GENDER INEQUALITY AT SCHOOL (DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY) - BY AMNIE SYAKIRAH

 

(DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY)

GENDER INEQUALITY AT SCHOOL

          What on earth is going on? School is a safe place to learn and grow educationally, emotionally, and morally. Recently, UCSI University’s Research Centre runs a poll of 544 adults in Malaysia on the topic of gender inequality and it showed that 72% of the adults had either experienced or witnessed gender inequality at home, school, or the workplace (UCSI Poll Research Centre, 2022). Gender inequality defines as unequal or disadvantageous treatment of an individual or group of individuals based on gender. As we already knew, boys and girls do have differences and this will lead to inequality. There are numerous signs of gender discrimination happening at school, especially in a classroom which are the way teachers paid attention to their students, developmental discrimination, and achievement discrimination.

 

         First and foremost, generally, teachers will interact with boys more often than with girls. This situation happened because it is related to the confidence that the majority of boys have rather than girls. One thing that I noticed in my classroom, the boys always came out with their ideas and they will speak up more frequently in a discussion, then automatically the teacher may be “forced” to focus on them. Other than that, boys at my school love to get into problems due to their naughtiness and mischievousness. I could see that the teacher will interact with them, again and again, to keep their concentration during the lecture.

 

         Furthermore, despite being fair towards girls and boys, teachers tend to educate boys and provide them with a myriad of praises and criticism rather than girls. Differences in the praises and criticism that teachers give to their students, boys will simply crave more attention while girls tend to be passive and reticent in class. Normally, boys will dominate a discussion or during a lecture and they also have a lot of knowledge about computers and technology that make teachers always need them, for example, when they have a problem with their laptop. This shows that the development of boys in the class increased compared to a girl.

 

         Last but not least, from my own experience, in high schools and colleges, male students likely to conquer courses like mathematics and engineering rather than female students. But nowadays, even though girls still lag behind boys in subjects like mathematics and science, girls in high school have great achievements in reading, writing, and other academic subjects such as language. They also earn more credit and the majority of them are more likely to further their education at colleges and universities. From this situation, I could say that every student has the freedom for choosing their dream course no matter boys or girls.

 

         In conclusion, there are a lot of signs that we can detect whether gender discrimination happens or not at school, especially in the classroom. A teacher should be aware of gender inequality so that students will learn peacefully.