Practising Gender Analysis in Education

by Fiona Leach

Overview

* Provides accessible tools for carrying out gender-sensitive analyses of current situations.
* Includes frameworks for analysing systems, institutions, and policies, in a simple but powerful way.
* These tools will enable readers to think though problems clearly, and to develop constructive alternatives.

"This Guide to Practising Gender Analysis in Education" is a companion volume to the Guide to Gender-Analysis Frameworks by March et al, published by Oxfam in 1999. The first book is a guide to using gender-analysis frameworks in development work. This companion will apply four frameworks: the Harvard framework, the Women’s Empowerment Approach, the Gender Analysis Matrix and the Social Relations Approach, to the analysis of a variety of educational contexts, including national education policies and projects, schools, colleges, ministries, teaching and learning materials, and school and teacher training curricula.

Aimed at policymakers and planners, academics, researchers and students, development agency staff and of the practitioners, each chapter presents a tool for gender analysis, and discusses its methodology and its uses, as a means of supporting gender mainstreaming. The book provides practical examples of how the tool can be used, and highlights their strengths and disadvantages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780855984939
Publisher:	Oxfam Publishing
Publication date:	10/28/2003
Series:	Oxfam Skills and Practice Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.66(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Fiona Leach is senior lecturer in international education at the University of Sussex and author of Practising Gender Analysis in Education and co-editor of Education, Cultures and Economics: dilemmas for development (with A. Little). She has done extensive research in the area of gender violence in schools in Africa.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Always ask: Where are the men? Where are the women? Why?

Gender Orientation on Development (1999), GOOD News, issue 11

This book

Practising Gender Analysis in Education is a companion volume to A Guide to Gender-Analysis Frameworks published by Oxfam GB in 1999. This latter book presented a number of analytical frameworks drawn from the Gender and Development (GAD) literature. I have been using a number of these frameworks in an educational setting for many years, both in teaching and research. As in other development contexts, they have helped to clarify issues of gender bias, discrimination, and inequality, and to identify possible strategies for addressing specific imbalances and injustices. However, it has been difficult to apply a framework designed for a development context, often with examples drawn from community-development projects, to an educational context. This book therefore draws on a number of the frameworks presented in the earlier book, suggests modifications to suit educational settings, and uses case studies drawn from education. In addition, I have widened the scope of the book to include a chapter exploring other appropriate tools of gender analysis, largely drawn from the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) pool of resources, and also a chapter on curriculum-materials analysis.

Like the original volume, this is not a comprehensive manual of all the tools that can be applied to a gender audit of educational situations. It is a 'taster' of the many practical uses of such analytical tools. A full bibliography is provided at the end of the book.

This book makes a small contribution to ongoing efforts at gender mainstreaming in education by providing accessible tools for carrying out gender-sensitive analyses of current situations. These in turn should facilitate the planning of gender-sensitive interventions. Naila Kabeer (1996: 1), whose Social Relations Approach is outlined in chapter 7, points out that the major impetus for the design of analytical frameworks to integrate a gender perspective into the planning process has come from

a. the recognition that past policy interventions have been gender-unaware and have resulted in avoidable costs and failures, and that new concepts and tools were needed to ensure greater sensitivity to gender issues;

b. the need to systematise and collate the insights of feminist scholarship and activism so that their relevance to the planning process would be more easily apparent to those not familiar with gender issues.

There are both efficiency and equity costs to gender-unaware policies where male norms supporting male preferences lead to a denial of access to capable women: the goals of development are thwarted and female autonomy eroded (ibid: 3–5). It is not that conscious decisions are taken to exclude or marginalise women from the planning process, but rather that there are 'unexamined assumptions and pre-conceptions which form the common sense of so much traditional top-down development planning'. At the same time, it is important to realise that some groups of men are also marginalised and disempowered in the planning process, and that gender analysis may need to take account of their needs while addressing those of women.

Gender mainstreaming is the internationally agreed strategy, adopted at the 1995 International Conference on Women in Beijing, for governments and development agencies to promote gender equality. In the education arena, the participating governments and agencies at the International Education Forum in Dakar in 2000 adopted a Framework for Action, which included among its six goals:

Eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieving gender equality in education by 2015, with a focus on ensuring girls' full and equal access to and achievement in basic education of good quality.

UNESCO 2002: 13

It also included the goal of achieving an improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and of ensuring that all children, including girls, children in difficult circumstances, and those belonging to ethnic minorities, are able to complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality.

These goals link up with two of the Millennium Development Goals agreed at the Millennium Summit of world heads of state in New York in 2000. These are (a) to achieve universal primary education and (b) to promote gender equality and empower women (ibid.).

This guide is intended for use by those working to achieve these targets in all types of educational settings: policy makers and planners, teachers and teacher trainers, academics, researchers and students, development agency staff, and other practitioners. It follows a similar format to the earlier book. Each chapter presents a tool for gender analysis and discusses its methodology and its uses as a means of supporting gender mainstreaming. It provides one or two practical examples of how the tool can be used, and draws out some of its strengths and disadvantages.

I use the term 'tools' here in a different manner to that used in A Guide to Gender-Analysis Frameworks. It is used here in a general sense to include the four gender analysis frameworks outlined (the Harvard Framework, the Women's Empowerment Approach, the Gender Analysis Matrix, and the Social Relations Approach), as well as the curriculum-materials frameworks and checklists in chapter 8 and the PRA activities and resources in chapter 9. A framework is understood here to be a self-contained and comprehensive model or method of gender analysis that one can apply to a particular context with the purpose of identifying key issues contributing to gender inequality. The other 'tools' are often small and uni-dimensional, and cannot generate a great deal of information on their own.

It is important to stress from the start that these tools should be used in a flexible way, and that expectations of what they can do for us need to be realistic. Nothing can replace more thorough forms of analysis, whether these are carried out through the collection and analysis of quantitative survey data (statistics), or qualitative research (descriptive findings from interviews, observations, etc.). They are, however, useful as a starting point for collective analysis and discussion and for the identification of strategies and action plans. Individuals and groups should assess the use for their own particular purpose of any of the tools described here. In the case of the detailed frameworks, it may not be necessary to go through the whole analysis as presented; alternatively, it may be necessary to modify it. However they are used, we do need to be aware of the risks of simplification and of assuming that there is some 'quick fix' offered by gender analysis. In all but the case of the Gender Analysis Matrix (GAM) detailed in chapter 6, these tools are only intended to provide a static snapshot at a particular moment in time. Their strength is in promoting understanding of gender inequality through clarity rather than through complexity. They help us to crystallise our thinking, isolate the important issues at key moments in time, and view the evidence in a stark light. The intention is to be analytical, rather than descriptive, and sensitive to diversity and context.

All the tools covered in this book can be used in ways which involve the target group(s) in some form of participation, very often in a workshop format, for example, as part of a gender training or awareness raising initiative. However, it is important to sound a note of caution about the power of participatory approaches (Fiedrich and Jellema 2003). We need to be aware that the potential for the 'feel-good' factor that participants in such workshops often experience can be misleading. These participatory activities can make people feel immediately empowered and resolved to take action to improve their circumstances, but they can also give an illusion of false consensus and false confidence. In the cold light of day their action plans, developed as part of a solidarity effort and requiring difficult changes in attitude and behaviour, may turn out to be too ambitious and remain unimplemented. Good intentions and enthusiasm can all too easily die away, and nothing changes.

Why we need gender analysis in education

Like its predecessor, this book is firmly grounded in the principles of social justice and respect for human rights. Gender equality is a priority for most development agencies, including Oxfam, in education as well as in social development. Denial of educational opportunity, like denial of access to healthcare, security, and opportunities for economic and social development, is a violation of human rights. Education plays a crucial role in teaching young people about their rights: their right to information, to services and political representation, their right to a 'voice' and to accountable government. No educational system should tolerate discrimination or inequality of any sort, as this is the very antithesis of 'education', its purpose being to release the potential in every human being. It is to be hoped that this book makes a small contribution to raising awareness of the importance of gender equality in education and offers some practical means of achieving it, as well as contributing to international efforts at gender mainstreaming.

Gender is, of course, not the only source of discrimination. Other markers of social identity are class, race, ethnicity, caste, sexuality, (dis)ability, age, and religion. It is important to recognise that these may interact with gender and where appropriate they need to be included in any gender analysis, as they affect women's and men's lives in different ways. The gender analysis tools presented here may in some cases be applicable to these other categories.

Universal primary education

Great efforts – and great gains – have been made over the past five decades to achieve universal primary education (UPE) and to make all citizens of the world fully literate. For many developing countries, the impetus came with political independence, mostly in the two decades following the end of the Second World War, as newly created national governments aspired to rapid economic development. Education as an investment in human capital was considered the key to this economic development; as the economy expanded, so would the demand for more skilled workers. Later, this view was revised to include education as an investment in social development, with clear links being made between education and health, low fertility and infant mortality, social welfare, and, more recently, democratic government, good governance, and respect for human rights.

Unfortunately, however, reaching the goal of UPE has been postponed time and time again; the latest declaration, at the Dakar Education Forum in 2000, has set a target date of 2015 for its achievement. In those countries yet to achieve UPE, there are usually unequal numbers of males and females who are denied access to education. According to the latest estimates (UNESCO 2002), of the 115.4m school-age children worldwide who are out of school, 56 per cent are girls. And of those adults who are illiterate, two-thirds are women (and it is roughly this same two-thirds who constitute the majority of the world's poor). There have been significant gains in access to schooling but these are uneven. In general terms, the better resourced the educational system, the higher the enrolments and the narrower the gender gap. So, for example, in Burkino Faso only 28 per cent of girls are enrolled in primary school compared with 41 per cent of boys; in Mozambique 46 per cent of girls compared with 55 per cent of boys; and in Gambia 65 per cent of girls compared with 75 per cent of boys. This can be compared with a situation where there is a much smaller gap, for example, in Thailand, where 80 per cent of girls are enrolled and 83 per cent of boys; in Indonesia 90 per cent of girls are enrolled and 93 per cent of boys; and in Costa Rica 91.1 per cent of girls and 91.4 per cent of boys (ibid.). On the whole, girls drop out of education in greater numbers than boys where overall survival rates are low and gender disparities high. In some countries with high enrolments, however, an opposite picture emerges, with more girls enrolled and staying on in school than boys, for example, in most Caribbean and South American countries, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and some Southern African countries such as Namibia, Lesotho, and Zambia. In many of these countries, too, national data show that girls' achievement is also higher than that of boys. There is increasing evidence of boys playing truant and dropping out of school, even in the less well-resourced countries where national data still show them achieving better examination grades than girls. So the picture is complex, and boys too are at risk.

Education For All

In the early days of rapid expansion of schooling, the problem of access to education for children was seen as just a matter of building more schools to expand the number of available places and recruiting and training more teachers. Non-physical barriers, whether economic, social, political, or cultural, were not, on the whole, understood. Remarkably, it was not until 1990, when an international conference on Education For All (EFA) was held in Jomtien, Thailand, that the international community fully realised that UPE could never be achieved until the issue of girls' under-representation in education was addressed. One of the most urgent priorities for the decade-long EFA initiative became, therefore, the improvement of educational opportunities for women and girls (WCEFA Final Report 1990). This has led to a shift away from an exclusive preoccupation with resourcing education to a concern for equity in education.

Halfway through the decade, however, statistics showed that despite this focus on girls' education, their share of primary education had only increased by less than half a per cent, and that 73m girls still remained out of school (Leach 2000a). In some regions (parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South and East Asia), the gap between boys' and girls' enrolments was, in fact, rising. At the start of the twenty-first century, it remains the case that, despite some gains, in the poorest countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and in the Middle East, fewer girls enroll in school, they tend to drop out in larger numbers than boys, and they have lower achievement. They make up the majority of children out of school in the world. In rural or isolated areas of these countries, literacy levels among women can be extremely low, for example, only 15 per cent among rural women in Bangladesh (BRAC 1998), less than ten per cent in remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Lack of access, or limited access, to education has a negative impact on young people's life opportunities, their ability to earn a living, to fulfill career aspirations, to enjoy a productive life, and to exercise autonomy and choice if they so wish. Demographic changes have come about as a result of the decline of the extended family, the increase in divorce and female-headed households, and the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, in particular the vulnerability of women to infection. Increased poverty has also led to a growth in child labour and human trafficking. It is therefore essential that every person can take full opportunity of whatever educational provision there is, however limited. Although girls and women are disproportionately disadvantaged globally, there are also boys and men who are exploited, impoverished, and marginalised. Education is crucial for them too.

So, why has progress been so poor? Why, despite all the public commitments and policy statements since 1990 by donors, lenders, and governments on the need to increase female participation in education, and so many programmes directed specifically at getting more girls into school, has progress been so slow? This can be in large part explained by a narrow focus on girls that does not consider the gendered nature of the society in which schools operate. This is culturally sensitive ground, embedded with a multitude of traditions, norms, and values relating to gender roles and relations, and to status and power in what remain heavily patriarchal social systems. Perceptions about the value of educating girls as well as boys and about appropriate roles for girls and boys when they reach adulthood, the availability of jobs, the needs and interests of the household, and also the attitudes and aspirations of girls themselves, all act as barriers to girls' educational opportunity. Schools themselves play a major part in reinforcing these gendered views, and so just getting more girls into school does not guarantee equality of opportunity or outcome. Unfortunately, the drive for gender equality is largely made by the international donor agenda. This creates situations of weak compliance by governments committed on paper to the EFA goals and, not surprisingly, results in what is called 'policy evaporation'. This is where the commitment to pursue equality remains at the level of rhetoric and paper statements, and is not integrated into the actual design and implementation of reforms.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Key concepts in gender and education
Choosing your gender analysis tools
The Harvard Framework
Women’s Empowerment Framework (Longwe)
Gender Analysis Matrix
Participatory tools for analysis and action
Curriculum materials analysis