Case Studies: Unpacking Gender Relations in Education and Society

Every child walks into a classroom carrying more than just a school bag – they carry society’s expectations about who they are and who they should become. These expectations, shaped by deeply entrenched gender norms, quietly influence which subjects students choose, which careers they dream of, and how far they let themselves aim. The classroom does not exist in a vacuum; it reflects, and too often reinforces, the gender hierarchies of the world outside its walls. But it can also disrupt them. Real-life stories of students and educators navigating these pressures bring this dynamic into sharp focus – and make the case for why gender-sensitive education is not optional, but essential.

How gender norms enter the school gate 🔗

According to the OECD, children are affected by gender stereotypes from the earliest years, with parental expectations, teacher behaviour, peer dynamics, and school culture all shaping how students come to understand their own gender identity. What makes this particularly significant is that these influences do not wait until secondary school – they begin in the first years of formal education, sometimes even before.

Research shows that as early as the first year of primary school, girls tend to undervalue their own abilities in mathematics. By age six, many children already associate robots and technical subjects with boys. These are not natural preferences – they are learned ones, absorbed from classrooms, textbooks, family conversations, and media. As children grow, studies indicate that gender stereotypes actually intensify with age, partly because students begin picking up on the gendered assumptions held by the adults around them.

Research across multiple country contexts documents how schools reproduce these norms through everyday practices – teachers responding more readily to boys during lessons, girls being assigned cleaning duties while boys do heavier physical tasks, and a general classroom culture that implicitly signals which students are expected to excel in which subjects.

Case study 1: Rina and the engineering dream deferred 🔗

Consider the experience of a girl from a small town in India who showed a genuine passion for machines and technology from a young age – taking apart gadgets, exploring how things worked, and participating in science activities. Despite this obvious aptitude, her teachers and family initially steered her away from engineering, suggesting she focus on biology or the humanities – subjects considered more fitting for girls. The resistance she faced was not rooted in her ability, but in a societal script that had already decided engineering was male territory.

Her story illustrates a broader, well-documented pattern. A UNESCO report on STEM education in Asia found that over a third of girls in India cited the absence of parental encouragement as a key reason for not continuing in STEM fields. The Pygmalion effect – demonstrated in landmark research showing that teacher expectations directly shape student performance – is central here. When teachers and parents hold lower expectations for girls in science, those expectations tend to become self-fulfilling. The girl who persists despite this resistance, as Rina did, succeeds not because the system supported her, but because her own determination outweighed the discouragement. That is not equity – it is endurance.

Case study 2: Kavita’s classroom and the power of visible role models 🔗

In a rural school in Rajasthan, a teacher named Kavita observed that almost all her female students aspired to become nurses, teachers, or homemakers, while the boys spoke of becoming engineers, doctors, or politicians. When she probed further, the girls revealed that these were the choices their families and teachers had consistently encouraged. Their aspirations had been shaped not by their interests, but by what society had told them was appropriate.

Kavita responded by actively restructuring what her students were exposed to. She invited female pilots, scientists, and entrepreneurs into the classroom – not as exceptional curiosities, but as evidence of what was normal and possible. Research supports this approach: role models in non-traditional roles directly influence girls’ academic self-concept, expanding their sense of what they are capable of and what careers are available to them. This is particularly significant for students from disadvantaged groups, where the gap between aspiration and lived experience is widest.

Kavita’s intervention reflects what the British Council’s research on teachers as change agents confirms: educators who actively employ gender-sensitive approaches in the classroom can meaningfully shift both learning outcomes and the gender norms students carry with them into adulthood. Teachers are not just instructors – they are one of the most powerful socialising forces in a young person’s life.

The hidden curriculum: What schools teach without saying it 🔗

Much of the gender socialisation that happens in schools is not written into any syllabus. It operates through what scholars call the hidden curriculum – the unspoken lessons embedded in how a classroom is organised, how behaviour is interpreted, and how academic ability is discussed. As educational researchers note, a teacher is more likely to rate a boy’s mathematical ability higher and a girl’s lower, even when their actual performance is identical. Boys who misbehave are managed; girls who do the same are treated differently. Boys are called on more in science and maths lessons. These are not dramatic acts of discrimination – they are small, repeated signals that add up to a deeply unequal experience.

A study involving classroom observations in Polish secondary schools found that teachers consistently associated humanities subjects with girls and mathematics with boys – and accepted this as natural rather than constructed. Most teachers in the study had no awareness of how their own gender assumptions were influencing student outcomes, which is precisely why these dynamics are so difficult to interrupt without deliberate intervention.

Quantitative research makes the stakes concrete: girls taught by teachers with traditional gender role views for more than one year show lower performance in both mathematics and verbal tests, and the negative effect grows stronger the longer the exposure. Crucially, no equivalent effect was found for boys – meaning the damage of stereotyped teaching falls disproportionately on girls.

Boys and the other side of the stereotype 🔗

Gender stereotypes do not only constrain girls. Boys who show interest in the arts, caregiving professions, or emotional expression also face significant social pressure. Research on gender stereotypes and young people shows that boys may disengage from education entirely when academic effort is not seen as masculine within their peer culture. A boy who wants to become a nurse, a primary school teacher, or a dancer faces a different but equally real set of barriers – ridicule from peers, scepticism from adults, and a curriculum that rarely shows men in nurturing or artistic roles.

This is why gender-sensitive education must address all students, not just girls. The goal is not to push every child toward a non-traditional path, but to remove the social penalties that currently attach to certain choices based on gender – so that every student is free to pursue their actual interests and strengths.

The STEM gender gap: From classroom to career 🔗

The consequences of unchallenged gender stereotypes in school extend far into adult working life. Women currently make up just 26% of the STEM workforce, and projections suggest it could take over a century to reach gender equity in these fields at current rates of change. The roots of this gap are traceable directly to classroom experiences.

Studies across informal science learning sites – museums, zoos, aquariums – show that even brief, positive interactions with female STEM professionals can shift children’s beliefs about who belongs in science. And research published in the Journal of Baltic Science Education found that when female students participated in workshops and career talks delivered by women working in STEM, their mental image of who a scientist or engineer looks like changed substantially. Representation, when made visible, works.

UNGEI’s work on STEM and gender highlights a programme in which gender-responsive pedagogy was incorporated into mathematics and science teaching, alongside leadership training for adolescent girls – helping over 4,000 girls stay in school and reconsider what they were capable of. When girls who had internalised the myth that they were bad at mathematics began to challenge it, the change rippled outward into other areas of their lives and self-perception.

What gender-sensitive education actually looks like 🔗

Gender-sensitive education is not a single policy or subject – it is an approach woven through the fabric of how schools operate. Gender-responsive pedagogy (GRP) is built on four key principles: inclusivity, actively challenging stereotypes, intersectionality (recognising how gender interacts with class, race, and other identities), and equity in access to all subjects including STEM. Teachers trained in these principles are better equipped to plan lessons, manage classrooms, and evaluate student work without unconsciously reproducing the biases they absorbed in their own education.

At the policy level, the OECD identifies three key levers for dismantling gender stereotypes in schools: curriculum governance (including reviewing textbooks for stereotyped language and imagery), capacity-building for teachers, and school-level interventions. Sweden, for instance, has made the eradication of gender stereotypes a formal national curriculum objective. Finland’s Equality Act requires educational institutions to promote gender equality in a systematic and documented way.

In practical terms, gender-sensitive classrooms include diverse representations in teaching materials, equitable teacher-student interactions, opportunities for all students to explore non-traditional subjects, and a school culture that treats the ambitions of every student as equally valid. Systematic reviews consistently identify teacher training and textbook reform as among the most evidence-backed interventions for improving educational outcomes and shifting gender norms simultaneously.

Education as a site of contestation – and change 🔗

What the case studies above reveal is that schools are simultaneously part of the problem and part of the solution. They transmit societal gender norms with remarkable efficiency – through curriculum, teacher behaviour, peer culture, and institutional policy. But they are also spaces where those norms can be contested, examined, and replaced. Research on gender norm change suggests that attending even a few years of secondary school can expand girls’ self-confidence and alter their expectations for their own lives – but only when the educational environment supports rather than undermines that process.

The stories of students who broke through gendered expectations – and of teachers who actively created the conditions for that breakthrough – are not exceptional. They are what education looks like when it takes its own stated values seriously. The question is not whether schools can challenge gender stereotypes. The evidence is clear that they can. The question is whether they will be equipped and required to do so.

What do you think? If you look back at your own schooling, can you identify a moment when a teacher’s assumption – stated or unstated – shaped what you believed you were capable of? And what would it take for schools in your context to move from accidentally reproducing gender norms to deliberately dismantling them?

References

1. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/gender-stereotypes-in-education_a46ae056-en.html
2. https://one.oecd.org/document/EDU/WKP(2022)9/en/pdf
3. https://www.alignplatform.org/gender-norms-and-education/discriminatory-norms-and-practices
4. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000375106
5. https://wp.nyu.edu/steinhardt-appsych_opus/2022/01/15/the-impact-of-stereotypes-on-girls-career-choices/
6. https://www.britishcouncil.org/partner/international-development/news/british-council-approach-gender-sensitive-schools-girls-education
7. https://book.all-means-all.education/ama-2025-en/chapter/gender-and-school-policy/
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9200163/
9. https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/Alan_Ertac_Mumcu_GenderStereotypes.pdf
10. https://www.iop.org/sites/default/files/2019-07/IGB-gender-stereotypes.pdf
11. https://www.stemwomen.com/unravelling-bias-how-gender-stereotyping-in-stem-starts-early
12. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7104893/
13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376587423_Breaking_gender_stereotypes_How_interacting_with_STEM_professionals_changed_female_students'_perceptions
14. https://www.ungei.org/blog-post/stem-breaking-gender-stereotypes
15. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1570115/full
16. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2022/05/gender-stereotypes-in-education_a6f2df0e/a46ae056-en.pdf
17. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8770660/