Reports from across the world last week were claiming that we are no longer facing a gender gap but rather a gender chasm. Drawing on a new ‘gender gap’report these articles claim that even though a number of countries see more young women going to university than young men, it is men who tend to end up faring better in employment (rising to higher levels of seniority and earning more than their female counterparts). Continue reading “Girls, Graduate Jobs and the Gender Chasm”
Has research on Gender and Education come of age as a properly scientific field or is something else happening?
I was recently invited by the University of Luxembourg as a keynote speaker at an International Conference, ‘Gender Variations in Educational Success: Searching for Causes’. It quickly became apparent that boys’ achievement with respect to girls’ is an international, hot topic. National and political concerns in Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg have created a mass of research dominated by multivariate analysis and structural equation modelling. Scholars from these countries drew heavily on data available from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to search for the ‘causes’ of boys’ underachievement. Alongside PISA data they used national public examination and test scores, psycho metric measures of cognitive competencies in, for example, reading, mathematics and problem solving, scales of well-being and data gathered from questionnaires designed by researchers to capture, for example young people’s motivations to learn. Continue reading “Has research on Gender and Education come of age as a properly scientific field or is something else happening?”
Accessions: Researching, Designing Higher Education
My piece ‘Accessions: Researching, Designing Higher Education’ in Gender and Education (23:6) reports on the experiences, effects and (dis)engagements in working alongside designers – as part of a research-design team – to foster a more ‘public sociology’. These are questions, conceptual and methodological, that I have been interested in for some time: this piece, as with other work, asks who becomes the proper subject for (non)academic attention? Questions are raised about the place of a ‘public sociology’ as part of a ‘city publics’ and ‘engaged university’ where understanding local disseminations and disparities is important in considering where different users, interviewees and indeed researchers are coming from. It asks where are we coming from? Why does this matter and how can this be operationalised as a politicised practice (rather than personalized, individualized pain); Where are we going as the direction of Higher Education stalls and changes? When we ‘travel’ in academia do we only credentialise ourselves, becoming more distant from the very audiences, users, and publics which enable our mobility? ‘Accessions’ alludes to academic hierarchies, elitism and ‘becoming’ in and out of the university setting, and continues a concern reflected in a forthcoming Sociological Research Online piece: ‘Placing Research: ‘City Publics’ and the ‘Public Sociologist’ (2011, with Michelle Addison) and a current European Societies piece ‘International and Widening Participation Students’ Experience of Higher Education, UK’ (2011, with Tracy Scurry). Continue reading “Accessions: Researching, Designing Higher Education”
Blaming the women and education again
Is anyone else as sick to death as I am about the reportage of the recent disturbances in London and other English cities? Continue reading “Blaming the women and education again”
Familiar and strange fathers in education
They say ethnographers are supposed to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. That, however, can be a difficult task since we tend to be ignorant about our own customs and ideologies. For instance, research on parenthood has often taken traditional gender roles for granted. In most western cultures, mothers’ unpaid educational work has been seen as natural, something that educational researchers have reproduced by talking about parent involvement instead of the more accurate term mother involvement. Prominent feminist scholars, such as Miriam David and Dorothy Smith, have for long called attention to the considerable amount of educational work that women carry out on a daily basis. But what about men’s relations to their children’s schooling and education? My article published in the forthcoming Gender and Education 23(5) addresses this question. Continue reading “Familiar and strange fathers in education”
GEA Lifetime Achievement Award for Professor Tuula Gordon
At the 8th International Gender and Education Association Conference in Exeter this year GEA was delighted to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor Tuula Gordon. Although Tuula was unable to be at the conference to receive the award in person, her friend and colleague Professor Elina Lahelma collected it on Tuula’s behalf. Below, Elina maps out some of Tuula’s many contributions to the field of gender and education. Continue reading “GEA Lifetime Achievement Award for Professor Tuula Gordon”
Who protects the protector? The worrying future of the Equality and Human Rights Commission
The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has a statutory remit ‘to promote and monitor human rights; and to protect, enforce and promote equality across the nine “protected” grounds – age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation and gender reassignment’. According to the Commission, a survey carried out by it in 2007 showed that discrimination and disadvantage are still common across Britain. So EHRC states: ‘We don’t all have equal chances in life and some forms of discrimination are complex and deep-rooted. Sometimes people choose to ignore the rights of others even when this is against the law. This is why the Equality and Human Rights Commission is here’. Continue reading “Who protects the protector? The worrying future of the Equality and Human Rights Commission”
Influences on Young Children’s Gender Identity: Observational Reflections
Bobbie: I’m Snow White.
(Bobbie has placed a cup on his head to symbolise a tiara and has draped his coat around his shoulders like a cloak)
Bobbie looks delicate, has long, blond hair and is easily mistaken for a girl. I made a mistake as I watched Bobbie and a group of boys and girls playing pirates. Thinking Bobbie was a girl, I was shocked when Terry and David, said: “He‘s always like this” “Bobbie is a girl.” “He’s a sissy.” Bobbie‘s response to me about these comments also left me stunned: “You might think this is strange, but I like girls and I like being a girl.” These brief exchanges and the realisation that Bobbie was a boy made me question my understanding of gender. Why had the boys reacted to Bobbie as they had and why, at such an early age, was their behaviour so stereotypical and Bobbie’s not? Perhaps Terry and David were being ‘normal’. Continue reading “Influences on Young Children’s Gender Identity: Observational Reflections”
Supporting Transgender Children in the Primary Classroom: A Reflection
Too often in discussions about gender identity the approach taken is extremely narrow. The discourse is largely dominated by the cisgendered, binary perspective that there is ‘male’ and that there is ‘female’ – and that both of these are biologically determined, stable categories. This is further reinforced when the discourse is situated in the context of children. The prevailing attitude is that any identity, theory or social group that destabilises such assumptions are too complicated and/or too ‘subversive’ to merit acknowledgement. It is therefore unsurprising that when school staff, policy makers and academics come to discus gender identity within the classroom, that transgendered children are usually entirely ignored. What can teachers can do to support such children? Continue reading “Supporting Transgender Children in the Primary Classroom: A Reflection”
Is feminism in the UK experiencing a double dip? Call for Action
‘Clinton is proving that feminist foreign policy is possible – and works’ so headlines an article in the Guardian in which Madeleine Bunting argues that Hilary Clinton is building her political foreign policy on a solid 1970s feminist mantra that ‘Transformation in the role of women is that last great impediment to universal progress.’ Clinton has proclaimed that ‘the rights of women and girls are now core to US foreign policy’ and Bunting draws attention to the 450 mentions of this ‘signature issue’ in the first five months of Clinton’s office. Clinton argues that ‘the empowerment, protect and protection of women and girls is vital to the long-term security of the US’. In a telling remark Bunting asks, imagine any politician saying something similar in the UK now. It is, indeed, unimaginable! Continue reading “Is feminism in the UK experiencing a double dip? Call for Action”