Engendering gendered mathematics education in the Philippines: Is equality to access enough?

Abstract

In this metasyntheses paper, I explore gender as a social factor that interacts with both the cognitive and affective domains of education by explaining what it means for mathematics to be gendered and how we can use mathematics education to promote gender fairness as a form of social justice. I start by discussing gender as a dichotomy and how educational research transitioned from a physiological to a socio-cultural perspective. Guided by Ferguson’s and Bjerrun-Nielsen’s Four-Perspective Gender model, and Cohen and Martin’s Four-Dimensional Model of Gender. I argue that mathematics education can be designed to promote gender equity only by considering these dimensions, and when there is a deliberate effort to examine how our exercise of education widens or narrows gender gap in terms of the four dimensions of gender equality: equality to access, learning experience, educational outcomes, and most importantly, external results. I discuss mathematics as an area perceived to embody a symbolic gender and what can be done through mathematics education to break that stereotype and contribute to the furthering equality to external results. I focus this discussion into the context of the Philippines and why it may be essential for educational reforms to zoom out to include other equally important dimensions of gender other than equality to access.