My daughters received their school year book this week. The question that they asked each student was what they want to be when they grow up. What a perfect opportunity to look at a large population of students and see if there are any gender influences I thought. There are just over 200 students in the school which is from Kindergarten to eighth grade.
The first occupation I looked at was teacher. This is my daughters first year at this school and they are in kindergarten. One thing I noticed through the course of the year is that all of the teachers at the school are females, as is the entire staff. My hypothesis prior to counting was that there would be an overwhelmingly high percentage of females versus males that would want to be teachers simply based on the fact that all of the teachers are females. About 10% of the students answered teacher, 80% of them are females.
My suspicion is that this is a result of not having any male role models who are teachers. What would be interesting to see is how students at another school with a mixture of male and female teachers would respond. Only then would I be able to validate if my hypothesis is accurate.
The second group of occupations I looked at was professional athlete. The school offers athletic programs for boys and girls including basketball, soccer and track. All three are sports I felt get a fair amount of exposure for males and females as opposed to football and baseball. About 20% of students answered that they want to be professional athletes, 80% are males. My hypothesis was that this would be a bit more even based on the programs offered at the school. It is clear that the outside influences impact the students gender expectations more so than what they are exposed to at school.
The third grouping I looked at were doctors and lawyers (excluding veterinarian, far too many, if they all come through all of our pets will be well cared for). About 7% of all students answered doctor or lawyer, 66% are females. I thought we might get more of a 50-50 mix here. I suppose that this may be impacted by so many males having selected professional athlete as first choice. It would have been a bit more interesting if the students were instructed to select something other than professional athlete.
There are many more ways we could look at these results, far too many for this blog. There were quite a few that were better representations of reality than others. There where four specific ones I thought were interesting, two girls who identified an occupation and added mother, and two males who added dad.
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And, on the rare occasion we find a male elementary school teacher, they usually are promoted to principal! Society has been discussing ways to bring more women into the math and sciences, but where is the dicussion about bringing more males into primary education. Or, I wonder if there is something that our female teachers can do to make an impression on the male students to aspire to teaching? How different are the teaching styles and the daily communication with a class between a female teacher and a male teacher? I know the teacher that sticks out in my mind was my 5th grade teacher. He was just cool. He just taught and had fun opposed to my female teachers that were a little less "hip" and more motherly.
Interesting that a few students put down "dad" or "mom". I wonder if these parents work? Did they want to raise children? Or, be the same profession as their parents?
(I laughed at the comment about vets...so true, they all want to be vets!)
So, want happens that children change from vets to teachers or lawyers or doctors, or stay at home parents? What place does gender communication come into play when they have career aspirations at such a young age?
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