5.4

• The study of gender and education 

  • encompasses gender differences in educational outcomes such as achievement, attainment, and experiences within the education system
  • moves beyond the study of how gender influences educational outcomes and incorporates how these differences impact the labor market, family formation, and health outcomes. 
• GENDER 

  • Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. 
  • Masculine and feminine are examples of gender categories.
• EDUCATION

  • Education is interpreted in a broad sense to cover both formal and informal aspects, including pre-school, primary, and secondary education; families and youth cultures inside and outside schools; adult community, further and higher education; vocational education and training, media education; and parental education.
• • Social scientists and educational researchers paid relatively little attention to issues of gender and education until the 1970s
• Researchers documented a link between increasing rates of female education in developing countries and a subsequent decline in fertility rates (e.g Boserup 1970).
• • Increasing female representation in primary and secondary education was cited as an important factor in promoting national economic development, and therefore seen as a vehicle for social change. (in the context of increasing global economy)
• WOMEN’S EDUCATION HISTORY

  • At home (reading and writing, music literature and foreign languages). 
  • Much more restricted knowledge.
  • Aimed at teaching how to fulfill women’s “natural” roles (good mothers and partners for their elite husbands)
• MEN’S EDUCATION HISTORY

  • Classroom, private studies, tutoring and colleges (Philosophy, Mathematics, Rhetoric, training in self discipline, other academic subjects)
  • Upon the graduation of colleges they took places among the ruling class as ministers, lawyers and other professional job 
• The term ‘reproduction’ is a chaotic concept which not only refers to biological reproduction but also includes the social reproduction of the family.
• Social reproduction is meant the care and maintenance of the household
• Biological reproduction encompasses:

  • childbearing

  • early nurturing of infants (only women are physiologically performing)
•  Social reproduction:

  • wide range of tasks related to housework

  • food preparation

  • care for the sick (usually more time-consuming in developing countries than in the industrialized world)
• In most countries women are also expected to ensure the reproduction of the labor force by assuming responsibility for the health, education and socialization of children. 
• Poor countries generally offer less state assistance for these tasks than is provided in post-industrial countries
• 1990s - fertility proportion had fallen to 40 percent

  • As women move to cities, become better educated and find new opportunities for work and self-development outside the home, the birth rate tends to fall. 
  • In cities children are less useful as supplemental labor and are more costly to maintain
•  traditional societal support for large families declines with modernization: 

  • mortality reduction of infants and children
  • higher costs of raising children
  • opportunity costs of childbearing for parents, especially mothers
  • transition from extended to nuclear families leading to changing values and gender roles
  • traditional societal support for large families declines with modernization
  • improved access to contraception and abortion
  • later marriage
  • increased spread of ideas and practices which encourage lower fertility
• In looking at gender differences in educational outcomes, it is important to distinguish between three sets of outcomes:

  1. educational participation and attainment 
  2. educational achievement
  3. field of study
• Educational Participation & Attainment


  Patterns of male and female attainment in recent years
• Men in Western countries have higher educational attainment levels than women
• Among the adult population (25 to 64 yrs old), men are found to have more years of schooling and are likely to reach upper secondary education than women in ⅔ developed countries
• If only the youngest age-group is considered (25 to 34 yrs old), the historical pattern is reversed with female attainment levels higher than male rates in ⅔ countries
• Currently, upper secondary graduation rates are higher among young women than young men in most countries
• •  In the industrialized world of the North, South Africa, Philippines, Caribbean, and most countries in latin America,  there were virtually no gender differences in literacy
• • In West Africa and South Asia, women has the lowest adult literacy rates
• • In Central and Eastern europe, Latin America, Caribbean, Middle East, and Barbados, there are more women enrolled in tertiary education
  •  the greatest recorded imbalance being in Barbados in 1998 where the female-to-male ratio was 228
• • However, UNESCO estimated that there were 113 million children not attending school in 1998 of which 60% were girls
• • Women achieve lower levels of education than men in the majority of developing countries because of;
  • distance between home and school and lack of transport (dangerous for girls to travel)
  •  costs of school in terms of the loss of the child’s labor at home
  •  financial burden of paying for school supplies
  •  suitable clothing such as uniforms, school fees
  • bribes to teachers also means that parents may decide not to educate daughters. 
• EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

  Ability test results indicated significant gender differences in verbal, quantitative and spatial ability : (Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974)

  • girls scoring higher in tests of verbal ability
  • boys achieving higher scores in relation to quantitative and spatial ability.
  • women are more likely to obtain a ‘good’ undergraduate degree (at least an upper second class honors award)
  • men are more likely than women to achieve the highest award, that of first class honors (Smith and Naylor, 2001) 
• FIELD OF STUDY

  Gender differences persist in the types of courses taken within the educational system:

  • Engineering courses at upper secondary level tend to be predominantly male
  • Health/welfare, arts/humanities, education courses and social science/business courses are disproportionately female.
• FACTORS CAUSING GENDER INEQUALITY IN EDUCATION:

  1. Poverty
  2. Discrimination against girls
  3. Occurrence of criminal and violent acts
  4. Child Marriage
  5. Education of Parents
  6. Occupation of Parents
• GENDER GAP IN EDUCATION

  Conventional wisdom holds that gender gaps in schooling favoring males in developing countries generally are large, though probably declining
• The gender gap is “the discrepancy in opportunities, status, attitudes, etc., between men and women” (Oxford dictionary, 2012) 

  • which still exists in the ever equalizing world in which we live in today
  • The gender gap appears in several areas in society such as in politics, employment and education although gender inequalities have the biggest impact on education policies (Marsh, 2009). 
• PHILIPPINES: Gender Equity in Education

  Historically, Filipino males were somewhat more educated than females. Now the males are lagging behind the females and the education gender gap is widening. 

  • This reversal was predictable early on in the 70s before it manifested itself in national statistics.
• Things to do to effectively remove existing impediments to schooling and learning:

  1.  greater clarity about the meaning of the gender equality objective in education
  2. more evidence-informed strategies and policy tools are needed.
  3. improving the educational status of the educationally disadvantaged gender group (albeit, males in the Philippines) at a faster rate than the increase in academic achievement of the opposite sex. 
  4. to find, design and implement a win-win mix of interventions, more and better ideas based on analytically sound empirical research is needed. 
• In Central Luzon, the Department of Education has begun to train teachers to ensure that all lessons use a gender lens in the curriculum, textbooks, teaching and learning, and in the design of school facilities

  • In addition, schools can work in tandem with companies to sponsor and mentor women to encourage more broad participation in the economy
• The Philippines stands out as a beacon in the Asia-Pacific region for its work on reducing gender gaps. 
• Recent trends analyze gender equality as a “relational process” through the educational systems, norms and values are institutionalized within them. The operation of rights is viewed as circular rights in each of these aspects linking positively to other rights. It promotes both gender parity and gender equality. The three components are:

  1. Rights to Education
  2. Rights within Education
  3. Rights through education
• RIGHT TO EDUCATION

  • describes gender parity
  • Gender parity means the equal participation of boys and girls in different aspects of education
  • Educational (parity) indicators do not tell us about processes of change/ reproduction in everyday life. Further, educational indicators do not bring into focus the actual experience of schooling.
•  Indicators of gender parity in education include:

  • The numbers of boys and girls enrolled in education
  • The numbers of boys and girls who survive up to grade 5 (and thus the numbers that drop out) 
  • Regularity of attendance of boys and girls 
  • The numbers of girls and boys who repeat years of schooling 
  • The average years of schooling attained for boys and girls 
  • The transitions of boys and girls between levels of education (pre-school primary; primary-secondary; secondary-high school/ vocational] 
  • The number of female and male teachers 
  • Literacy levels of boys and girls, men and women 
• RIGHT WITHIN EDUCATION

  • Gender equality or rights within education thus refers to the right of men and women to non-discrimination in educational gender opportunities
  • Main Focus:
  • Learning content
  • Teaching method
  • Subject choice
  • Assessment modes
  • Management of peer relationships
  • Learning outcomes