Female Classmates Research Articles

Gender peer effects in high schools: Evidence from India

This paper presents evidence of gender peer effects in high schools in India using new administrative data. Identification of gender peer effects is achieved by exploiting variation induced by idiosyncratic changes in gender composition across cohorts within schools, in addition to controlling for past scores. The proportion of female classmates in a student's cohort has a sizeable positive effect on the test scores of both male and female students. We find that peer effects vary non-linearly with the proportion of female students. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence on plausible mechanisms. We show that achievement spillovers are not the main driver of positive gender peer effects. Using a supplemental dataset, we show that a greater proportion of female students leads to an improved classroom environment in the context of Indian schools.

Female Classmates, Disruption, and Stem Outcomes in Disadvantaged Schools: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

Female Classmates, Disruption, and Stem Outcomes in Disadvantaged Schools: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

Female Classmates, Disruption, and Stem Outcomes in Disadvantaged Schools: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

Female Classmates, Disruption, and Stem Outcomes in Disadvantaged Schools: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

The Role of School Context Factors for Gender Role Attitudes: General and Differential Associations Between Female and Male Adolescents

During adolescence, socialization of gender role attitudes (GRA) shifts from parents to peers, friends, and classmates; thus, it takes place primarily in the school context. Accordingly, previous studies identified school-related factors associated to adolescents’ GRA. However, little is known about the relative importance of these factors as well as about the factors’ differences between females’ and males’ GRA. This study investigates the relevance of several school factors on adolescents’ GRA and gender differences. Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study ( N = 10,866), the results show that attending a higher educational school type, higher classmates’ socio-economic background, lower proportion of female classmates, and more egalitarian classmates’ GRA are related to more individual egalitarian GRA. Furthermore, the relation between classmates’ GRA and individual GRA is more pronounced for males than females. The study further discusses starting points for possible interventions.

Peer Gender and Schooling: Evidence from Ethiopia

In this paper, we study how classmate gender composition matters for students in Ethiopia. We base our results on a unique survey of students across classrooms and schools and among those randomly assigned to class. We find a strong asymmetry: males do not and females do benefit from exposure to more female classmates with less school absence and improvement on math test scores. We further find that exposure to more female classmates improves motivation and participation in class, and in general, that the effects of classmate gender composition are consistent with social interaction effects.

Who cheats? Do prosocial values make a difference?

Research has indicated the importance of internal motivation as a factor in reducing academic misconduct in higher education and some commentators have also cited prosocial values as buffers against the temptation to cheat. In light of this research, the goal of the present research was to study the roles of motivation and prosocial values in combating academic misconduct. Specifically, it examined how internal motivation and strong prosocial values might impact the risk of academic misconduct. For this purpose, 455 student participants completed a self-report questionnaire. The results support the hypothesis that high internal motivation and strong prosocial values reduce the tendency to cheat. In comparison, high external motivation and weak prosocial values were associated with higher levels of academic misconduct. In addition, male students were more likely to cheat than their female classmates and science students were more likely to cheat than social science students. The ability to identify factors that reduce the risk of academic misconduct can inform interventions in higher education. According to the present results, such interventions should involve the promotion of prosocial values and enhance student well-being.

University Experiences of Students in a Gender Minority

Academic and social-emotional experiences during the university years influence students’ academic achievement and emotional well-being. However, there is insufficient evidence on how the numerical representation of same-gendered persons affects such experiences in each group. The aim of this research was to analyze university experiences within degree programs where there is a large gender gap in students enrolled. The study is descriptive and cross-sectional and uses a mixed approach. An adaptation of the QVAr (questionnaire on academic experiences-reduced version) was administered to 726 students enrolled in degree programs with a large gender gap. Additionally, ten individual interviews were carried out with students belonging to minority gender groups. The obtained results show that, in these degree programs, students’ adaptation and coexistence processes are different, especially in interpersonal relationships between the majority and minority groups. Women in the minority require support from their female classmates in the early years of the degree program. Men in the minority, however, feel like part of the group from the start.

Health benefits of having more female classmates: Quasi-experimental evidence from China

We investigate the impact of having more female classmates on students’ physical health outcomes. To do so, we draw on panel data from the first two waves of the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) and take advantage of exogenous variation in classroom gender composition brought by the random assignment of students to classes when they entered junior high school. Results from the value-added model show that having more female classmates helps to improve the physical health outcomes of junior high school students in China. Specifically, a one-percentage-point (pp) increase in the proportion of female classmates in Grade 7 explains a 0.003-0.004 pp increase in one's probability of staying normal BmiAZ or going from abnormal to normal BmiAZ, a 0.029-0.031 increase in the BmiAZ score of those with low starting BmiAZ, a 0.003 increase in one's HAZ score, and a 0.157-0.165% or 0.166-0.177% decrease in the diopter of one's left or right lens of glasses from Grade 7 to Grade 8, respectively. One possible mechanism underlying these relationships is that more female classmates bring healthier behaviors. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the beneficial effects of having more female classmates on health outcomes are more prominent among boys, students with less-educated parents, and those attending rural schools or schools with bigger class sizes.

The Foot of Compassion and Complicity

Sym-pathy or com-passion means sharing pain or trouble. Foot and shoe are often employed to denote sympathy as in “If I were in your shoes.” Foot and shoe, albeit less often, can also be a means to represent complicity, which means folding clothes together. People sometimes have to avoid bad memory or situations and want a closer and more personal bond with like-minded people, so that they together forge fictional scenarios that account for hard situations to them. The main objective of this essay is to explore aspects of the liaison between shoe-foot and compassion-complicity in various cultural and textual sources. 1) The pure sympathy or firm ties and its opposite cases are rather simply represented by one’s putting on the same shoes and taking them off respectively. 2) A shaky and unstable bond is indicated by the abnormal or weak foot which impedes walking itself. The self-exiled 20th Irish modernists, Joyce and Beckett, invent walking obstructions such as flat-foot and disabled feet in the depiction of their ambivalent attitude toward the fatherland. 3) Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons can be said to present certain cases of the complicitous relationship. Mentally stricken, Plath had maintained an imaginary life in the dead father’s boots for 30 years, and, when that relationship was not needed any more, decided to quit her life for good. In Creech’s novel, the two young female classmates whose mothers have equally vanished from home join the complicity which makes them take their situations for a conspiracy-induced one. Only when they wear others’ “moccasins to walk two moons,” their understanding of others can be turned from the narrow and self-serving one to a truly sympathetic one.

Sustainable Mobility Issues of Physically Active University Students: The Case of Serres, Greece

The mobility practices of students are largely dictated by their respective educational obligations. Students of physical education are an ostensibly physically active population, whose active lifestyle may include active travel. University student mobility research calls for behavioral approaches to ground relevant interventions. This work investigated the sustainability practices in the student community of the Physical Education Department in Serres, a medium-sized Greek city. Moreover, this paper aimed to shed light on the gender differences in the physical activity levels of 259 students, as well as their respective differences in mobility practices. A novel questionnaire, based on Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior and Godin–Shephard’s approach to physical activity, was used. The results confirmed higher levels of physical activity in male students, although their attitude toward physical activity was less positive than that of their female classmates. Further positive attitudes in women were recorded toward sustainable mobility choices, although the evidence demonstrated a similar gap between the answers of the two genders. Car possession was higher in men, whereas car purchase intention was slightly lower in women, who had a lower income in general. Moreover, income impacted gender mobility preferences. Recommendations can be guided by students’ sports preferences and can be gender-sensitive, taking income into account.

Adrift

Adrift Erin Miller Reid (bio) When Georgeanna first arrived in Mainz, the German students assessed her shoes. She wore a pair of Reebok sneakers she'd taken great pains to keep snow white, at times even scrubbing the soles with Comet cleaning powder. "You can always know an American by their shoes," a classmate said in accented English. "They wear sneakers everywhere, not just to do sport." His English was far better than [End Page 17] Georgeanna's German, even though she was the one spending two semesters abroad. The next day she wore her brown loafers instead, complete with a shiny copper penny wedged in the slit just over the tongue. "Those shoes look like something my Oma would wear," a female classmate said with brusque German-bred honesty that Georgeanna would eventually learn to not take personally. After class, Georgeanna took a bus downtown, its wide body weaving with hisses and sighs between timber-lined buildings that hovered along narrow streets originally intended for pushcarts and wagons, never vehicles the size of single-wide mobile homes. Georgeanna stared at the bus's floor appraising the shoes of other passengers. Indeed, the elderly ladies, their wheeled produce baskets in tow, wore loafers. Georgeanna reasoned that her own penny loafers were sleeker and daintier than the heavy-soled sort West German senior citizens wore. However, she noticed that the girls closer to her age sported heels of all types—strappy and close-toed, rounded and squared, mostly sleek black and dark brown—but all with height. At the department store, Georgeanna chose a chocolate-brown pair of lace-up, platform Oxfords. She caught her heels on cracked sidewalks at first, and her ankles ached at the end of the day, but no one commented on how American she looked anymore, or how she resembled a grandmother. That was months ago. Now Georgeanna managed the sidewalks of West Germany in heels with confidence. She expertly navigated the cobblestone streets of downtown without stumbling. She raced up the stairwell when she was late for class, and climbed the library stepladder to reach books on the top shelf. Her honed skills of heel-wearing were put to the test in one of the wooded thickets tucked in and around the [End Page 18] campus. Georgeanna admired the German penchant for nature, and these woods, as small as they were, reminded her of the tree-covered hills back home in Kentucky, where the forests were dense with pines, poplars, and an underbrush of rhododendron, creeper vine, and fallen trunks that she and her siblings, Elena and P.J. spent entire days exploring as kids. Georgeanna sat down on a cement bench in the otherwise empty grove to eat an apple and write a letter to her boyfriend Trent. She took a bite of the apple, so juicy that it dripped onto her chin, and scribbled away to Trent, assuring him that despite the good time she was having and all she was learning, she still loved him and missed him. She sunk her front teeth into another mouthful of apple. The crack of the apple's crisp flesh pierced the quiet that had settled in the crop of birch trees and alders. A pigeon scuttled from under the bench and pecked at her feet. Just as Georgeanna bit a tiny morsel of apple to toss to the bird, a completely naked man emerged from the bushes. He blinked as if his eyes were adjusting to the first sun of the day. He was bald from head to toe, no hair on his head, his chest, his arms, or legs. His penis hung unadorned by even the smallest tuft. His skin was pale, like the buttermilk Georgeanna used to dunk leftover cornbread into for an afterschool snack. The Naktbader. She'd only heard about the campus nudist from other students. She'd never seen him herself. According to student lore, he was a graduate school drop-out who camped out in the nooks and crannies of the campus, ate from the cafeteria dumpster, and bathed in the central fountain at odd hours of the night. Students debated his hairless physique, whether it was self-induced...

Does Exposure to More Women in Male-Dominated Fields Render Female Students More Career-Oriented?

The underrepresentation of women in male-dominated fields of study can generate a lack of role models for female students, which may influence their career choices. This paper sheds light on this question, investigating the existence of impacts of the gender composition of instructors and peers in the Department of Economics from a selective Brazilian university. Specifically, we analyze whether having higher shares of female professors and classmates throughout undergraduate studies in Economics affects female students' labor market outcomes. We use comprehensive administrative data from the University of Sao Paulo, containing information on students' academic results and students', instructors', and course sections' characteristics. We merge these data with Brazilian labor market and firm ownership data to obtain a broad range of career outcomes, including labor force participation, occupational choices, career progression, and wages. To overcome endogeneity issues arising from students' self-selection into professors and peers, we exploit the random assignment of students in the first-semester classes and focus on mandatory courses. A higher representation of women in a male-dominated field, such as Economics, increases female students' labor force participation. Moreover, larger female faculty shares increase the probability that a female student becomes a top manager. These results suggest ways to counteract the highly discussed glass ceiling in high-earning occupations. We show that students' academic performance and elective course-choice are not driving the effects. Instead, we find suggestive evidence that higher shares of female classmates may increase the likelihood of working during undergraduate studies, leading to stronger labor market attachment.

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case"

The Queer Gift of Black Folk Double Consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois's Detective Story "The Case" Erika Renée Williams (bio) W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, which he defines as "a problem" in the Euro-American imaginary, has long been understood to denote an alienated black subjectivity and an American body politic divided by racial caste. The white gaze, Du Bois instructs, has the potential to restrict the parameters of black subjectivity by barring black subjects from fully accessing their citizenship and expressing their humanity. In the opening chapter of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," he recounts the childhood memory that perhaps occasioned his divided consciousness: that of a young white female classmate refusing the affection he offered with the gift of a "gorgeous" calling card.1 The incident leads him to realize that his blackness signals not approbation but abjection to many of his white compatriots and thus to see that they deem him a problem and not fully a person. Because he likens this experience of failed interpersonal, interracial affection to that of being cast out from his native land, Du Bois arguably suggests a parallel failed "romance," understood in its most capacious sense as any heightened exchange of intersubjective affect, between himself and the American nation writ large. In rendering the young white girl a symbol of an ungenerous and withholding white nation, Du Bois implicitly ties the development of individual states of black consciousness to the promise and pathos of black assimilation into a Euro-centrist American body politic, foregrounding the way interpersonal dynamics of intimacy shape collective processes of nation-building and implicitly rendering double consciousness a matter of misbegotten love. [End Page 27] Moreover, Du Bois's recounting of a childhood story of foreclosed "puppy love" to set up his theory of double consciousness in Souls marks his deployment of a literary trope that I term the "cross-caste romance." Drawing on Lisa L. Moore's work regarding the role of intercultural love in imagining and shaping the fabric of a nation, I define the cross-caste romance as an intimate relation between persons separated by differences (e.g., race, class, and gender) that are purportedly immutable but are in fact constructed, a relation that foregrounds the fragility of intersubjective exchange and the tenuousness of nation formation.2 Simultaneously a remainder of transatlantic slavery, a harbinger of antiracist and decolonial critique, and an object of metaphysical inquiry, double consciousness cannot be understood solely by way of history, politics, or philosophy. Rather, I argue that it must be approached through the framework of the story with which he introduces it and through its trope of failed interpersonal intimacy, which symbolizes not just the psycho-social alienation of black subjects but the broader material and sociopolitical divisions fracturing the United States. Indeed, Du Bois's various narrative projects, both fictional and nonfictional, describe the urgency of America's revaluation and acceptance of its ethnic others by using the language of intersubjective and intrasubjective intimacy—whether figured as romantic courtship or as other forms of love or eros. For Du Bois, the solution to the conundrum of the black subject's compulsory, divided consciousness is twofold: first, a robust process of black recovery and reclamation, premised partly on the recovery and reclamation of African ancestry and African folkways, and second, an attempt at some form of black assimilation, through which the black subject might "consent," with Motenian echoes, not to being reduced to a "single being" but rather to being incorporated into the American body politic while still maintaining some measure of cultural distinction.3 Du Bois suggests that black American subjects, once having taken sustenance from the legacy of "wasted, dispersed, or forgotten" African "genius," might then be freer to offer up the gifts—however conditional—of their affective labor.4 Like his anecdote in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois's forgotten 1907 detective story "The Case" frames double consciousness as a form of misbegotten love and in terms of the challenge of placing black self-love on a parallel track with black assimilation in the form of affective, intersubjective...

Athlete as Agitator, Assaulter, and Armor

An increasing number of young adult literature features male athletes sexually assaulting female classmates. These books can be generative spaces for examining relationships between athletic identities and sexual violence. This manuscript provides an analysis of six YAL novels addressing sexual assault: Moxie (Mathieu, 2017), The Nowhere Girls (Reed, 2017), The Way I Used to Be (Smith, 2017), Some Boys (Blount, 2014), Asking For It (O’Neill, 2016), All the Rage (Summers, 2015). The authors examine athlete identities and figured worlds in the six titles and then present teaching suggestions to investigate in English classrooms athlete identities and sexual assault.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Did court stop college from enforcing suspension?

The plaintiff, a senior at Vassar College, was the captain of the school's soccer team. In May 2019, a female classmate reported to the Title IX coordinator that the plaintiff attempted to coerce her into a sexual encounter after a party they both attended. She also claimed he had engaged in nonconsensual sexual touching of her body in violation of the school's Sexual Misconduct Policy.

Did court stop college from enforcing suspension?

The plaintiff, a senior at Vassar College, was the captain of the school's soccer team. In May 2019, a female classmate reported to the Title IX coordinator that the plaintiff attempted to coerce her into a sexual encounter after a party they both attended. She also claimed he had engaged in nonconsensual sexual touching of her body in violation of the school's Sexual Misconduct Policy.

Sheikh Jackson (Feature by `Amr Salama, Muhammad Hifzi and Hani `Usama)

Sheikh Jackson Joel Gordon (bio) Feature, Starring Ahmad al-Fishawi and Magid al-Kidwani, 2017, 93 Minutes, Directed by ' Amr Salama, and Produced by Muhammad Hifzi and Hani 'Usama This is a movie that can no longer be watched without noting the release since its production of a critically acclaimed, albeit ever controversial documentary chronicling the accusations of child sexual abuse against the "King of Pop," Michael Jackson. I have not seen "Leaving Neverland" (Dan Reed, 2019), but the longstanding charges are impossible to ignore in its wake. The ghost of Michael Jackson, it seems, is destined to haunt us, even if we can never truly shake off his music or stop replicating his moonwalk. Khalid, (starring Ahmad al-Fishawi) the lead character in Sheikh Jackson, is also haunted, but only partly by the superstar singer, whose death he learns of early on in the film. Happily married and the father of a precocious, slightly rebellious young daughter, Khalid is a troubled figure plagued by nightmare visions—the film opens to a dream sequence of him being buried alive—that drive him to sleep under the bed. He does so, he tells his psychotherapist, modeling an early hero of Islam, so that he remembers he is always a step away from the grave. Regularly devout, clad in a crisp white galabiyya and deliberately scrubbing his teeth with a miswak, he occasionally sends his wife and child downstairs to her mother's apartment so he can pray and meditate in solitude. He is also an aspiring imam, who leads a local congregation in evening prayers, and narrator-producer of fire and brimstone religious videos that are as gruesome as his dreams. He is seeing a therapist because he no longer can cry when leading prayers, and that, he fears, indicates a waning of faith. His backstory, revealed in a series of flashbacks, prompted by the therapist's query, narrates the times in his childhood and adolescence in which he recalls crying. The first time is upon learning of the death of his mother, the same day he had been reprimanded at school for writing a perverse (shaz) essay in which he converses with God. He is left to contend with his father, Captain Hani, (starring Magid al-Kidwani), owner of a local weight-lifting club, who harbors fears that his spindly, later longhaired son, known in school as Duda, is not quite man enough. His father's fears are stoked by the teenager's growing infatuation with Michael Jackson, albeit initially inspired by attraction to Shirin, a female classmate with whom he sneaks private moments and shares music cassettes on the daily bus-ride to school. Before long, and initially unbeknownst to his father, Duda—who will morph into Jackson—has purchased the full outfit—sequined [End Page 110] hat, sunglasses, white glove, spats, to which he adds an open white blouse over a white undershirt—and is practicing his dance-moves behind a closed bedroom door. Soon, he is ready to test his talents at a local disco competition. But his father will tolerate no such dalliances. He knows Michael Jackson only as a bisexual (mukhannas). He chastises Khalid for not attending to his lessons and moves gym equipment into the apartment, hoping to enforce an exercise regime. At a particularly delicate moment in Khalid's evolving relationship with Shirin, he encourages him to become more physically aggressive and to stop fearing the first-kiss. A blowup, impacted by Khalid's panic at Shirin's own boldness, leads him to leave home and Alexandria for Cairo and to move in with a sympathetic uncle, his mother's brother, who undertakes, off-screen, his religious instruction. Fifteen years later—the flashbacks take place between 1991 and 1995, the present is 2009—Khalid struggles to keep to the straight and narrow. The most striking thing about Sheikh Jackson is its honest treatment of religion. Khalid's behavior is not quite normative, but he is able to lead a happy, normal life within the confines of his persistent gaugeing of the permissible versus of the forbidden. He wears a ring with a meter on which he keeps tab of good and bad thoughts...

Changing Gender Attitudes: The Long-Run Effects of Early Exposure to Female Classmates

Identity norms are an important cause of inequalities and talent misallocation. I leverage a unique opportunity to observe students exogenously allocated to classes across a close-to-nationally-representative set of Vietnamese schools to show that more exposure to female peers during childhood causally decreases the extent of agreement with traditional gender roles in the long-run. This shift in attitudes is accompanied by changes in actual behavior: employing friendship nominations I find that male children have more female friends and spend more time with them outside school. Moreover, both their intensive and extensive margin contributions to home production increase in the short- and the long-run. These results are novel in the attitudes formation and in the long-term effects of peers literature and are important in informing optimal class allocation. Academic spillovers from female classmates are much weaker.

Primary School Performance of Girls with Turner Syndrome: A Transcultural Assessment.

We analyzed primary school performance of girls with Turner syndrome (TS) in two distinct countries to ascertain if the cognitive phenotype of TS causes selective learning difficulties. The cohort comprised of 44 Czech and 50 Egyptian girls with TS who attended public schools. School reports from grades 1 to 9 were obtained retrospectively from Czech participants with TS. Only recent school reports were obtained from Egyptian participants. Two controls per participant were requested - biological sisters and/or female classmates. The results were converted into a 5-point scale (1-excellent; 5-unsatisfactory). Analysis of longitudinal Czech data displayed a strong time component in both subjects and controls. Showing better points in lower grades with its gradual worsening as the education complexity increased. In contrast, there was a strong statistically significant difference between groups in Mathematics (p=0.0041, p=0.0205 after Bonferroni correction) and this difference increased over time. The points for Mathematics did not differ in grades 1+2 (0.05 difference in mean grade between the two groups), however, they differed by 0.28 in grades 6+7 and by 0.32 in grades 8+9. While slightly different in character (cross-sectional vs. longitudinal), the Egyptian cohort data confirmed our findings, showing no difference in general school performance but having similar trends in Mathematics (grades 1+2: 0.11, grades 6+7: 0.54, grades 8+9: 0.68; p=0.0058, p=0.029 after Bonferroni correction). Excluding results in Mathematics, which showed pronounced worsening in relation to age in comparison with unaffected controls, girls with TS performed similarly to their controls.