Gender equality and girls’ education: Investigating frameworks, disjunctures and meanings of quality education

Abstract

The article draws on qualitative educational research across a diversity of low-income countries to examine the gendered inequalities in education as complex, multi-faceted and situated rather than a series of barriers to be overcome through linear input-output processes focused on isolated dimensions of quality. It argues that frameworks for thinking about educational quality often result in analyses of gender inequalities that are fragmented and incomplete. However, by considering education quality more broadly as a terrain of quality it investigates questions of educational transitions, teacher supply and community participation, and develops understandings of how education is experienced by learners and teachers in their gendered lives and their teaching practices. By taking an approach based on theories of human development the article identifies dynamics of power underpinning gender inequalities in the literature and played out in diverse contexts and influenced by social, cultural and historical contexts. The review and discussion indicate that attaining gender equitable quality education requires recognition and understanding of the ways in which inequalities intersect and interrelate in order to seek out multi-faceted strategies that address not only different dimensions of girls' and women's lives, but understand gendered relationships and structurally entrenched inequalities between women and men, girls and boys.

Women’s Marriage Age Matters for Public Health: A Review of the Broader Health and Social Implications in South Asia

“…Studies from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal find the lack of available, accessible, acceptable, and adaptable education of good quality may function as a “push factor” for both low educational attainment and an earlier age at marriage ( 134 , 135 ). Aikman and Rao find that in school girls are often encouraged to fulfill gendered societal roles of early marriage and childbearing ( 136 ). Similarly, Jeffrey and Jeffrey’s ( 137 ) study raises important questions about the potential failure of education in transforming gendered social roles, …How can sending girls to school for a greater number of years empower them if the structures of domination in which they are embedded remain unchanged?…”

Public Education Spending and Income Inequality in Bangladesh

“…This stipend system will encourage them for tertiary education. This system will bring the positive effect for the students come bottom income group [15], [16]. Government can increase the charge and fees for private higher education where normally rich households send their children.…”

Buzzwords at play: gender, education, and political participation in Kenya

“…The concern here, however, and as discussed previously, is that gender in these contexts focuses on statistical outcomes and efficient delivery systems, with little regard for the complicated nuances of gender and the reality that policies working towards gender equality require mechanisms to address structural imbalances that institutionalise inequality (Unterhalter 2005a;Aikman and Rao 2012;Unterhalter and North 2011). The discourse surrounding gender equality in education as prescribed by the MDGs focuses on the barriers girls must overcome to access schooling.…”

“…Those recommendations extending beyond this, for instance, UNGEI's (2002) focus on gender sensitivity training and gender sensitive curricula, do little to deconstruct systemic gender disparities. These types of frameworks neglect the need for analyses that interrogate the ways in which power plays out in the school and in the broader community (Aikman and Rao 2012).…”