The aim of this paper paper is to discuss reproduction and change in some aspects of gender in school. It is using data from on a research project (Gender – policy, perspectives and practices,) Changing Sex/Gender Orders in Schools and Education. Policy, Perspectives and Practice, financed by Swedish Research Council. The conceptual and theoretical framework emphasises gender as a social construction, continuously reproduced in people’s everyday life and everyday interactions, but at the same time also continuously in change. The gender order in society includes gendered beliefs and discourses and gendered performativity as well as gendered patterns and structures at different levels of society (Connell, 2002; Harding, 1986; Butler, 1990). The gender order is characterised by discourses and patterns of difference and segregation, and of discourses and patterns of hierachy and power (Hirdman, 2002); but also varying in relation to width and strentgh (Thurén, 1996). School, as all social institutions, have incorporated gender into its assumptions and the gender regime in school to a large extent reproduces gender order in society, in values and content as well as in gender patterns and a gendered organisation (i.e. Wernersson, 1977; Ohrn, 1990; Gannerud, 1999; Holm, 2008). At the same time, access to education has been an important agent of change in giving both girls wider opportunities both in private and public life.

The paper is based on data from three different surveys. The first, a national survey, was 2005 distributed to 1716 teachers and results from the sample of 545 secondary school teachers and from some items, dealing with their beliefs about and experiences of boys and girls in the school setting, are presented. The second set of data is based on the same items from a survey distributed at the same time to 3535 pupils in grade 9, 15-16 years old. Some of those items were also included in the third survey, distributed 1992 to 537 pupils in the same age within another project (BASK).

This paper is primarily focussed on how pupils and teachers describe similarities and differences in the behaviour of girls as a group and boys as a group in the classroom situation, but also in some aspects related to school, i.e. amount of home work. The overall impression of the results is one of stability and reproduction. In the 2005 survey, both pupils and teacher to a great extent share the same opinions; in many aspects, the alternative ”no difference” is frequently chosen, but when differences are expressed, they follow a traditional gender pattern. But there are also some important differences to note; i.e. that pupils, and especially girls, tend to describe girls as more active in the classroom (participating in classroom discussion and initiating work related activities) than teachers do, and also more than boys do. Also in the comparison between pupils 2005 and 1992, the dominating impression is one of stability and reproduction; but there are some differences that can rather be expressed in relation to the concepts of width and strength in the gender order/gender regime than changes in its character. Using the same example as above, both boys and girls (and especially girls) tend to describe girls as more active 2005 than they did in the beginning of 1990-ies.