Cultural Capital, Gender, and School Success: The Role of Habitus

TLDR

Research on cultural capital’s impact on male and female students’ educational success has yielded contradictory results, and the influence of habitus has rarely been examined. The study examines eighth‑grade boys’ and girls’ cultural participation and introduces a model incorporating a habitus measure. The analysis shows that female and higher‑SES students participate more in cultural activities, cultural capital significantly boosts female students’ grades (with a weaker, fixed‑effects‑only effect for males), while habitus strongly predicts academic performance for both genders; gender stereotypes appear to limit male participation and enhance female use of cultural capital.

Abstract

Studies of the effects of cultural capital on the educational success of male and female students have reached coLtiadictory concusions, and few studies have considered the role that habitus plays in educational outcomes. This article analyzes the cultural participation of eighth-grade boys and girls and presents a model that includes a measure for habitus. Through a detailed analysis of cultural practices that have typically been grouped together as a single scale, the author found that female and higher-SES students are more likely to participate in cultural activities. In addition, in both standard ordinary least squares and fixed school-effects models, she found that cultural capital has a positive, significant effect on the grades of female students, both with and without controlling for Bourdieu's notion of habitus. For male students, the effect is weaker and present only in the fixed-effects models. Habitus itself has a strong effect for both male and female students in all models. The author argues that traditional gender stereotypes play a role in the lack of cultural participation by male students and that female students may be more encouraged to make use of their cultural capital to succeed in school.