By Michaela Hall
The intersectionality of class and gender is at the forefront of my experience and research as a PhD student exploring curriculum justice. In this blog post, I reflect on my higher education journey as a white, working-class, British woman and I touch upon how structural inequalities are embedded in curriculum design and delivery. I explore how neoliberal ideologies commodify education, marginalise working-class women, and erase diverse ways of knowing. My experience and reflections have shaped my commitment to advocating for curriculum reform that promotes epistemological justice, which has the potential to lead to broader social transformation.
A Moment To Reflect
Very recently, I attended a conference where one of the presenters mentioned that personal social injustices they face motivate them to change things for others. This resonated deeply with me and prompted me to reflect on my own intellectual journey through higher education, particularly my undergraduate studies. I reflected on how my experiences as a working-class white British woman not only shaped my path but also my research into gender and curriculum justice.
I vividly remember the look in my dad’s eyes when I told him I was intending to go to university after completing my A Levels. I caught a glimpse of the heart-stopping, stomach-dropping panic.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Have you thought about getting a job?’
‘You don’t have to because your friends are, you know?’
I knew I didn’t have to. I wanted to. Even in those self-absorbed teenage years, I did feel for my dad. I was asking for the equivalent of 2 years’ worth of food shopping for our working-class family of four, to be paid over the course of the next 3 years. Yet, with the most pained smile I will probably ever witness, he agreed.
I studied Music, and it wasn’t until my third year that I came across my first female lecturer, a guest lecturer from the Music Therapy Master’s course. It was then that I realised there were no female lecturers in the department. We did not learn about any female composers and anything aside from Western music was crammed into a one-semester elective module in the first year – ethnomusicology – taught by a very charming, but very white, middle-class male.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now I truly understand how teaching cannot be viewed as a matter outside of social class. Teaching is an overt genderised profession with evident historical roots within the capitalist system (Anyon, 1997; Arnot, 2002; hooks, 1994; Darder, 1991). I now question myself: Was it worth it? Is it worth it for working-class women now, after 20 years? What knowledge, or rather whose knowledge, are you paying for? These are just some of the questions I hope to answer through my research.
Working-Class Realities and the Cost of Aspiration
Class matters are deeply intertwined with gender and, needless to say, racial categories. (Davies, 2019; hooks, 1987; Darder, 1991) I have found that women are disproportionately affected by precarious work conditions, unpaid carer roles and responsibilities, as well as exclusion due to disability. Also, it is interesting to notice whose women one is referring to? In recent research, the UK Trades Union Congress (2025) revealed that women are 34% more likely to be on exploitative zero-hour contracts than men, BME women are 103% more likely than white men, and disabled women are 49% more likely.
When I started my undergraduate studies in 2005, university tuition fees in England were set at £1,500 a year. At that time, the National Minimum Wage was £5.05 per hour for those aged 22 and over, and £4.25 per hour for those aged 18 to 21. Fees were the equivalent of 297 hours’ and 353 hours’ worth of work, respectively. Have things got better? Unfortunately, no. The National Living Wage, as it is now known, is set at £12.21, and a year’s fees can be charged at a maximum of £9,535 in England and Wales: an equivalent of 781 hours. So, what kind of curriculum are you paying all this money for? What will you learn? Who benefits from ‘such learning’? Importantly, is it worth the mounting debt for the working class in particular? Alarmingly, if one pays attention to studies promoted by conservative psychologists, such as Jordan Peterson, equality policies, particularly in Scandinavian nations, have aggravated gender equality.
It is essential to recognise that prevailing societal ideologies influence the dominant forms of curriculum theory, design, and development. At present, as research documents, neoliberalism has been capable of imposing itself as a public pedagogy aiming for educational outcomes that are directed by primary market drivers. Students are treated as a commodity, like any other commodity, a captive mass of customers, and knowledge is viewed as a commodity as well (Apple, 2000; Giroux, 2011). There is an emphasis on ‘marketable skills,’ which reinforces capitalist values, namely, individualism, competition, and instrumental views of reason and existence. Since the market dictates education, pedagogy is compartmentalized and individualized to be in tune with those markets. In the course of my research so far, I have observed that the majority of online prospectuses foreground workplace skills that can be acquired during the course, before describing the degree content. For some, this isn’t very meaningful. The curriculum is designed to serve the labour market, not the students. It promotes skills for employability, assuming everyone is a potential worker, and adds little value for women who cannot work or are in insecure jobs, creating a sense of economic disempowerment. Notably, education is closely tied to a new emerging gendered class: the precariat. Distinct from the traditional working-class, the ‘precariat’ (a term originally coined in 2011 by British economist, Guy Standing (2014)) are characterised by their precarious employment, unstable living conditions and lack of rights both within and outside of the workplace.
From a progressive feminist perspective, this assumption overlooks structural inequalities (such as access to employment, leadership roles, and equal pay, to name but a few) that disproportionately affect women—particularly those in caregiving roles, precarious employment, or excluded from formal work altogether. It adds little value for the women who cannot work or are in insecure jobs, creating a sense of economic disempowerment. By prioritising individualised success and employability, neoliberal curriculum design erases collective struggles and reinforces gendered marginalisation within education.
Intersecting Inequalities: Who Is Left Behind?
Neoliberal framing also builds the curriculum as a site of power. Bernstein (1971) claims, “how a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control”. The curriculum, therefore, is a selective tradition (Williams, 1983): when you select, you make choices of what is ‘in’ and ‘out.’…and in so doing, you murder countless knowledge platforms. ‘Educated knowledge’ is often defined by dominant Western, patriarchal, and capitalist ideologies, and higher education is no exception. The curriculum has an epistemicidal nerve (Paraskeva, 2011). The general curriculum engages in epistemological looting (Paraskeva, 2016), privileging Western Eurocentric narratives while silencing indigenous, feminist, and non-Western epistemologies. ‘Objective’ knowledge is masculinised, whilst socially constructed ways of knowing and emotional experiences are feminised and devalued. Actually, in many aspects, they have been produced as non-existent (Santos, 2014). Epistemological violence (Paraskeva 2016) against working-class women and other disenfranchised individuals and communities has historically been rampant -not just in the West – and this rode upon the wave of colonisation to the South. Hence, women from indigenous communities face double the marginalisation and oppression from both patriarchal and colonial powers.
How do the politics of the curriculum impact working-class women? They are systematically neglected: the curriculum rarely reflects the lived experiences of the working-class, as their knowledge is often rooted in survival, care, and community, and is not considered ‘academic’ or ‘valuable’. This invisibility also means that others, outside of their community, do not understand their realities. Women’s invisibility in the curriculum matters has been consolidated through men’s visibility.
Additionally, the current curriculum perpetuates social hierarchies. As a result of the white, patriarchal Western Eurocentric norms embedded in the curriculum, working-class women are assumed to be uneducated and unskilled despite their different ways of knowing, reinforcing classism, ableism, racism, and sexism in both education and society. Constant exclusion from educational narratives and opportunities can lead to disempowerment and alienation, also limiting their ability to advocate for themselves or their communities.
Towards Epistemological Justice
I was fortunate enough to secure a full-time job, albeit at minimum wage, while attending school. Working full-time hours and studying on a full-time course was intense, and sure, I would have attained better marks if it had not been for cramming coursework in work breaks, but I managed to see myself through and come out with a piece of paper on the other side to show the world I had a degree. Looking back, however, it cost a lot more than money. My identity – my working-class ontology, my epistemology, and even my accent, which set me apart – all had to be shed for me to fit in with my peers and absorb white Western male knowledge. I am not ashamed to admit that, if it were not for employers covering the costs of my Master’s and PhD studies, nor for the fantastic support I receive from my supervisors, I would not be where I am today.
I was, and still am, lucky — and it is not fair. As a society, we need to strive for something better, and I hope this is where my research will lead me. I cannot see how we can change society without changing education and teacher education. Although I am not naïve, as education alone cannot transform society, the truth is that the social transformation we so desperately need requires a radical shift in the way we think about and approach education. I am making it my mission to explore curriculum theories that promote epistemological justice, embrace diverse and plural ways of knowing, and break away from a territorialised curriculum that is fixed, canonised, and built on colonial and patriarchal frameworks.
REFERENCES
Anyon, J. (1997). Ghetto Schooling. New York: Teachers College Press.
Apple, M. (2000). Official Knowledge. New York Routledge
Arnot, M. (2002) Reproducing Gender. New York: Routledge
Bernstein, B. (1971) ‘On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’. In M. F. D. Young (ed), Knowledge and Control. New Directions for the Sociology of Education (pp. 47- 69). London: Collier-Macmillan
Darder, A. (1991). Culture and Power in the Classroom. New York: Routledge
Davies, A. (2019) Woman, Race and Class. New York: Penguin.
Giroux, H. (2011) Education and the Crisis of Public Values. New York: Peter Lang
hooks, b. (1987) Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge
Paraskeva, J. M. (2011) Conflicts in Curriculum Theory. New York: Palgrave
Paraskeva, J. M. (2016) Curriculum Epistemicides. New York: Routledge
Santos, B. (2014) Epistemologies from the South. Boulder: Paradigm
Standing, G. (2014) The Precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury
TUC (2025). Women are “bearing the brunt” of exploitative zero-hours contracts. 06 March 2025. Available at https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/women-are-bearing-brunt-exploitative-zero-hours-contracts (Accessed 2 June 2025)
Williams, R. (1983) Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press
