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116 chapter 6 The Family and the Gender Gap T his chapter examines the thesis that families play an important role in producing a gender gap in educational performance and attainment. First, we review evidence that parental education at one time assisted daughters in getting the same level of education as their brothers and that this relationship has been reversed in the past sixty years, such that today boys are especially disadvantaged when their parents are less educated or when their father is absent. Then we address the question of how the relative academic performances of sons and daughters may depend on family characteristics. The mechanisms connecting parental resources to different educational outcomes for girls and boys are subtle. we consider the evidence that parental characteristics operate both directly on children’s behaviors and academic orientations and indirectly by shaping children’s peer environment and the influence of that environment on their behaviors, academic orientation, and educational performance. The family has long played a central role in theories of education and status attainment. But the family’s impact on differences in the educational attainment of sons and daughters has not been a central question for most scholarship, even though in popular culture it has been almost universally recognized that parents treat sons and daughters differently. consider the example from the famous 1945 musical Carousel: Billy. i wonder what he’ll think of me. . . . i bet that he’ll turn out to be the spittin’ image of his dad. But he’ll have more common sense than his puddin-headed father ever had. i’ll teach him to wrestle and dive through a wave when we go in the mornin’s for our swim. his mother can teach him the way to behave but she won’t make a sissy out o’ him. Not him! Not my boy! Not Bill! . . . i don’t give a hang what he does as long as he does what he likes! he The Family and the Gender Gap 117 can sit on his tail or work on a rail with a hammer, hammering spikes! . . . and you won’t see nobody dare to try to boss him or toss him around! wait a minute! could it be? what the hell! what if he is a girl? what would i do with her? what could i do for her? a bum with no money! You can have fun with a son but you gotta be a father to a girl. . . . My little girl pink and white as peaches and cream is she. . . . My little girl is half again as bright as girls are meant to be! . . . i-i got to get ready before she comes! i got to make certain that she won’t be dragged up in slums with a lot o’ bums like me. She’s got to be sheltered in a fair hand dressed in the best that money can buy! i never knew how to get money, but, i’ll try, i’ll try! i’ll try! i’ll go out and make it or steal it or take it or die! —“Soliloquy” (also known as “My Boy Bill”) from Carousel, lyrics by oscar hammerstein ii (1945) when scholars eventually became interested in female disadvantages in education and the labor market, their explanations alternatively emphasized biology, cultural differences in adult gender roles, or family investment strategies that were “rational” reactions to the gendered roles for men and women in the family and labor market. Now that girls have surpassed boys in educational performance and attainment, familybased theories continue to explore the ways in which families differently socialize boys and girls. The family, of course, has undergone profound changes in the years since Carousel was written. when girls look to their mothers as role models , they have presumably been influenced by the rising education and labor market success of women. when boys look to their fathers as role models, many have been influenced by less-educated fathers whose earnings have declined with changes in the labor market. other boys have no stable father figure in the household. changes in the educational and labor market positions of both mothers and fathers could well have fueled the female-favorable trend in educational attainment through patterns of parents’ investment and socialization of children and through children’s role modeling of parents. Some psychologists have argued against the idea that parents substantially influence the gender differentiation of their children. eleanor Maccoby and carol Jacklin (1974, 301) began their...

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