Gender Differences Among Educationists In China

As a controversial topic, "gender" has always been attractive to a lot of researchers all the time. In the past 20 to 30 years, it has also attracted attention from many educationists. In some extent, such related researches have broadened the education research fields, deepened the profundity of education research, and helped to change the "gender" inequality existing in the education practice as well.Recently, Chinese females in education practice have performed better and better: there are a great number of female teachers; and female students are getting higher and higher mark. On the other hand, compared to male, there are much more females who are learning education sciences. However, these facts are not enough to tell that female has attained the predominance in education. It is necessary to find out the gender situation and differences among educationists in China, which is the essential aim of this dissertation.Up to now, some researchers have noticed that some gender differences exist in the groups of education practitioners. There have also been many related research findings which point to females as researchers in other research fields and which explain the differences between male and female. Both of them built up the groundwork of this dissertation.On the basis of related research findings, the dissertation presents its analysis framework: the gender situation of chief principals of some national key projects on education in the past 5 years (2000-2004); the gender situation of authors who publish articles on some theoretical pedagogical periodicals; the gender situation of chief editors of some theoretical pedagogical periodicals. The dissertation mainly adopts three research methods: investigating, referring to literature and interviewing.Requiring the statistic, the dissertation comes to its basic conclusion: there are some apparent gender differences among educationists in China, and it is the male who takes an advantage occupation in this community.The dissertation explains that the history, society, females and education sciences shape these gender differences. Then it argues that these gender differences may be obstacles for the development of education sciences. So we shall apply ourselves to improve the gender equality in education research.The dissertation is made up of four parts as follows: The first part is to put forward the issues, including the reasons for selecting this topic and related research findings. The second part displays the design of this research, which involves the core concepts, aims, contents, analysis framework and research methods of this dissertation. The third part mainly contains the findings and rough analysis. The last part is composed by some consideration, discussion, and several suggestions according to the findings.