Challenging the Inevitability of Difference: Young Women and Discourses about Gender Equity in the Classroom

Abstract

Debates about achieving gender equity in education have largely been conducted along a single axis, swinging between two questions: Are girls and boys fundamentally the same or different? Consequently, should girls and boys be treated similarly or differently? This article grounds these theoretical debates about approaches to gender equity in the experiences of one group of female high school students’ struggle to achieve gender equity in their mathematics education. An analysis of students’ talk yields that the young women and their male peers understood the relationship between gender and educational equity through competing discourses. Thus, this case study provides a grounded critique of the dominant paradigms for understanding gender equity and helps reframe the kinds of questions and conversations that practitioners, students, families, researchers, and policymakers might pursue as they search for remedies to educational inequities. At the same time, although this particular case study focuses on competing discourses about gender, these discourses mirror other debates in feminist, multicultural, and critical race literature about the relationship between race, class, and disability, and approaches to equity. Thus, this article holds implications for how we understand the relationship between differences (race, gender, class, and disability) and educational equity.