The project explores high-achieving pupils’ constructions and performances of gender and learning. A large body of work has established how educational achievement is bound up with gender, and with popularity/peer-group status. Educational achievement can have an adverse affect for pupils’ ability to perform gender positions that are acceptable to their peers; and consequently an adverse affect on popularity and status among classmates.

Professor Becky Francis, Kings College, London Mendick, H. Francis, B. Boffin and geek identities: abject or privileged?, Gender and Education.

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 28, 2016