The Role of Gender in Immigrant Children's Educational Adaptation.

Recent scholarship across many ethnic groups in the United States has consistently shown strong gender differences favoring girls in educational outcomes. This paper examines four areas of research that may shed light on why immigrant girls tend to do better than boys in schools: parental expectations after migration, socialization at home, relations at school, and gendered processes of acculturation and identity formation. The paper concludes that gender is an important segmenting factor in the adaptation and future mobility of the new generation. More in-depth research studies are needed to understand why and how gender makes a difference in the adaptation of children from different immigrant communities. The intersection of gender, ethnicity, and social class and how it impacts immigrant children's education and adjustment can be a particularly fruitful area for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]