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...