Fragmented frameworks? Researching women, gender, education, and development

Elaine Unterhalter

This chapter critically reviews contrasting frameworks which present different ways of understanding the nature of the challenge to achieve gender equality in education. Different meanings of gender equality and schooling have consequences for our understanding of two Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): MDG 2, which is concerned with gender equality in schooling, and MDG 3, concerned with the empowerment of women. Different meanings entail different actions, and, as will be shown, organisations have interpreted gender, education, development, empowerment, and equality in very different ways. These interpretations are underpinned by different approaches to research and analysis: how one undertakes research on gender and women will determine the conclusions. This chapter examines different meanings of the challenge for gender equality in education and evaluates the implications of each approach for policy and practice.

Four approaches to gender equality in education

Table 1 summarises the four approaches and main phases of thinking and action concerning gender education, development, and equality that have prevailed since approximately 1970. (For a fuller discussion of some of the theoretical issues raised, see Unterhalter 2003a, 2005a.)

In practice there are considerable overlaps between the four approaches, but I have separated them out analytically to emphasise some of their key differences. The WID (women in development) framework, with its stress on expansion of education for girls and women, linked to efficiency and economic growth, is the framework with the longest history and the most powerful advocates in governments, inter-government organisations, and NGOs. It is the framework that views gender in relatively uncomplicated ways and generates clear policy directives regarding, for example, the employment of more women teachers to reassure parents about girls' safety at school.

The GAD (gender and development) framework considers gender as part of complex and changing social relations. Influential for more than twenty years among women's organisations concerned with development, GAD has only slowly made an impact on the thinking of some governments and education NGOs. Because GAD is alert to complex processes entailed in the reproduction and transformation of gendered relations, it is less easily translatable into simple policy demands. However, GAD approaches have had some impact on practice, particularly with regard to teachers' understanding of work in a gendered classroom, women's organisations' linking of education-related demands to wider demands for empowerment, and the ways in which advocates of gender equality work in institutions.

The post-structuralist approach questions the stability of definitions of gender, paying particular attention to fluid processes of gendered identification and shifting forms of action. While the issues raised by this approach have not influenced government policies directly, they have put on the agenda the affirmation of subordinated identities, and they have made some impact on the development of learning materials and forms of organisation that recognise the complexity of social identities.

The final framework analysed is concerned with human development and human rights in development. In some ways this is a meta-theory, working at a higher level of abstraction, and suggesting not concrete policies or forms of practice but rather a framework in which these can be developed ethically. However, the human-development approach also differs significantly from the other three with regard to how gender and education are understood, and some of the processes entailed in developing policy. It thus allows us to see the three other approaches in a somewhat different light.

I now want to look in more depth at the assumptions and research base of each approach, drawing out its policy and practice implications, its achievements, and some associated problems and questions.

Bringing girls and women into school: the dominance of the WID approach

The WID framework, with its emphasis on bringing women into development, and thus girls and women into school, has links to aspects of liberal feminism in Northern contexts. It stresses the importance of including women in development planning to improve efficiency, but not necessarily challenging the multiple sources of women's subordination. Histories of the WID approach point to its beginnings in the early 1970s with the work of Ester Boserup, which illustrated how women, who do the bulk of farming in Africa, were neglected in rural development projects (Boserup 1970; Moser 1994).

WID has had the strongest resonance for analysts of education in governments and inter-government organisations. The most influential policy thinking on gender, education, and development in the 1990s drew on this approach, expressed most clearly in a collection of papers edited by King and Hill and first published in mimeographed form in 1991 for the World Bank. This was to have enormous influence on governments, and on large-scale development assistance projects. King and Hill emphasised the importance of counting girls and women inside and outside schooling, overcoming the barriers to access, and realising the social benefits of their presence in school: increased GDP per capita, reduced birth rates and infant mortality, and increased longevity (King and Hill 1991; 1993). This analysis was framed in key policy documents throughout the 1990s, including the World Bank's Priorities and Strategies in Education and UNESCO's Delors Commission Report (World Bank 1995; Delors 1996). Its influence is still evident in key passages of important strategy documents from the World Bank, including Engendering Development (2001), and DFID's Girls' Education: Towards a Better Future for All (DFID 2005).

In the WID approach, 'gender' is equated with women and girls, who are identified descriptively in terms of biological differences. 'Education' is understood as schooling. 'Development' or 'empowerment' is linked with economic growth or social cohesion and sometimes improved governance. Herz and Sperling's influential analysis What Works in Girls' Education, written in 2004 in response to the failure to meet the MDG on gender parity in schooling, uses some forms of WID analysis, identifying the benefits of girls' education in terms of faster economic growth, more productive farming, smaller and better-educated families, and reduced infant and child mortality. While the report also argues that the education of girls will result in benefits to them, such as higher earning potential, better protection from HIV and domestic violence, and greater political participation, the assumption is that these personal benefits are acceptable because they fit with accepted social benefits (Herz and Sperling 2004). Intrinsic benefits from education that might be more personal and private are not acknowledged.

Questions of exploitation, subordination, and social division are generally not considered in this framework. The slogan 'If you educate a woman you educate the nation' nicely captures the thinking that underpins the mainstream policy support for WID. The education of women is for others, not for themselves. The benefits of women's education are to be realised in the household, often the site of the harshest discrimination. Some critiques draw attention to WID's narrow assumption that 'education' is always delivered in formal schools; that gender is not a political relationship, but merely a set of descriptive categories; and that the concerns of individual women are not to be taken into account (Unterhalter 2000; Fine and Rose 2001; Brighouse and Unterhalter 2002).

The WID approach to the challenge of gender inequality in education is to get more girls into school. A great deal of the empirical work using this framework has concentrated on counting the numbers of girls in or out of school and measuring the breadth of the gender gap between girls and boys in enrolments or achievement (UNESCO 2003; UNICEF 2000–2004). This work has been carried out by government ministries, including census departments. District household surveys have been a key instrument in collecting data on school attendance. Additional surveys have looked at how household relations affect decisions about sending girls to school and keeping them there (Hadden and London 1996; Filmer and Pritchett 1999; Alderman, Orrazo and Patterno 1996). Analysis has also concentrated on quantifying the benefits of girls' and women's schooling in terms of reduced birth rates and improved uptake of immunisation (Klansen 1999; Subbarao and Raney 1995; Gage et al. 1997). Much of this work has been undertaken by researchers working for multilateral organisations, including the World Bank, UNICEF, and UNESCO. Generally these researchers are economists, and very often research teams have been led by international experts who employ local research assistants for fieldwork.

Some work mixes qualitative and quantitative data to consider gender in relation to achievement at school (Nath and Chowdhury 2001). In the Caribbean this work has studied how boys underachieve because of their relations with female teachers and other boys (Kutnick et al. 1997; Parry 1997). While the qualitative research provides some of the insight about social relations that is difficult to discern in the quantitative work, the assumptions that underpin it are the same: that is, the importance of bringing girls into school and assuring achievement for girls and boys.

This quantitative work on gender, access, retention, and achievement tends not to deal with other dimensions of inequality, particularly race, ethnicity, caste, and disability. While some acknowledgement is made of differences between rural and urban girls, there is little engagement with the complexity of social division. This resonates with the way in which writers in the WID framework interpret equality. Within this framework, equality is generally understood in terms of equal numbers of resources: for example, places in school for girls and boys, male and female teachers employed, or equal numbers of images of women and men in textbooks. Studies thus concentrate on describing the gender gap, that is the inequality in numbers of boys and girls at school (UNESCO 2003), the lack of female teachers (King and Hill 1994; Herz and Sperling 2004), and the numbers of boys and girls in children's textbooks (Joshi and Anderson 1992; Obura 1991). This approach pays little attention to gendered processes of learning, the conditions in which women teachers work, the way their work is regarded by their societies, or the meanings that children make and take from the images they see in textbooks. Chapters in this book by the Global Campaign for Education (Chapter 2) and Elimu Yetu (Chapter 5) are examples of a WID approach.

Policies associated with the WID approach have concentrated on improving access for girls, through giving them stipends or abolishing school fees, providing food in return for attendance at school, developing the infrastructure of training or accommodation to ensure that more women teachers are employed, digging latrines, and providing water. Some associated practice has entailed mobilising teachers and communities to encourage girls to enrol in school and ensure that they pass examinations. These are often seen as ends in themselves. In Malawi and Kenya, the abolition of school fees led to hundreds of thousands of girls enrolling in school – with little provision to support them. WID practice is not much concerned with the content of what girls learn, how they learn, or whether gender inequalities face them after their years in school are over. Generally WID analysts will comment on the content of schooling when it has a bearing on access, but not more generally. For example, Herz et al. highlight the importance of girls' studying science in Kenya because it encourages parents to send their daughters to school, not because learning science might provide intrinsically useful knowledge (Herz et al. 1991). The stress in WID practice is on bringing girls into school and ensuring that they learn appropriately. The framework is not concerned to raise questions about the gendered practice of teachers in relation to children's learning styles, management practices in school, or gendered structures of power in society.

The WID framework is not able to explain more complex aspects of gender equality and inequality in school. GAD critiques of WID, discussed below, have taken issue with some of these limitations. However, it must be acknowledged that WID's simple messages about policy and practice, despite – or possibly because of – their lack of analytical complexity, have galvanised huge programmes by government and inter-government organisations, mobilised additional funding, and led to some important legal changes with regard to the provision of education. Despite the many limitations of WID's failure to look beyond the school gate, the policy achievements associated with the framework in the past two decades must be acknowledged.

The gendered power structures of school and society: drawing on GAD in education

In opposition to WID, the GAD (gender and development) approach emerged in the late 1980s, emphasising the significance of gendered power structures of inequality in a range of contexts. GAD theorists argued that inequality needed to be challenged politically and could not merely be ameliorated by a process of inclusion, by the provision of welfare support, or by a belief in the greater efficiency of projects or programmes that included women (Moser 1993). GAD grew mainly out of women's organisations (primarily but not exclusively those of poor rural and urban women). It was also linked to debates about feminism in the third world, and the contributions of critical theorists in development studies who highlighted the inadequate ways in which women and gender were conceptualised in the work of mainstream development theory (Kabeer 1994; Elson 1995; DAWN 1995; Randall and Waylen 1998; Molyneux 1998; Rai 2002). In some ways this work resonated with the approach of socialist feminists in Western Europe. (Radical feminism, with its trenchant critique of the politics of the family, had considerable impact in North America, Western Europe, and Australia, but was less significant politically in developing countries, although there are some notable exceptions, particularly in Latin America.)

GAD work focused on the sexual division of labour inside and outside the household, on forms of political mobilisation, and changing gendered structures of power. As a form of political analysis and action, GAD paid relatively little attention to issues concerning formal schooling. Partly because education is so centrally concerned with the State, which provides an ambiguous partner for transforming gendered social relations (Stromquist 1995), the writings of influential GAD theorists tended not to deal with formal education.