Anomie Theory

The basic evidence in favour of the theory that an anomic situation occurs at various points in schools suggests that, in this particular instance, a conflict over role expectations and the ideology that surrounds male and female roles develops in relation to both what pupils are now expected to achieve and how they are expected to achieve. For example:

• As a schoolgirl, a girl is expected to try her best to achieve academically.

• As a female, girls are not expected to enter areas of the curriculum (and by extension the workforce) associated with masculine gender characteristics.

Thus, girls are secondary socialised into ideological assumptions about competing and succeeding at school. Both their primary and secondary socialisation, however, teaches them that some areas of work (and the curriculum) are off-limits. If they insist on studying those areas then they run the risk of attracting a deviant label ("unfeminine").

While this may not seem particularly significant, when looking from an "adult" perspective, it is evident that questions of gender identity may assume greater importance and intensity amongst the young because they control fewer resources than adults in relation to their identity (they do not, for example, work full time, nor do they have the many responsibilities that come with supervisory adult roles within the family) and, consequently, have fewer reference points for the establishing of gender identity.

In addition, gender differences and identities tend to be magnified amongst the young precisely because of their ambivalent status in modern society (as neither children nor adults). We also know that a double sexual standard still operates in our society, whereby the obvious outlet for gender identity (sexual activity) is surrounded by questions of appropriateness, guilt and the like. In basic terms, while it is clearly changing, it is probably still the case that sexually-active young males are held in much higher esteem by their peers than sexually-active females (think, for example, about the labels - and their associated characteristics) applied to these two groups).

In this particular instance, girls, like boys (albeit in a slightly different way and for slightly different reasons) resolve the "problem of identity" by avoiding certain subjects classified as masculine (such as the natural sciences) and opting for subjects classified as feminine (such as modern languages) or gender neutral (such as English literature). For males the above process also holds true, except it is largely reversed.

The significance of a gendered curriculum, therefore, is that boys and girls become horizontally-segregated within the school in a way that channels girls into a relatively narrow range of future occupations (usually those that reflect social stereotypes about women and affective roles - the teaching, nursing and social work professions, for example).

This mirrors, for example, the arguments of writers such as Bowles and Gintis ("Schooling In Capitalist America", 1975) when they refer to the way in which the horizontal stratification of work is reproduced within the education system.

Although this theory explains why some boys and girls take certain types of subject, the fact that not all boys and girls stick to gender appropriate subjects indicates that the theory cannot fully explain the gendered curriculum.

• Additionally, at GCSE level and below a National Curriculum has meant that blatant forms of gender association are no-longer as much in evidence, since all pupils are expected to follow the same basic curriculum. This may eliminate some forms of gender association (especially in GCSE subjects such as maths, which all children are now expected to take).

It is also not clear why some subjects, such as sociology and psychology should be female gendered. One explanation - that they are seen as easier - is plausible since it keys into traditional assumptions about the relative abilities of males and females. However, if this were the case, as evidence of female achievements become more widely known, we would expect this situation to change. Alternatively, the association with social science and social work, teaching, nursing and so forth might explain the gendering of these subjects, since such careers are still highly gendered in our society.

Anomie theory, while it has a number of shortcomings, does seem to offer a general explanation for the process of the curriculum becoming gendered, especially in the higher levels of the education system where students are free to pick the subjects they want to follow.

In particular, one of the strengths of this theory is that it relates events in the wider world (work, general socialisation of males and females) to individual choices and shows how wider social structures influence such choices.