Gender is far from a settled issue. There are still some significant debates occurring around the different educational practices, expectations and outcomes experienced by boys and girls. Important wider questions also still attract attention: just what is gender, and why bother talking about it – after all, aren't we all equal now? Isn't biology about to explain all of this stuff anyway? And what is the best theoretical framework for approaching gender? Do we still have to go down the ‘men are to blame for everything’ route?

This chapter will unpack the complex and changing relationship between gender and education. In order to accomplish this, the chapter will link each of the most common myths in the area with one of the three waves of feminism that characterised the twentieth century. As with the arguments surrounding social class, it will ultimately be suggested that explanations relying upon a master discourse – not ‘the economy’ again, but rather it this case ‘patriarchy: a unified system of male-domination’ – have had their day.

Myth #1 Sex and gender are really the same thing

Girls are girls, and boys are boys, because nature made them that way. Masculinity is a function of being a man, and men run society because biology determined they would be better at it.

First-wave feminism rightly challenged this biological determinism, contending instead that our genders are the flexible product of a range of cultural and historical factors. We have a choice in what we become.