Gendered Habitus and Gender Differences in Academic Achievement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and social reproduction posits that students’ habitus—learned behavioural and perceptual dispositions rooted in family upbringing—is a formative influence on how they react to their educational environments, affecting academic practices and academic achievement. Although originally conceived as a “class” variant construct, it has been argued subsequently that habitus is also conditioned by gender socialization, and so may also be characterized by significant gender differences. Working with multilevel Canadian data from the linked PISA-YITS surveys, this study investigates gender differences in a Bourdieu derived “structure-disposition-practice” model of academic achievement. For the most part gender differences in the model are modest, but several significant differences are evident: the boys outscore the girls in math and science while the girls excel in reading, students’ socioeconomic stats (SES) has a relatively stronger effect on the girls’ academic achievement than on the boys’ achievement, while students’ habitus affects the boys’ academic achievement more strongly than the girls’ achievement. Finally, the average SES of the schools’ students attend affects both the boys’ and the girls’ academic achievement, but this effect is stronger for the boys, and the effect of the boys’ habitus on their academic achievement diminishes slightly as the average SES of the schools they attend increases; no such contextual interaction was evident for the girls. Overall, the results suggest that habitus and the “structure-disposition-practice” model may still offer a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of gender differences in educational and occupational outcomes, and indeed, merit further empirical investigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".