Gender Education and Equality in a Global Context

Conceptual Frameworks and Policy Perspectives

Shailaja Fennell, Madeleine Arnot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134111961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Millennium Development Goals aim to achieve basic education for all by 2015. But can such global agendas address national and local gender inequalities and will they empower women through education?

This thought-provoking book offers an opportunity to engage critically with existing and emergent conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches to this global debate. It is divided into three sections that:

reconceptualise the definitions of gender equality used by various social scientific disciplines, international organisations and policy makers;

illustrate the methodologies used to collect the voices of young men and women and their teachers telling stories of their success in lifting the burdens of poverty and negotiating traditional gender relations;

trace the impact of global gender agendas on national education policies, such as citizenship education, poverty reduction strategies, and feminist activism around adult women's learning.

Gender Education and Equality in a Global Context is an invaluable introduction to the range of conceptual frameworks and innovative research methods that address issues of gender education and development.

1
(Re)visiting education and development agendas

Contemporary gender research

Madeleine Arnot and Shailaja Fennell

The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed a profusion of new thinking in gender studies across the social sciences. The philosophical and political conceptualisations of gender equality have been substantially reworked to take into account new social agendas around multiculturalism and diversity while new notions of citizenship and nationhood have required a reconsideration of how to position women in modern society (Benhabib 2002; Yuval Davis 2001). This re-engagement with the theoretical foundations of gender research within the world of academia occurs at a time when gender concerns (particularly around women’s empowerment through economic progress and development) have been placed on international agendas (Nussbaum 2000; Sen 2004). The emergence of global equality agendas provides a unique opportunity to bring together the diverse understandings emerging from the different trajectories taken by Western and non-Western traditions of gender research. The possibility of such a confluence has potentially profound implications for an analysis of gender education since, up until now, there has been relatively little interaction between Western and non-Western research.

Gender theorists working in richer Western economies have developed complex systems of monitoring gender inequalities in education, in employment and in civil society. They have also assisted in the development of, for example, anti-discrimination policies, so called ‘girl friendly’ schooling, anti-sexist pedagogies and extensive programmes to raise teacher awareness (Arnot et al. 1999). In contrast, development educationalists concerned about gender have been faced with the imperative of finding resources for mass schooling whilst trying to ensure that the ‘girl child’ is brought into the educational process. This separation of gender education research within developed and developing nations prevents the conceptual tools used by Western feminists and gender researchers from being challenged by research from developing economies. At the same time in the field of development studies, gender and education projects do not appear to have generated a sufficiently strong identity as a distinctive and progressive line of internationally recognised scholarship. Few such projects address or use theories of gender developed, for example, by Judith Butler, Raewyn Connell and Pierre Bourdieu (see Arnot and Mac an Ghaill 2006) perhaps because they are regarded as emanating from a Western historical and cultural process and political project.¹

There is therefore a sharp disciplinary divide that cuts through the research on gender, education and development – much of the research on how gender education links to development is located within the subject matter of development studies and relates to educational dilemmas and initiatives in the non-Western world even though there is growing interest in addressing notions of diversity and difference and the pluralities of gender within, for example, the sociology of education and gender studies. A meaningful exchange requires us to consider whether the merging of Western based gender studies and non-Western development studies is feasible or whether it is preferable to ensure that development studies and gender studies maintain their intellectual integrity.

The formation of a global field of gender education research, in effect, implies crossing the bridge from development studies to gender and education studies and vice versa. For some, it means thinking for the first time about the development context, for others it means considering the theoretical and empirical insights of Western gender and educational research, which has developed nationally and internationally since the l970s. This field could potentially provide students with a wider internationally focused terrain and a larger and potentially more useful range of methodological frameworks. There are already indications of this in the ambitious ethnographic and other, innovative methodologies used by researchers to explore the conditions of gender relations and education – (see Sarangapani’s (2003) analysis of classroom learning in an Indian village and Stambach’s (2000) study of gender community cultures and schooling in Kenya). In the past, students wishing to enter the field have also had to identify the range of conceptual frameworks for themselves. However, the recent publication of Practising Gender Analysis in Education (Leach 2003) and A Guide to Gender Analysis Frameworks (March et al. 1999) have helped considerably in this enterprise. Similarly, Unterhalter’s (2006) Schooling and Global Social Justice for the first time allows the reader to consider simultaneously the Western and development discourses about gender equality and their various intellectual roots, problematics and consequences.

Below, we explore some of these transformations in this field of global gender ducation and introduce the particular approach adopted by authors in this collection and their contribution to this emergent interdisciplinary line of research on gender education and development in a global context.

Global gender goals and gender education

One of the most important catalysts for establishing gender education and development as a new scholarly arena is the increased involvement of international organisations in gender education policy making. This tendency began in the 1990s and was considerably enhanced by the publication of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000. Such goals focused on the need to ensure development across the globe through a concerted reduction in poverty. They also established the legitimacy of talking about gender equality in relation to education.² In conjunction with the Dakar Decla-ration (2000), which pledged to achieve Education for All, the MDGs provided a skeleton framework and devised a set of yardsticks with which to establish the current status of gender educational equality in each nation and assess their progress. Such global gender targets were particularly welcomed in some quarters especially since they identified the scale of the problem and began to demonstrate to national governments the range of factors, variables, forces and constraints associated with gender inequality. However, such universal gender targets also carry with them imperial and colonial legacies of international interference in nation building and national educational systems. Gender equality, although portrayed as a human right, is now also associated with the new demands of neo-liberal economic globalisation, encouraging national regimes and indigenous cultures to move towards Western versions of modernisation.

The global statistics on poverty, inequality and exclusion and, for example, campaigns such as Making Poverty History in 2005, now exercise the worlds of policy, academia and civil society. In the summer of 2005, the G8 (the grouping of the world’s eight most economically advanced nations, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom and United States) met at Gleneagles in the United Kingdom to discuss their role in the reduction of global inequalities. Under review was the proposal for a global fund that could be drawn upon by poor countries to advance towards the MDGs. The G8 has already become somewhat concerned about the limited power of economic growth rates to transform the lives of the majority in national economies. There is a real or perceived failure (or perceived inability) of the field of international development to overcome the inequalities of gender in a world where a third of the population is still mired in poverty.

The promotion of gender equality internationally cannot today easily avoid contemporary debates about the difficulties facing poorer nations in their quest to participate in the global economy. The difficulty of achieving gender equality goals was highlighted by the influential Global Monitoring Reports on gender equality (UNESCO, 2003), which found that two-thirds of those reported to be illiterate globally were female and that 54 countries in the world were not likely to achieve gender parity in access and enrolment even in basic schooling by the target date of 2005. Rather than blame girls for their failure to attend school, the thrust of this report and the wealth of associated case study and briefing material alerted governments to the need to ‘think through’ their educational provision and policy approaches and to begin to establish what used to be called ‘gender audits’.³ The MDG gender equity goals, therefore, represent an important moment for the academic study of gender education, encouraging it to engage critically, theoretically and empirically with gender educational inequalities on a global basis and to articulate and publicise its own voice in international development.

The diversity of forms that gender education takes within different societies, however, makes this educational research work difficult. Take for example the link between education and employment. By the late 1990s, it was already known that regions such as South Asia were resistant to advances in girls’ education despite economic growth, while Latin America showed little correlation between literacy and employment (Heward and Bunawaree 1999). These national/local differences in how gender education relates to economic development are increasingly recognised as important – our attention is drawn, for example, to the use of female employment in particular economies, to divergent patriarchal structures found in a wide range of different household and family types, and to the ways in which different religious values, customs and cultural symbolisms are embedded in the category ‘woman’ (Tinker 1990; Basu 1995). In such contexts also, gender reform has come less through national governments and their education budgets and more from the many interventions into female education from local and international non-government organisations (NGOs and INGOs). Researching and accounting for the processes of gender change is that much more complicated particularly within countries where education is not mainly organised within national welfare systems.

The use of education within gender equality reform movements globally is also patchy. Often the focus of gender reform is outside the school system, working with women and women’s organisations in local communities. Gender educational reforms therefore operate unevenly within a country and across countries. The low status of teachers, especially female teachers, makes it unlikely in development contexts that the equivalent form of ‘education feminism’ found in the UK and other anglophone nations will develop and find expression in published research, school resources and policy documents (Arnot 2002). In less developed economies, without strong empirical educational research traditions and a strong public teacher voice, gender education reform is also expressed through an ideologically diverse group of NGO grass roots activists, projects and initiatives or through government policy statements developed in response to international pressure but with relatively little impact on educational provision. Making sense of these different reform processes and strategies is a challenging task for any gender researcher. Systematic in-depth research on these policies and initiatives not surprisingly is only just emerging.

There is a strong tendency, however, to report rather than research girls’ educational initiatives in these settings. Whilst imaginative and politically very important, these initiatives are rarely followed up by in-depth academically based investigations, and, as a result, we do not get clear sight of the significance of the contributions they make to our understanding of pedagogy, teacher training, learning and educational achievement. Even if groundbreaking, the outcomes of these initiatives on girls’ and women’s identities and lives, whether personal or economic, or their significance on gender relations and dynamics in local communities, are little understood by international academies. Noticeably, the focus of academic papers has often been on advancing gendered estimation of returns to education, enrolment and retention rates (Banerjee et al. 2005; Jalan 2002). Thus, despite the extraordinary and rich insights that such initiatives could have offered about the importance of education, and deeper conceptualisations of the educational problems within developing and often poor economies, it is fair to say that they have not made as impor...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 (Re)visiting education and development agendas
• Part I (Re)conceptualising gender equality
• Part II Researching agency, engagements and empowerment
• Part III (Re)defining global equality agendas
• Index