Gender matters?

The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of gender-attention giving in the HK classroom and to offer practical steps towards addressing this issue. Two HKIEd research projects will be reported in which a new research methodology on gender-attention giving in the HK classroom has been trailed within the HKIEd. The research methodology to be described here is uncomplicated and may easily be replicated within other teaching organisations. The findings of this attention-giving survey would seem to support the view commonly held in the West, that in the classroom situation gender matters. The question of whether gender matters in the HK classroom will be discussed in the light of three further HKIEd research projects which combine to offer a profile of a post- Secondary student-corpus. The Paper concludes by considering the above results in the light of Alice Freed's concept "that gender is a social construct". This theoretical implication adds a fresh dimension to what at first, seems a clear case of HK gender- discrimination.