School Cultures, Peer Cultures, and Inequality: Gender in K‐12 Schooling

ABSTRACT Despite a decades‐long debate still raging about whether K‐12 schooling disadvantages boys or girls more, a closer look at the relationships between gender and schooling reveals that gender operates in complicated ways according to intersections with race, class, sexuality, and disability statuses in education. This paper takes an intersectional approach to understanding how gender structures K‐12 education through two primary lenses: institutional forces and peer cultures. Institutional forces include how schools track students into gifted and special education and how school personnel target specific groups of students for discipline. School policies like dress codes also unevenly police students' gender presentations, while sex education curricula transmit gender norms that are heteronormative, racialized, and classed. In turn, peer cultures often reinforce gender hierarchies in schools through cultural rituals and patterns of bullying and violence. At the same time, peer and youth cultures are potentially resistant, protective, and activist. Intersectional forces operating through institutions and peer cultures both inform and complicate the centrality of “achievement”—the grades and test scores—that are usually at the forefront of popular debates about gender inequality in education.