 2 increases with the proportion of girls, indicating that boys forming a numerical minority at school, report more growth in gender-conformity pressure. This effect is stronger for boys holding more traditional gender-role attitudes.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the project ‘Teaching in the bed of Procrustes’, financed by the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (Project Number: SBO 110020), which made this research possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Mieke Van Houtte
Mieke Van Houtte is full professor and head of the research team CuDOS (Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Belgium). Her research interests cover diverse topics within the sociology of education, particularly the effects of structural and compositional school features on several diverse outcomes for students and teachers, and sexual minorities. She is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.