The Role of Gender in Immigrant Children's Educational Adaptation

Recent scholarship across many ethnic groups in the United States has consistently shown strong gender differences favoring girls in educational outcomes. This paper examines four areas of research that may shed light on why immigrant girls tend to do better than boys in schools: parental expectations after migration, socialization at home, relations at school, and gendered processes of acculturation and identity formation. The paper concludes that gender is an important segmenting factor in the adaptation and future mobility of the new generation. More in-depth research studies are needed to understand why and how gender makes a difference in the adaptation of children from different immigrant communities. The intersection of gender, ethnicity, and social class and how it impacts immigrant children's education and adjustment can be a particularly fruitful area for future research. Introduction At the beginning of the twentieth century, men attained significantly higher levels of education than women. One hundred years later the role of gender in education has come full circle (Lopez, 2003). This unprecedented shift in education is particularly pronounced in immigrant and minority student populations (Lopez, 2003). Recent scholarship on the educational outcomes of children of post-1965 "new immigrants" across ethnic communities in the United States has consistently shown strong gender differences favoring girls, suggesting that gender may be an important segmenting factor in the adaptation and future mobility of the new second generation. This paper aims to theorize the role of gender through reviewing scholarly research and presenting some of the findings from my research with Chinese immigrant children. The term "immigrant children" is used interchangeably with the term "immigrant second generation," referring to children from immigrant families that include both first-generation (i.e., foreign born) and second-generation (U.S.-born) children. Many of the gender-related issues they face are similar because of their families' cultural backgrounds. Gender and Immigrant Children's Educational Adaptation As "one of the fundamental social relations anchoring and shaping immigration patterns," gender has been largely ignored in early research on immigration (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2003, p.3; Passar, 2003). Until the last two decades, studies focused heavily on the experiences of adult men Not until the 1980s did scholars conducting research on immigration began to examine the experiences of immigrant women (Simon & Brettell, 1986). In the 1990s researchers begin to broaden their focus to study "gender as a social system," and its effect on men and women's adaptation after migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1999). Current theorists conceptualize gender as "an organizing principle in all social systems, including work, politics, everyday interactions, The Role of Gender in Immigrant Children’s Educational Adaptation 9 December 7, 2006 families, economic development, law, education, and a host of other social domains" (Howard et al., 1997, p. ix). The role of gender has been particularly under-theorized in studies of immigrant children (Suarez-Orozco & Qin, 2006). In most studies, it is either ignored or treated as an individuallevel control factor in statistical analyses. Controlling for gender is a far cry from in-depth analyses of the role of gender and of understanding "how, when, and why it makes a difference to be male or female" in immigrant children's adaptation (Eckes & Trautner, 2000, p.10). Regarding the adaptation of immigrant children, gender represents an important structure and organizing principle, layered with different social meanings. Not only does it intersect with culture, it wields a powerful force in shaping students' experiences in different locales such as family and school. It dictates different ways immigrant boys and girls are socialized at home according to their native culture (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001), and it embodies norms and practices to which the immigrant child is expected to adapt in the new cultural context, for example at schools (Williams Alvarez & Hauck, 2002). Gender shapes an immigrant child's identity formation, "both in a process of labeling from the outside and in the construction of a subjective identity" (Prieur, 2002, p. 53). Theorizing the role of gender in immigrant children's adaptation and future mobility is especially important considering the emerging evidence of gendered pathways, which reveal that boys lag behind girls in academic settings across many ethnic groups (e.g., Brandon 1991; Faliciano & Rumbaut, 2005; Gibson, 1988; Lee, 2001; Qin, 2004; Waters, 1996). At the precollegial level, researchers have found strong gender differences in grades, academic engagement, high school completion, and future aspirations. In her research on students of Mexican heritage, Gibson (1993) found that girls did better than boys in terms of grades and attitudes toward school. In their report on second generation youth with various Latino and Asian origins, Portes and Rumbaut (2001) found that boys were less engaged, had significantly lower grades, and lower career and educational goals than did girls. Other researchers found similar gender trends in their study of children from immigrant families (e.g., Kao & Tienda, 1995; Qin 2003; Rumbaut, 1995). Tracing the educational experiences of the California participants in the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study over ten years, Faliciano and Rumbaut (2005) found that males lagged behind females in educational aspirations and expectations beginning from junior high school and were less likely to pursue further education over time. This gender pattern in pre-collegial education has historical origins as well. Olneck and Lazerson (1974) summarized studies of early 20th century levels of secondary-school attainment in four U.S. cities and found that immigrant girls completed more years of high school than immigrant boys did among most ethnic groups. Collegial level data also indicates that females, who used to lag behind males, are catching up quickly and are outperforming the males fast in most ethnic groups. The 2003-2004 data show that college-enrolled students included 54% white females, 57% Latinas and 60% African American female students respectively. For Asian American students, females have now caught up with males, although eight years ago they