Gender Segregation In High School

The high school I attended was called Eastern Hills High School and was located in Fort Worth Texas. The area primarily contained students of middle and lower class. As far as race, about eighty percent of students were African American, ten percent were Hispanic, five percent were white, and the other five percent consisted of mixed races. Administration at my high school primarily consisted of women as they represented eighty percent of the staff. However, from high school, I also saw that the higher occupations were held by men. For example, all of those who worked in high offices such as the principal and vice-principal were men, while women occupied jobs such as teachers and counselors. This was consistent with what I experienced in primary …show more content…
Although small values were different for my high school, most of the values were consistent with each school. One primary difference, between my high school and others may have been that there was gender segregation displayed. Gender segregation is something you expect in elementary and middle school as dances, lines for lunch, and even selected classes were segregated. However, this is not something widely experienced in high school. And although gender segregation was not always displayed, for testing days, this was a different story. For my senior year of high school, when younger individuals would test, the school would separate seniors into groups of guys and groups of girls. We would then spend the whole day with just girls, if we were girls, or just guys, if we were guys, as we participated in rotations. It was one of the oddest displays for high school, especially since I was used to this system in elementary and middle school, but not high …show more content…
For example there was a high school that focused on healthcare, one focused on technology, another focused on law, and so on. I decided to attend the high school that focused on law. This meant I would take law classes along with my core courses. This is where I began to see this separation of gender through field of study. When I entered the program, it consisted of ninety-five percent of men and only five percent of women. As I continued through the program this percentage of women became smaller. By the time I was a senior, I was the only girl left. I could see this stigma of “only men can be lawyers,” begin to surface. This was similarly true for the fire science program offered at my school as well. The same statistics applied to this program as well as young women continued to drop the program and choose programs such as cosmetology which was “suited” for