Gender Identity and Education

Last Updated on August 30, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Gender identity is one of the three questions the AQA asks about gender and education, alongside achievement and subject choice, and it is the one students find hardest. It asks how pupils construct and perform masculinity and femininity at school, and how schools respond to the identities pupils bring with them.

The key ideas covered below are:

1. Gender domains — what pupils come to see as boys’ territory and girls’ territory
2. Louise Archer on working-class girls’ identities and the school’s “ideal pupil”
3. Becky Francis on classroom interaction and laddish behaviour
4. Sue Lees on the sexual double standard
5. Peer groups, verbal abuse and teachers as enforcers of gender identity
6. Trans and non-binary pupils, and the statutory position from September 2026

This is part of the gender and education sub-topic within the sociology of education module for A-level sociology.

What sociologists mean by gender identity

Sociologists distinguish between sex, meaning biological differences, and gender, meaning the social expectations attached to being male or female. Gender identity is a person’s sense of themselves in relation to those expectations — and, crucially, something that has to be actively produced rather than simply possessed.

That is the idea students most often miss. Gender identity is not something a pupil has and brings to school like a rucksack. It is something they do, continuously, in front of an audience that judges the performance. West and Zimmerman called this “doing gender”. Judith Butler’s related concept of gender performativity makes the stronger claim that the repeated performance is what produces the identity in the first place, rather than expressing one that already existed.

Research on child development shows that children become keen to demonstrate their knowledge of gender at around five or six, and that by seven or eight most have a relatively settled sense of gender identity. Being accepted as a typical boy or a typical girl matters to them.

School matters to this for three reasons. It is where children spend most of their waking hours in the company of peers. It is organised along gender lines in ways that are hard to ignore — uniforms, sports, sometimes toilets and changing rooms. And it is an audience: a place where a gender identity can be performed, tested and, if it fails, punished.

The pressure runs in both directions. Boys are expected to display aspects of traditional masculinity such as enjoying sport and being competitive, and boys who display traits read as feminine are criticised. Girls who behave in ways read as masculine may be ridiculed. The sociological question is who does the enforcing — peers, teachers, or the institution itself.

Gender domains

A gender domain is a task or activity that children come to see as belonging to their own gender or to the other one.

Browne and Ross (1991) argued that children arrive at school having already learned, mainly from the family, which activities are “for” them. Children are more confident tackling a task that falls inside their own gender domain and approach one outside it with more anxiety — and this is about perceived territory rather than actual ability. A boy handed a task he reads as feminine does not merely dislike it; he expects to be bad at it, and behaves accordingly.

Two features make the concept useful in an exam.

First, gender domains are learned early and reinforced continuously, which makes them a good illustration of primary socialisation feeding into secondary socialisation. How schools continue that process is covered in my post on gender socialisation in schools.

Second, gender domains connect identity to attainment. If a girl reads physics as outside her domain, she is less likely to choose it, less likely to volunteer in it, and less likely to persist when she finds it hard — which affects her results and not just her preferences. That link between domains and choices is developed in my post on gender and subject choice, which is where the subject data belongs.

Tutors and subject advisers reinforce domains. Where a male student wants to take a traditionally female subject, staff are more likely to question the decision critically and ask whether he is sure — a small pressure, but one applied repeatedly and only in one direction.

Louise Archer: working-class girls and the ideal pupil

Louise Archer’s research is the most heavily examined material on this topic and the part of this post most worth learning properly.

Archer and colleagues interviewed 89 working-class young people in inner-London schools about their identities, their experience of school and their plans after 16. The central finding is a paradox: the identities that gained these girls the most status among their peers were the identities that brought them into the most conflict with school.

Archer’s argument depends on the concept of the ideal pupil. Every school carries an implicit picture of the pupil it is set up to reward — quiet, compliant, academically focused, and, Archer argues, implicitly white, middle-class and asexual. Pupils are judged against that picture whether or not anyone states it. The working-class girls in the study were not failing to have an identity; they had strong, carefully constructed ones. Those identities simply did not match the template.

The hyper-heterosexual feminine identity

For most of the girls, constructing and performing a desirable, glamorous, recognisably heterosexual feminine image was the single most important thing. They spent considerable time and money on appearance — hair, make-up, nails, jewellery, branded clothing. Getting it right brought status, and the peer group policed the standard closely.

Schools read the same performance very differently: as excessive, as a distraction, as evidence that a girl was not serious about her work. Girls were disciplined over appearance, and Archer argues that in punishing the look, schools were effectively punishing a working-class feminine identity — devaluing something the girls had invested heavily in. In Bourdieu’s terms this is a form of symbolic violence: the school treats one group’s cultural resources as worthless.

The boyfriend identity

Having a boyfriend also conferred status. But Archer found it came with a cost: girls who invested in the boyfriend identity tended to lose interest in higher-status “masculine” subjects and to lower their occupational aspirations, orienting towards settling down rather than towards a career. The identity that worked socially narrowed the educational horizon.

The “loud” identity

Some of the girls adopted a loud, assertive, outspoken way of presenting themselves that directly challenged the passive, docile femininity the school preferred. This gained respect among peers. Teachers read it as aggressive, unfeminine and confrontational, which led to conflict, low expectations and disciplinary trouble.

Archer’s wider point about branded clothing — sometimes discussed as the Nike identity — applies to boys as much as girls. Wearing the right brands signalled belonging and self-worth; being without them meant social worthlessness. Schools that banned or mocked these styles were, again, dismissing the thing the pupils used to construct a valued self.

The girl who changed identity

Archer also interviewed one “laddette” who felt the school held a grudge against her. Over a single summer she remade her identity into a conventionally feminine one, and got on markedly better with staff at her new college as a result.

That case is worth remembering because of what it shows: the change was in her presentation, not in her ability. It is the strongest single piece of evidence Archer offers that schools respond to identity rather than to aptitude.

Carolyn Jackson on laddettes

Carolyn Jackson argued that laddish behaviour among girls has been increasing, with girls more likely to be loud, assertive and to drink heavily. Her explanation is about risk management: appearing not to care about school protects a pupil from losing face if they fail, because failure can be attributed to lack of effort rather than lack of ability. If they do well anyway, they look effortlessly clever.

Jackson’s argument applies to boys and girls alike, which makes it useful for arguing that laddishness is a response to the pressures of assessment rather than a straightforwardly masculine trait.

Becky Francis: classroom interaction and laddish behaviour

Becky Francis researched gender and classroom interaction in London secondary schools, and her work explains how the identities described above get produced in the room.

Francis found that boys dominate the classroom both physically and verbally — taking up more space, moving around more, calling out more, drawing more of the teacher’s attention whether positive or negative. Girls tended towards quieter, more collaborative and more contained ways of participating. Neither is simply a personality difference: each is a way of performing an expected gender identity in a setting where everyone is watching.

Francis argued that boys’ laddish behaviour should be read as a response to gender expectations rather than as a natural disposition. If masculinity requires appearing not to work, and school requires working, boys face a genuine conflict, and loud disruptive behaviour resolves it by making effort invisible. Francis also linked increasing laddishness to girls’ rising achievement: as girls succeeded, some boys responded by investing harder in an anti-school masculinity that redefined success as something girls did.

Her earlier work on toys and early socialisation makes the same point about how early this starts. Francis asked the parents of more than sixty three- to five-year-olds what they thought their child’s favourite toy was. Choices for boys clustered around action, construction and machinery; girls were steered towards dolls and activities coded as feminine.

Francis’s finding on boys’ overconfidence — boys assuming exams will be easy without much effort, and blaming teachers rather than their own ability when they are not — sits with the other in-school explanations of the achievement gap, which I cover in Explaining Gender Inequality in Education — In School Factors.

Sue Lees: the sexual double standard

Sue Lees’s research with London schoolgirls in the mid-1980s produced the clearest account of how girls’ reputations are policed, and it remains examinable because the mechanism has not gone away.

Lees found that boys labelled girls “slags” if they appeared sexually available and “drags” if they did not. The trap is the point: there was no safe position. A girl could be criticised for being too sexual or for not being sexual enough, and the label was applied by boys, about girls, in public.

There was no equivalent term that damaged a boy’s standing. Boys’ sexual reputations were an asset. Lees argued this asymmetry — the sexual double standard — is one of the ways male dominance is established in adolescence, before any of it reaches the workplace.

Two things make Lees strong evaluation material. The labels are not fixed but the structure is, so students can update the vocabulary while keeping the analysis. And the mechanism connects directly to Archer: the hyper-heterosexual feminine identity that brings status among peers is the same identity that risks the “slag” label, which is why Archer’s girls were negotiating something genuinely difficult rather than simply misbehaving.

Peer groups and gender identity

Mac an Ghaill: masculinities at Parnell School

Máirtín Mac an Ghaill’s study of Parnell School, published as The Making of Men (1994), found male peer groups pressuring boys not to take schoolwork seriously — and found that the pressure worked differently by class.

Working-class boys genuinely did not try. Being male, for them, meant being cool and unbothered, in the manner of the lads Paul Willis studied in 1977. Boys who wanted to do well were called “dickhead achievers”, “queer” or “gay”.

Middle-class boys did try, but concealed it. In public they projected effortless achievement — pretending they had not worked, and taking particular satisfaction in good results precisely because they appeared unearned.

The formulation worth remembering: for working-class boys, not working hard is part of the masculine identity; for middle-class boys, appearing not to work hard is part of it. Same performance, different relationship to the actual work.

Diane Reay: Shaun’s story

Diane Reay’s study of Shaun (2002), an eleven-year-old white working-class boy, followed him through the move from primary to secondary school. In primary school his identity rested on being one of the toughest boys and a good footballer. He saw the transition as a chance to remake himself as a good student — and found it very hard, because he still valued his old friendships and the tough, sporting identity that came with them.

Shaun’s story is useful because it shows identity as something a pupil actively negotiates rather than passively receives. He wanted to change and could not easily do it, which is more interesting than either determinism or free choice.

Connell and Paechter: verbal abuse as enforcement

R.W. Connell argued that verbal abuse is one of the main ways dominant gender and sexual identities are enforced. Carrie Paechter (1996) found male pupils using “gay” and “queer” as insults, typically aimed at boys who were uninterested or unsuccessful at sport, or who preferred subjects coded as feminine.

The sociological point is that the abuse is not random. It targets precisely the boys who deviate from the dominant version of masculinity, which is what makes it a mechanism of enforcement rather than simple unpleasantness.

Teachers and gender identity

Chris Haywood

Chris Haywood (1996) found male teachers telling boys off for “behaving like girls” and teasing them when they scored lower than girls in tests. Teachers also tended to ignore boys’ verbal abuse of girls. There was some evidence of male teachers adopting a protective attitude towards female colleagues, entering their classrooms to rescue them from disruptive pupils.

Each of these is a small act, and each communicates the same thing: that femininity is a lesser position, and that a boy’s worst failing is to occupy it.

John Abraham

John Abraham’s research found teachers describing the typical girl as well-behaved and studious and the typical boy as a troublemaker. Boys consequently received more negative feedback, which may reinforce the association between masculinity and messing about in school — a self-fulfilling prophecy operating on identity rather than on ability.

Gender identity, ethnicity and class

Gender identity is never just gender. It is always inflected by class and by ethnicity, and the strongest answers say so.

Tony Sewell argued that African-Caribbean boys are more likely to form anti-school subcultures. Mac an Ghaill broadly agreed with the observation but explained it differently, arguing that these subcultures are a response to institutional racism rather than a feature of the identities themselves — a distinction worth making explicitly, because it is the difference between blaming a group and explaining a response.

Archer’s work is class-specific by design. Her account is about working-class femininity coming into conflict with a middle-class ideal-pupil template, and generalising it to all girls loses the argument.

The intersection also shows in outcomes. Progression to higher education by age 19 varies far more by ethnicity than by gender: 67.4% for Asian/Asian British pupils, 63.3% for Black pupils, 50.2% for pupils of mixed heritage and 40.5% for White pupils in 2023/24, against a gender gap of around 13 percentage points. The full attainment picture is in my post on explaining the gender gap in education.

Trans and non-binary pupils in school

Schools have long been organised around a simple male–female division — gendered uniforms, gendered sports teams, separate toilets and changing rooms, and in some cases single-sex schools. Pupils who identify as trans or non-binary do not fit that structure, and how schools should respond has become one of the most contested areas of education policy in England.

For A-level purposes you need the legal position, the current guidance, and the sociological debate. Keep them separate.

The legal position

The Equality Act 2010 makes gender reassignment a protected characteristic. Schools must not discriminate against a pupil who is undergoing, has undergone, or is proposing to undergo a process of reassigning their sex, and this does not require any surgery or medical treatment. That protection is unchanged.

The current guidance

For several years there was little specific guidance on what schools should actually do, and schools largely made their own arrangements. That has now changed.

The Department for Education published Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 on 7 July 2026, and it comes into force on 1 September 2026. For the first time it includes a section on children who are questioning their gender, placing the issue inside the statutory safeguarding framework that all schools and colleges in England must follow. Earlier draft guidance, published in December 2023, was non-statutory and was never finalised in that form.

The guidance draws on the Cass Review, the independent review of NHS gender identity services for children and young people published in April 2024, which recommended a cautious approach to gender transition in childhood. Its main provisions:

• Schools should approach these issues through a safeguarding lens rather than primarily as an equality or inclusion matter, considering the best interests of the child and of other children.
• Schools must not initiate social transition. The guidance applies only where a child or parent has made a request.
• Social transition — changing name, pronouns or appearance — is treated as an active intervention with potential implications for a child’s development, to be approached very carefully, with a strong emphasis on parental involvement, and agreed only very rarely in primary schools.
• Schools must not allow pupils to use toilets, changing rooms or residential accommodation designated for the opposite biological sex.
• There are new provisions on single-sex sports based on biological sex.

Education is devolved, so the position differs in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Do not describe this as UK policy.

The sociological debate

Sociologists disagree about what all this means, and an exam answer should represent the disagreement rather than resolve it.

One position holds that a school organised entirely around a male–female division transmits the message that gender is fixed and binary, and that pupils who do not fit are left without a recognised place. Stonewall’s School Report, published in 2017 and now the most-cited survey evidence, found that a substantial minority of trans pupils reported not being able to use their own name at school, and that most reported difficulties with toilets, changing rooms and sports. On this reading, the school’s structure is itself the problem.

A different position holds that a school’s first duty is safeguarding, that children questioning their gender are a group about whom the clinical evidence is genuinely uncertain — which is what the Cass Review concluded — and that a cautious institutional response reflects that uncertainty rather than hostility. On this reading, single-sex provision protects something that matters to other pupils, and the caution is a response to evidence rather than to prejudice.

A third strand, drawing on Butler, questions the framing of both: if gender identity is produced through performance rather than possessed, then a debate conducted entirely in terms of fixed categories may be asking the wrong question.

For exam purposes, what matters is that you can describe the policy accurately, attribute each argument to a position rather than asserting it as fact, and evaluate. Examiners reward analysis of a contested issue; they do not reward taking a side and calling it sociology.

Evaluating the gender identity material

Most of the key studies are old. Mac an Ghaill is from 1994, Lees from 1986, Willis from 1977. The mechanisms they describe — peer policing, the sexual double standard, anti-school masculinity — are plausibly still operating, but none of these researchers observed a school with smartphones in it. Social media has changed how reputations are made and destroyed, and no classic study accounts for that.

Small qualitative samples. Archer’s 89 interviewees and Reay’s single case study give real depth and no basis for generalisation. That is the standard interpretivist trade-off and it cuts both ways: these studies tell you what identity work looks like from the inside, which no survey could, and they cannot tell you how common it is.

The category “working-class girls” does a lot of work. Archer’s findings are specific to working-class girls in inner London. Whether the same conflict with the ideal pupil arises in a rural comprehensive or a selective school is an open question.

Structural versus action explanations. Functionalists and Marxists would say this whole approach focuses too narrowly on interaction and misses the structures producing it. Interactionists would reply that the structures only exist in the interactions, and that watching pupils construct identities is how you see socialisation happening.

Identity does not obviously explain attainment. Girls now outperform boys on most measures despite the pressures Lees and Archer describe, and the achievement gap has narrowed sharply in recent years. If schools were straightforwardly hostile to working-class feminine identity, that is hard to explain — which suggests identity work affects pupils’ experience of school more clearly than it affects their results.

How this comes up in the exam

Gender identity appears on Paper 1 (7192/1: Education with Theory and Methods). It is examined less often than achievement or subject choice, which is exactly why it is worth knowing — a question on it separates candidates.

Expect it as:

• A 4 or 6-mark question, for example: “Outline two ways in which schools may reinforce traditional gender identities.”
• A 10-mark ‘analyse two’ question with an item, where the item mentions pupil identities or peer groups and both points must be taken from it.
• A 30-mark essay on the extent to which processes within school reinforce traditional masculine and feminine gender identities.

For the 30-marker, the structure that works is: peer groups, then teachers, then the institution itself, evaluated with the point that pupils are active agents constructing identities rather than passive recipients of them — which is what Archer’s laddette and Reay’s Shaun both show.

Name the studies. This is a topic where a candidate who can write “Archer found that the hyper-heterosexual feminine identity conflicted with the school’s ideal pupil” will beat a candidate writing about peer pressure in general terms, even where the underlying point is the same.

For a worked answer on the related achievement question, see Evaluate sociological explanations of gender differences in educational achievement.

Sociology of Education Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my sociology of education revision notes bundle – which contains the following:

1. 34 pages of revision notes
2. mind maps in pdf and png format – 9 in total, covering various topics within the sociology of education
3. short answer exam practice questions and exemplar answers
4. how to write sociology essays, including 7 specific templates and model answers on the sociology of education

Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the education topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course, and covers the gender identity strand of the gender and education sub-topic.

The other two strands are achievement — see Explaining the Gender Gap in Education for out-of-school factors and In School Factors for labelling, subcultures and the feminisation of teaching — and gender and subject choice.

For how schools transmit gender norms as institutions, through the hidden curriculum, uniform and classroom practice, see Gender Socialisation in Schools.

On theories of gender identity more broadly, see Judith Butler on gender and performativity.

Going further: Becky Francis’s research profile is held at UCL, and the Guardian’s summary of her study of children’s toys, Dolls are for girls, Lego is for boys, is a readable way into the early socialisation argument.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

• Archer, L., Halsall, A. and Hollingworth, S. (2007), ‘Class, gender, (hetero)sexuality and schooling: paradoxes within working-class girls’ engagement with education and post-16 aspirations’, British Journal of Sociology of Education
• Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994), The Making of Men
• Lees, S. (1986), Losing Out: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls
• Reay, D. (2002), ‘Shaun’s story: troubling discourses of white working-class masculinities’, Gender and Education
• Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, statutory guidance, published 7 July 2026, in force 1 September 2026
• The Cass Review, independent review of gender identity services for children and young people, April 2024
• House of Commons Library, Provisions to support gender-questioning children in schools
• Stonewall, The School Report, 2017
• Department for Education, Widening participation in higher education, 2023/24