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From kindergarten through college, students perceive boys as more intelligent than girls, yet few sociological studies have identified how school processes shape students’ gender status beliefs. Drawing on 2.5 years of longitudinal ethnography and 196 interviews conducted at a racially diverse, public middle school in Los Angeles, this article demonstrates how educators’ differential regulation of boys’ rule-breaking by course level contributed to gender-based differences in students’ perceptions of intelligence. In higher-level courses—where affluent, White, and Asian American students were overrepresented—educators tolerated 6th-grade boys’ rule-breaking, such that boys challenged girls’ opinions and monopolized classroom conversations. By 8th grade, students perceived higher-level boys as more exceptionally intelligent than girls. However, in lower-level courses—where non-affluent Latinx students were overrepresented—educators penalized 6th-grade boys’ rule-breaking, such that boys disengaged from classroom conversations. By 8th grade, lower-level students perceived girls as smarter than boys, but not exceptional. This article also demonstrates how race intersected with gender when shaping students’ perceptions of intelligence, with students associating the most superlatives with affluent White boys’ capabilities. Through this analysis, I develop a new theoretical understanding of how school processes contribute to the gendered social construction of exceptionalism and reproduce social inequalities in early adolescence.

This article draws upon data collected as part of a 25-year longitudinal analysis of televised coverage of women's sports to provide a window into how sexism operates during a postfeminist sociohistorical moment. As the gender order has shifted to incorporate girls' and women's movement into the masculine realm of sports, coverage of women's sports has shifted away from overtly denigrating coverage in 1989 to ostensibly respectful but lackluster coverage in 2014. To theorize this shift, we introduce the concept of "genderbland sexism," a contemporary gender framework that superficially extends the principles of merit to women in sports. Televised news and highlight shows frame women in uninspired ways, making women's athletic accomplishments appear lackluster compared to those of men's. Because this "bland" language normalizes a hierarchy between men's and women's sports while simultaneously avoiding charges of overt sexism, this article

The last quarter century has seen a dramatic movement of girls and women into sport, but this social change is reflected unevenly in sports media. This study, a 5-year update to a 25-year longitudinal study, indicates that the quantity of coverage of women’s sports in televised sports news and highlights shows remains dismally low. Even more so than in past iterations of this study, the lion’s share of coverage is given to the “big three” of men’s pro and college football, basketball, and baseball. The study reveals some qualitative changes over time, including a decline in the once-common tendency to present women as sexualized objects of humor replaced by a tendency to view women athletes in their roles as mothers. The analysis highlights a stark contrast between the exciting, amplified delivery of stories about men’s sports, and the often dull, matter-of-fact delivery of women’s sports stories. The article ends with suggestions for three policy changes that would move TV sports news and highlights shows toward greater gender equity and fairness.

Huge numbers of children participate in sports. However, kids and sports are rarely seen, much less systematically studied by sport sociologists. Our survey of the past decade of three major sport sociology journals illustrates a dearth of scholarly research on children and sport. While noting the few exceptions, we observe that sport studies scholars have placed a disproportionate amount of emphasis on studying sport media, and elite amateur, college, and professional athletes and sport organizations, while largely conceding the terrain of children's sports to journalists and to a handful of scholars whose work is not grounded in sport sociology. We probe this paradox, speculating why sport scholars focus so little on such a large and important object of study in sport studies. We end by outlining a handful of important scholarly questions for sport scholars, focusing especially on key questions in the burgeoning sociological and interdisciplinary fields of children and youth, bodies and health, and intersectional analyses of social inequality.Un très grand nombre d'enfants participent à des sports. Cependant, les enfants et les sports sont rarement considérés et encore moins systématiquement examinés par les sociologues du sport. Notre enquête sur la dernière décennie dans trois journaux majeurs en sociologie du sport illustre la rareté de la recherche académique sur les enfants et le sport. Alors que nous soulignons quelques exceptions, nous observons que les chercheurs en études du sport ont surtout porté attention aux médias sportifs, aux athlètes élites de niveau amateur, collégial ou professionnel, et aux organisations sportives, tout en concédant le domaine du sport pratiqué par les enfants aux journalistes et aux quelques chercheurs dont le travail n'était pas directement en sociologie du sport. Nous questionnons ce paradoxe, nous demandant pourquoi les scientifiques s'attardent si peu à un si grand et important objet d'étude dans le domaine du sport. Nous terminons en soulignant les enjeux académiques importants pour les chercheurs en études du sport, en nous concentrant en particulier sur les questions clés dans les domaines sociologiques et interdisciplinaires en pleine expansion que sont les enfants et la jeunesse, le corps et la santé, et les analyses inter-sectionnelles des inégalités sociales.Alarmist news and political discourses in recent years have warned of an "obesity epidemic" among youth, a fear fueled in part by cultural images of inactive