How gender operates is a key factor in the ways in which physical education is organized, taught and experienced by students and teachers. This essay highlights the gendered contours of the history of physical education development in Hong Kong, its Chinese heritage and its colonial foundations - the persistent influence of British approaches to physical education teacher education and the promotion of sport. The paper is a collaborative work between Chinese-born and Western scholars. It examines the relative influences of Chinese attitudes towards gender roles and the active, sporting body and the continued impact of Western approaches to physical education and sport in a post-colonial society.
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Teaching is a female-dominated career in both Western and Eastern societies. While low salary and social status have been suggested by previous research as the main reasons, these cannot explain the phenomenon in Hong Kong where teachers enjoy high social status and salary. My Master of Psychology research will include samples of Hong Kong and Australian senior high school students, to contrast their gender stereotypes as measured by Bem's Sex-Role Inventory (Bem, 1981), and how these, along with their gender and gender role orientations, affect their views of what characterises a good primary and secondary teacher, likelihood to consider teaching as a career, self-efficacy, and interests in teaching.
The theoretical framework integrates Lent et al.'s Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT; 1994) and research on gender stereotyping. SCCT posits that self-efficacies predict individuals' interests and intentions to persist in a given domain, which has not yet been applied to the context of teaching career choice. Research on gender stereotyping predicts that gender and conformity to gender role norms significantly shape individuals' learning experiences, which, in turn, affects self-efficacy (Toker et al., 2007). Recent research in the Chinese context has found that males and females exhibit fewer and weaker traditional gendered stereotypes (Zhang, Norvilitis, & Jin, 2001).We may reasonably infer shifting conceptions of gender stereotypes, including those associated with teachers, across cultures or time.
In the present paper, I report on the pilot study results from 120 senior high school survey participants in Hong Kong. Factor analyses and measures of Cronbach's measure of internal consistency will first explore the structure of gender stereotyped characteristics. Multiple regression analysis will examine the contributions of student gender, gender stereotypes, self-efficacy, and interest in teaching, towards intentions to teach. These findings will have

Girls' education has been considered a site of struggle where ideals of femininity and domesticity are translated into curricula and practices that seek to shape and regulate. In colonial Hong Kong, British mission societies had a significant share in providing girls' education, which was predominantly in the hands of European missionaries in the nineteenth century. The dual mission of evangelising and civilising colonial subjects in the Victorian era of empire expansion constituted a pertinent focus of inquiry in the writing of history of girls' education. Drawing on selected texts on missionary literature and government reports, this article examines in what ways a domestic ideology framed within evangelical beliefs and the imperial gaze interplayed with the politics of race and class in shaping girls' education. It challenges the presumed impartiality in education policies and practices concerning both sexes, and discusses women's agency in re-defining identities and boundaries in a colonial society.
[Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00467600802368715]