Last Updated on August 31, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Gender socialisation is the process through which people learn the norms, roles and expectations attached to being male or female. It starts in the family, but it does not stop there — and school is the institution that takes over.
This post covers how school as an institution transmits gender norms to pupils:
- Primary and secondary socialisation, and what school adds
- The hidden curriculum
- Barrie Thorne on borderwork and the playground
- Teacher expectations and classroom interaction
- Gendered language, uniform and dress codes
- Curriculum content and textbooks
- Peer policing and sexual harassment, and how schools respond
- How much schools actually shape gender, against the family and the media
This is part of the gender and education sub-topic within the sociology of education module for A-level sociology, and it also applies directly to the culture and identity option.
What gender socialisation means, and where school fits
Primary socialisation happens in the family, in the first few years of life. Ann Oakley’s account is the standard starting point, and she identified four processes through which parents shape a child’s gender:
- Manipulation — encouraging behaviour seen as appropriate to the child’s sex and discouraging behaviour seen as inappropriate, such as praising a girl for her appearance or telling a boy not to cry.
- Canalisation — channelling children towards particular toys and activities. Dolls, prams and toy kitchens for girls; construction sets, vehicles and weapons for boys. Canalisation is the process examiners most often expect students to name, and it is the one that leads most directly into gendered subject choice later on.
- Verbal appellations — the names and phrases adults use: “good girl”, “big strong boy”, “little princess”. These attach evaluations to behaviour before a child can question them.
- Different activities — girls drawn into domestic tasks alongside their mothers, boys into outdoor or practical tasks, so that each learns a different set of competences as normal.
By the time children arrive at school at four or five, they already have a working sense of which things belong to them.
Secondary socialisation happens in institutions beyond the family — school, the peer group, the media, the workplace. School is the first of these that most children encounter, and it is the most sustained.
What school adds is not simply more of the same. Three things make it different from the family:
- It is public. Family socialisation happens in front of a handful of people. School socialisation happens in front of an audience of peers who notice and comment.
- It is formally organised along gender lines. Registers, uniforms, sports, sometimes queues and seating. The family does not usually sort children into two groups every day.
- It carries institutional authority. When a school communicates something about gender it does so with the weight of an official body behind it, which is why sociologists treat it as more than a collection of individual attitudes.
The functionalist reading is that this is socialisation working as it should: schools transmit shared norms and prepare children for adult roles. Feminists argue that what is actually transmitted is patriarchal ideology, and that schools reproduce gender inequality while appearing merely to educate. Both are arguing about the same set of observations, which is worth saying explicitly in an essay.
The hidden curriculum
The hidden curriculum is everything a school teaches that is not on the timetable — the norms, values and expectations transmitted through how the school is run rather than through what is formally taught.
Applied to gender, the hidden curriculum includes:
- Which subjects are timetabled where, and who teaches them
- How the staff body is structured — who is a headteacher, who is a teaching assistant, who runs the science department
- Whether sports are single-sex, and which sports are offered to whom
- The rules on appearance, and whether they apply equally
- Which behaviours are punished, and whose behaviour is punished more often
- Whose names appear in the textbooks
None of this is stated. That is the point. A school can have an explicit equality policy on the wall and still transmit, through its everyday organisation, the message that leadership is male and care is female. The hidden curriculum works precisely because nobody has to argue for it — it is simply how things are, which is what makes it look natural rather than social.
In an exam, give a concrete example and then say what message it transmits. “The hidden curriculum reinforces gender norms” earns very little on its own.
Barrie Thorne: borderwork and the playground
Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play (1993) is an ethnography of two primary schools and remains the most detailed account of how gender is produced in the informal spaces of school life. Thorne became interested in the topic after trying to raise her own children in a gender-neutral way and finding that it did not work.
Thorne’s central argument is that gender is something children actively do, not something they passively receive. There are many ways of interpreting and expressing masculinity and femininity, and children construct them dynamically through interaction. The framework draws on Goffman’s work on the presentation of the self in everyday life. HOWEVER — and this is what makes Thorne useful rather than simply optimistic — children who are active agents still, overwhelmingly, end up reproducing conventional gender roles.
How school organisation produces separation
Thorne found some classes organised by teachers into boys’ and girls’ tables. In classes where pupils chose freely, boys still sat with boys and girls with girls. Some teachers organised games teams and lunch queues by gender, which generated rivalry and antagonism between the two groups.
But when gender was not made an issue, mixed groups worked together perfectly well. The separation was not inevitable; it was produced — sometimes by staff, sometimes by pupils.
Borderwork
Borderwork is Thorne’s term for the active process of marking out the boundary between male and female groups. It is the concept worth learning, because it names something students recognise immediately.
One form was cross-border chasing, most famously kiss chase, which Thorne described as a ritualised form of provocation. Girls chased boys and tried to kiss them, sometimes wearing lipstick to leave a visible mark; boys fled to avoid the embarrassment, and boys who were caught complained about catching “cooties” from the girls. Girls who spent too much time in boys’ territory were labelled “cootie queen”, which carried low status.
A second form was cross-gender interrupting: boys deliberately standing on girls’ skipping ropes to disrupt their games.
Borderwork dramatises difference. It exaggerates the distinction between boys and girls and reinforces the idea that they are opposites — and it tends to reinforce male power, since boys were more likely to use physical disruption while girls were left chasing them off.
Why the segregation happens
Thorne argued there was no single cause, and that socialisation alone could not explain it. She pointed to:
- Crowding. Playgrounds are dense environments where groups can easily police behaviour and call out anyone who does not conform. Following Foucault, children who know they are under constant peer surveillance begin policing themselves.
- Public choosing. Where games involved picking teams publicly, boys picked boys and girls picked girls. Where pupils simply lined up behind a leader, as in handball, there was far less separation. The procedure, not the preference, produced the outcome.
- Adult presence. Pupils policed gender lines more vigorously when adults were absent. Adults, when present, tended to encourage mixing — though some teachers reinforced separation by warning boys away from girls’ areas of the playground.
The exceptions matter
Thorne also found plenty of boundary-crossing. Some games were genuinely mixed. Some boys skipped and some girls played football. Notably, it was the most popular boys who could play girls’ games without being teased, and the strongest girls who could play boys’ games and take on a tomboy identity. Crossing the line was possible, but it cost social capital, and only those with enough to spare could afford it.
Teacher expectations and classroom interaction
Teachers transmit gender norms without intending to, mainly through where their attention goes.
Boys receive more teacher attention than girls, both positive and negative, and a substantial share of it is disciplinary. Teachers describing a typical girl reach for words like well-behaved and studious; describing a typical boy, they reach for troublemaker. Boys consequently receive more negative feedback, which can reinforce the association between masculinity and disruption — a self-fulfilling prophecy operating on behaviour rather than on ability.
The consequence for girls is subtler and easier to miss. A pupil who is quiet, compliant and causing nobody any trouble is a pupil who can safely be ignored. Girls learn that the route to approval is to be undemanding, which is useful in school and considerably less useful afterwards.
Becky Francis’s work on classroom interaction — boys dominating the room physically and verbally, girls participating in quieter and more contained ways — is covered on my post on gender identity and education, along with Archer and Lees. The labelling material as it relates to the achievement gap is on Explaining Gender Inequality in Education — In School Factors.
Who teaches also matters. Primary teaching is heavily female while headship is disproportionately male, so a child moving through primary school sees women teaching and men in charge. That is a hidden-curriculum message about authority which no lesson delivers and no policy states.
Gendered language, uniform and dress codes
Uniform is the clearest worked example of a school transmitting gender norms, because it is visible, compulsory and enforced daily.
The trousers question
Most UK schools introduced trousers as an option for girls over the last twenty-odd years, but the change was slow and contested. Campaigns such as Trousers for All documented schools across the full spectrum — primary and secondary, state and private, faith and non-faith — that continued to require skirts and would send girls home for wearing trousers.
Three arguments were made for change.
The legal argument. Requiring only girls to wear skirts looks like a straightforward instance of less favourable treatment on grounds of sex under the Equality Act 2010. The point has never been settled in court, largely because schools facing a challenge have tended to change the policy rather than defend it — which is itself informative.
The freedom argument. Requiring one group to wear a garment that restricts how they can sit, move and play, in an institution that tells children they can achieve anything, is difficult to justify on its own terms.
The socialisation argument, which is the sociologically interesting one. Becky Francis has argued that requiring boys to wear trousers while girls wear skirts communicates that boys are active while girls should be less active, decorative and demure. The uniform is not neutral clothing; it is a daily instruction about how each group is expected to occupy space.
Uniform policy has since moved on. Many schools have adopted gender-neutral codes, and some have gone further and required trousers for everyone. Both directions remove the explicit gendering, which suggests the norm was never as fixed as it looked.
The policing of bodies
Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism makes a broader argument worth keeping: whether or not a school has a gender-neutral policy, girls’ bodies get policed more than boys’. Girls have been sent home for skirts judged too short, on the grounds that they were distracting — and girls have also been sent home for trousers judged too tight. In one case a school sent home dozens of girls in a single day over trouser fit.
The contrast that makes the point: when a group of boys wore skirts to school in protest at a policy banning shorts in hot weather, they faced no disciplinary action at all.
The sociological reading is that dress codes are rarely just about smartness. Where a school has more rules governing girls’ appearance than boys’, and enforces them more actively, it is teaching that female bodies require regulation and that responsibility for how others react to them rests with the wearer.
Gendered language
Everyday classroom language carries the same freight. Addressing a mixed class as “guys”, praising girls for being helpful and boys for being clever, using “boys and girls” as the default way of splitting a group, telling a boy to “man up” — none of these is a policy, and all of them are socialisation.
Curriculum content and textbooks
What appears in the formal curriculum transmits gender norms as effectively as anything hidden.
History dominated by male political and military figures, science taught through the discoveries of male scientists, English literature reading lists weighted towards male authors: each communicates whose activity counts as significant. Where women appear mainly as exceptions — the one female scientist, the one queen — the framing can reinforce the rule rather than challenge it.
Textbook illustrations have historically shown men in active and occupational roles and women in domestic and caring ones. Publishers have worked on this and modern textbooks are considerably better, which is why the argument needs handling carefully: a student who claims textbooks are full of women in aprons is describing the 1970s. The stronger version of the point is that curriculum content is a choice, that choices carry messages, and that the messages have changed — which is itself evidence that this part of socialisation is not fixed.
Where subject choice follows from all this belongs on my post on gender and subject choice.
Peer policing and sexual harassment in schools
The most powerful gender socialisation in school comes from other pupils, and schools shape it through how they respond.
Peer policing is the enforcement of gender norms between pupils — the teasing, the labels and the exclusion that follow when someone steps outside what their group expects. Thorne’s cootie queen is the primary school version. In secondary schools it takes sharper forms, and the labels attached to girls’ sexual reputations are covered on gender identity and education.
What Ofsted found
In 2021 the government asked Ofsted to carry out a rapid review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges, following thousands of anonymous testimonies posted to the Everyone’s Invited website. Inspectors visited 32 state and independent schools and colleges and spoke to more than 900 children and young people.
Pupils were asked how often various things happened to them or their peers. The proportions saying “a lot” or “sometimes”:
| Girls | Boys | |
|---|---|---|
| Sexist name-calling | 92% | 74% |
| Rumours about sexual activity | 81% | 53% |
| Unwanted or inappropriate sexual comments | 80% | 55% |
| Sexual assault of any kind | 79% | 38% |
| Feeling pressured into sexual things they did not want to do | 68% | 27% |
| Unwanted touching | 64% | 24% |
Nearly 90% of girls, against nearly 50% of boys, said that being sent explicit pictures or videos they did not want to see happened a lot or sometimes.
Ofsted’s conclusion was that this behaviour had become normalised — so frequent that many young people no longer registered it as unusual or worth reporting.
The perception gap
The finding that matters most for this topic is not the prevalence figures. It is that leaders, teachers, governors and local safeguarding partners consistently underestimated the scale of it. Pupils described a routine feature of school life; the adults running those same schools did not know it was happening.
Two things explain the gap. Pupils told inspectors they often did not report, fearing reputational damage, social ostracism, or that once reported the situation would be out of their control. And where behaviour was reported, staff sometimes dismissed sexist language as banter, or were unaware of the vocabulary being used.
That is a hidden-curriculum finding in the strict sense. A school that does not respond to sexist name-calling is not doing nothing. It is transmitting a norm — that this is ordinary, and that it is not worth an adult’s attention.
Ofsted’s central recommendation followed from this: where school leaders have no specific information suggesting sexual harassment is a problem in their setting, they should assume that it is.
A methods point worth knowing
The survey asked whether things happened “to them or their peers”. That combined wording means the figures cannot be separated into personal experience and perception of others — 92% of girls reporting sexist name-calling is not the same claim as 92% of girls having personally experienced it.
This is a genuine limitation and a good illustration of how question wording shapes what a statistic can support. It is not, however, a reason to dismiss the findings. The wording was chosen for ethical reasons: asking children directly about personal experience of sexual harassment, in a rapid review, without established relationships or follow-up support in place, would have been difficult to justify. Ofsted traded precision for ethics, which is a trade-off researchers make constantly and one worth citing in methods questions.
Note also that the review is now five years old and that the statutory position has moved on. From 1 September 2026, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 strengthens schools’ duties around child-on-child abuse and harmful sexual behaviour.
Evaluating school as an agent of gender socialisation
Children are not passive. This is Thorne’s main contribution and the strongest single evaluation point. Pupils actively construct gender rather than absorbing it, and some resist. The tomboys and the boys who skipped show the norms can be broken — though the fact that only high-status children could break them without cost shows the norms are real.
The family probably matters more. Primary socialisation happens first, at the most formative stage, and school is working on children who already have a gender identity. Where family and school conflict, it is not obvious that school wins.
The media may now matter more than either. No account written before smartphones deals with what a teenager encounters online. Influencer content aimed at boys, algorithmically delivered and consumed privately, transmits ideas about masculinity at a scale and intensity no school assembly can match. This is the most current evaluation available and it is worth making.
Schools have changed. Much of the classic research describes schools that no longer exist. Gender-neutral uniform is now common, equality duties are statutory, textbook publishers have overhauled their content, and girls now outperform boys on most measures. If schools were straightforwardly reproducing patriarchy, girls outperforming boys is difficult to explain — see explaining the gender gap in education.
Schools may reduce inequality as well as reproduce it. Feminist accounts tend to treat school as a transmitter of patriarchal norms. It is also where equalities law is enforced, where harassment can be challenged, and where girls gained the qualifications that changed their position in the labour market. Both can be true at once.
Thorne’s study is American and over thirty years old. Gender Play observed two US primary schools in the early 1990s. The concepts travel well; the specific playground culture may not, and a student applying cooties to a British secondary school in 2026 is stretching it.
Sample sizes are small. Thorne’s is an ethnography of two schools. The Ofsted review covered 32 settings, was explicitly a rapid review, and was not designed as a representative national survey.
How this comes up in the exam
This material appears on Paper 1 (7192/1: Education with Theory and Methods), and overlaps with culture and identity for students taking that option.
Expect it as:
- A 4 or 6-mark question, for example: “Outline two ways in which schools may reinforce traditional gender roles.”
- A 10-mark ‘analyse two’ question with an item referring to the hidden curriculum or to processes within school.
- Part of a 30-mark essay on the extent to which processes within school reinforce traditional gender identities, or on gender socialisation more broadly.
The structure that works is: formal curriculum, then hidden curriculum, then peer policing, then evaluation weighing school against family and media. Give a concrete example for each — uniform, teacher attention, the Ofsted findings — rather than describing the concepts in the abstract.
The distinction examiners reward here is between the formal and the hidden curriculum. Make it explicitly, make it early, and use it to organise the answer.
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:
- 34 pages of revision notes
- mind maps in pdf and png format – 9 in total, covering various topics within the sociology of education
- short answer exam practice questions and exemplar answers
- 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 how school as an institution transmits gender norms.
For how pupils construct and perform gender identity in school — Archer, Francis and Lees — see Gender Identity and Education.
For the achievement gap and why girls outperform boys, see Explaining the Gender Gap in Education for out-of-school factors and In School Factors for labelling, subcultures and the feminisation of teaching.
For why boys and girls choose different subjects, see gender and subject choice.
On the theory behind “doing gender”, see Goffman on the presentation of the self and Judith Butler on gender and performativity.
Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com
Sources
- Thorne, B. (1993), Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School
- Ofsted, Review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges, published 10 June 2021
- Department for Education, Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, statutory guidance, in force 1 September 2026
- Bates, L., School dress codes reinforce the message that women’s bodies are dangerous, The Guardian, 2015
- Sexist school uniform rules, The Guardian, 2017
- Part of this post draws on Haralambos and Holborn, Sociology Themes and Perspectives