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)...