Gender equality and gender awareness have been a topic of interest in educational research for decades in Europe. An extensive amount of research reports and recommendations for teacher education have been produced in Finland only (Lahelma, 2011). Some of them focus on narrowing the gender gap in educational outcomes and others on teachers’ gender awareness and sensitivity for promoting equality between boys and girls. Teachers’ role in promoting gender equality was stated already three decades ago in Finland on national level (Act on Equality between Women and Men 1986/609). The effects were, however, modest to say the least (Lahelma, 2011). Moreover, the governmental action plans have been criticized for focusing on measurable underachievement and dropout rates among boys, rather than on gender equality per se (Brunila & Edström, 2013). Nevertheless, the gender gap in educational outcomes is growing all over the industrialized world and the gender segregation in STEM fields is evident (Stoet & Geary, 2018; Voyer & Voyer, 2014). Paradoxically, the segregation in STEM fields seems to grow in nations with higher gender equality. Finland and Norway score highest on gender equality in a study by Stoet and Geary (2018), yet, women graduating with a STEM degree is among the lowest in an international comparison. The study also revealed that gender differences in science self-efficacy were substantial among Finnish students in favour of male students. These results do not fit well with the perception of advances in gender equality endeavours in education in Finland.

Finland is often perceived as a country with high equality where gender issues are solved, however, there seems to be a rigid socially and culturally embedded force that sustains gender segregations and impedes true gender equality in education. The aim of this study is, therefore, to explore how upper secondary school teachers and study counsellors perceive students’ self-beliefs, study habits, academic emotions and behaviour in school and if their perceptions and expectations reflect and reproduce stereotyped gender roles. Teachers’ perceptions of students have been shown to affect students in many ways (Jones & Myhill, 2004) and they can reveal pitfalls that need to be remediated in order to narrow the gender gap in education and educational aspirations and thus promote equality in educational settings. It is worth noting that gender equality means more than increased numbers of women with STEM careers. Rather, it also means that gender should not affect how students are encountered or students’ self-beliefs and thereby educational aspirations. This study contributes to the discussion that aims at elucidating the gender gap in education regarding differences between boys and girls and how they are met in schools. Since Finland is regarded to be one of the most gender equal countries in the world, the results of this study can reveal why gender equality is so hard to achieve despite all the efforts. The theoretical focus will be on socially constructed and transmitted gender role expectations.

This is an interview study consisting of 23 semi-structured interviews with study counsellors (6), and teachers in psychology (8) and science (9) in nine Swedish speaking upper secondary schools in Finland (18 women, 5 men). Henceforth ‘counsellor’ will be used as a shortening for ‘study counsellors’. The number of students per school varied from 120 to 330, which indicates that the schools are relatively small and therefore makes it possible for teachers and counsellors to know the students fairly well. The schools represent a geographic distribution as well as a variation in socioeconomic status. Psychology and science were chosen due to lower grades in the national exam among Swedish speaking students in these subjects compared to Finnish speaking students. The interviewees represented different genders and lengths of working experience (from two to thirty-five years). The interviews included the following themes: their perceptions of students’ learning activities, study challenges, self-efficacy and self-regulated learning, career aspirations, schools’ supportive arrangements and preparation for HE. The interview protocol was piloted beforehand (not included in the analysis). The interviewees were invited to participate by email. The interviews were conducted in a location that the interviewees preferred, which in most cases was in the school, except one via Skype and one in the teacher’s home. The interviews were conducted between May 2016 and January 2017. They were based on informed consent and the interviewees were promised confidentiality. Gender neutral pseudonyms were used for the interviewees, since revealing their gender could jeopardize their confidentiality. Moreover, the interviewees’ gender did not affect how they described their students. The interviews lasted for 45 minutes to 1 hour 40 minutes and they were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data were analysed using qualitative inductive content analysis without a prepared coding framework (Finfgeld-Connett, 2014). The initial analysis of every segment in the transcribed interviews resulted in 103 codes. One segment was defined as the interviewees’ spoken words between the interviewer’s questions. Thereafter the codes were narrowed down to 56 by combining overlapping ones. Similarities in the interviewees’ perceptions were highlighted and key features were identified. The codes were consequently grouped into seven main categories whereof three themes were extracted and analysed for the present study because gender emerged as a distinct feature in all of them: (1) self-beliefs, emotions and wellbeing, (2) studying and learning and (3) behaviour in class.

The main findings show that teachers and counsellors hold quite stereotypical gender beliefs about students in upper secondary school. Teachers and counsellors perceived girls to be insecure and lack sufficient self-beliefs in studying. Girls’ low self-beliefs, especially in science, combined with high achievement expectations were perceived to affect their learning strategies and approaches to learning. Insecurity was also considered by the teachers to affect their achievements in the final, and decisive, exam when nervousness and anxiety interfered with their performance. The teachers and counsellors claimed that girls’ high achievement expectations together with low self-beliefs, make them work too hard and stress disproportionately much. Boys, on the other hand, were perceived as smart but a little lazy and immature. At the same time, boys were perceived to avoid discussing possible uncertainties. Boys were also perceived as rather indifferent about achievements and school in general, by having low ambitions and also by trying to get away effortlessly. Nevertheless, the teachers and counsellors in this study allowed this kind of behaviour, because they thought the boys will make it in the end anyway. The attributions of success were also clearly gender biased, with girls’ success attributed to persistence and effort, while boys’ success was attributed to ability. Moreover, girls were perceived to be less creative and less able to think logically than boys, which can affect their learning activities and reinforce their possible low self-beliefs even more. The negative effects of this kind of distorted stereotypes and expectancies have been widely demonstrated (Friedrich et al., 2015; Jones & Myhill, 2004; Myhill & Jones, 2006), wherefore it is important to raise awareness of their existence despite all endeavours to create gender equal schools. Implications for gender awareness in teacher education will be discussed.

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