The difference between sex and gender

For most sociology / psychology teachers Robert Stoller’s (1964) distinction between “biological sex” and “cultural gender” is probably the go-to definition to use when introducing this topic – and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using it you might want to flesh it out a little by pointing your students towards some more-contemporary ideas and […]

Gender, Crime and Co-Offending

The broad relationship between gender and crime is both well-known and fairly-consistent over time, both in the UK and across the world, and can be summarised in terms of three main ideas: 1. Men commit more crimes than women. This, as we’ve noted, is consistent across both time (an historical dimension) and place (a cultural […]

Sociology Video Tutorials

These short video tutorials are basically a variant on “podcasts with pictures”: a talking head tutor in one corner of the screen explains something while the occasional picture or real-time whiteboard illustration is displayed. In other words, the 40+ films available here are relatively simple video lectures of the “listen and learn” variety – which […]

British Social Attitudes: Selected Surveys

NatCen describe themselves as “Britain’s largest independent social research agency”, one that works “on behalf of government and charities to find out what people really think about important social issues” and while they produce a lot of statistical stuff™ that’s probably of interest to someone, of most interest to a-level sociology teachers and students will […]

Podcasts With Pictures | GCSE

I’ve been meaning to do a post on the growing number of teachers creating video resources for some time and now I’ve finally managed to drag myself away from Far Cry 5 make a bit of time I thought I’d start with a set of GCSE resources from MTO Sociology aimed at the AQA Specification. […]

Gender and Subject Choice

Another little bonus to add to yesterday’s offering from the work I’m currently doing on the concept of school climate and its possible effect on achievement. This one comes in the form of a couple of pieces of research commissioned by the Institute of Physics that cover gendered subject choices at A-level. Closing Doors: Exploring […]

DEA: Mythbusters

I’ve recently been looking at the idea of school climate and its possible relationship to the gender gap in educational achievement for a forthcoming blog post, a fact I mention for a couple of reasons: firstly, because I think the notion of school climate and its possible impact on educational achievement is an interesting idea, […]

GCSE Sociology Guides: Family and Education

GCSE Sociology resources tend to be a little thin on the ground, so it’s always nice to come across decent teacher-created material such as these two bang-up-to-the-moment Revision Guides created by Kate Henney. The Family Guide is a 25-page document that packs in a whole range of resources covering family types, diversity, alternatives, perspectives, roles […]

Popular Postmodernism and the Crisis of Masculinity…

Popular forms of postmodernism are arguably a feature of many forms of current journalistic analysis of social behaviour, in both main stream and social media, with a current “crisis of masculinity” being a firm media narrative. Locating such arguments in their historical context may, however, be a more-sociologically useful way to understand them at a-level. […]

Sex and Gender: A Short Film

If you’re into flipped teaching (or even if you’re not) and want a relatively short (around 15-minute) video-introduction to sex and gender this Ted-Talk on “Understanding the Complexities of Gender” by Sam Killermann should fit the bill for a couple of reasons: Firstly, it introduces a wide range of gender-related concepts and issues, including: • […]