Gender : Peer pressure to be masculine

• Ford argues peer pressure encourages boys to maintain a dominant masculine identity. This also creates an anti-learning subculture; this involves rejecting academic work as feminine. Boys gain ’street cred’ and peer group status by not working - this leads to a laddish, anti-education, anti-learning subculture.
• Epstein found that working class boys risked harassment and bullying if they appear to be hardworking.
• Peer pressure to be masculine

  Willis found that aspiring for academic success conflicts with adolescent concepts of masculinity. Boys may also see learning as feminine due to the dominance of female teachers so this could lead to underachievement in boys since they have no one to see as a male role model in school, they can’t associate with female teachers.
• Jackson carried out a mixture of interviews and questionnaires in eight schools to study masculinity and femininity. The schools were dominated by culture of dominant masculinity. This valued toughness, power and competitiveness. Academic work was defined as too feminine to be seen as 'cool' by boys. This resulted in many boys messing about in schools and not concentrating on their work, acting out 'laddish' masculinity. Jackson believes that laddish masculinity is a response to fear of failure in an increasingly competitive education system.
• With girls now currently doing better than boys it could be argued that many boys have been put off trying to compete with a girl in case the girl does better making the boy feel inferior and humiliated as boys have been indoctrinated to believe they are to do better than females and if they don't they are not 'macho' and 'cool'.