SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar–Bad or Brilliant: The Gendered Social Construction of Exceptionalism in Early Adolescence

From kindergarten through college, students perceive boys as more intelligent than girls, yet few studies have identified how school processes shape students’ gender status beliefs. Drawing on 2.5 years of longitudinal ethnography and 196 interviews conducted at a racially diverse, public middle school, this presentation identifies the effect of educators’ differential enforcement of school rules by course level on students’ beliefs. In higher-level courses, where educators tolerated the predominately affluent, White, and Asian American boys’ rule-breaking, students learned to perceive boys as geniuses and prodigies. However, in lower-level courses, where educators penalized the predominately non-affluent Latinx boys’ rule-breaking, students learned to perceive girls as smarter than boys, but not exceptional. Dr. Musto concludes by theorizing how school processes contribute to the gendered social construction of exceptionalism in early adolescence.

Dr. Michela Musto is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Her research interests include gender, education, children & youth, and social inequalities. She received her Ph.D. in sociology and a graduate certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Southern California in 2018. Her current project, which has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the American Association for University Women, and the Haynes Foundation, examines how school processes shape students’ gender beliefs. An article based on this work is forthcoming at The American Sociological Review, and she is also developing a book manuscript on the same topic. A second project examines how school processes discourage girls – especially girls of color – from developing a sustained interest in STEM in early adolescence.