Co-education vs. all-girls schools : the effects of schooling on the way young women perceive gender roles within a local context

Abstract

Gender is a concept which is learned throughout life, and is in fact extremely fluid depending on various temporal-spatial variants. Education is a great contributor to the process of socialisation, particularly throughout the most formative years of a person’s life. Therefore it can be said that an individual’s sense of self could be shaped in a large way by their educational experiences. The study will attempt to understand whether the experiences lived by four young women throughout their secondary school years has had an effect on their perception on traditional gender roles, both through the formal curriculum followed, as well as through the internalisation of informal messages transferred by the school environment as a whole. This dissertation features a qualitative study on whether co-education vs. all-girls schooling has any effect on the way young girls perceive gender roles within a Maltese context. The focus of this study is on secondary schooling, and the data will be gathered through interviews with four young women aged between eighteen and twenty years of age. Two of the participants have attended co-education schools, both private and state respectively, whilst the other two have attended all-girls schools. The interviews with the four participants highlighted that certain aspects of their educational experiences left an impact on their perceptions surrounding gender issues, with some of them even re-living similar events in their higher educational settings. The possible effects of religion, as well as conservative mindsets of the schools’ administrative and teaching staff also impacted the way that female students were treated. In the end, it seems that the four participants have credited their families and social circles for holding the most bearing on their current perspectives on gender roles.