Gender bias can go back to the very first day in Primary school where girls had pink or purple themed clothes pegs and name cards and boys had blue or green. From being on placement it is clear that this is still something which occurs in primary schools – getting no say in whether the children would prefer a dinosaur or a princess for their nametag.

My brother was a lover of football and I tended to go along with my Dad and watch him train or practice with him at home – sparking an interest in the sport. When it came to being part of school sports teams in primary school girls were encouraged to join netball while boys were encouraged to join the football team. Due to the lack of encouragement for girls to play football in the school I soon steered far clear of this spark I had developed and placed myself with the rest of the girls, playing netball.

Excluding these factors, gender was never really something – at the time- that I felt affected my education. However, a little older and wiser I can now see that there was a distinctive difference in the expectations between boys and girls. There are several things I can think of to demonstrate this; Boys were better at mental maths, they were more destructive and couldn’t concentrate for long; Where as girls were always the ones with the lovely neat hand writing, settled/ more attentive in class with a much more caring nature. Although nine times out of ten this probably could be argued to be the case there was always the children who fell outwith the ‘general expectations’ of their gender but lacked encouragement to further progress as they went unnoticed.