Gender Relations in Secondary Schooling

Abstract

There is abundant evidence that inequality between women and men is a very general feature of Western education systems. Differential treatment and differential outcomes for both staff and students have been extensively documented by research over the past decade.' In the same period, considerable energy has been spent trying to change it. A stock of nonsexist curriculum materials and teaching aids have been produced, and centers have been set up to disseminate them. In Australia, as in other advanced capitalist countries, there is a campaign to end gender stereotypes in career counselling and subject choice, to get more girls into mathematics, science, and traditionally masculine trades and professions. Sexual harassment is being made an issue in schools and colleges. There are equal-opportunity policies in force in some states, and antidiscrimination laws apply, if unevenly, to education. Yet the effect of this activity so far has been slight. The resources devoted to it are, at best, painfully small in comparison to the scale of the problem. In New South Wales, for instance, although the funds for the Non-Sexist Education Unit have been maintained in the last year, only a fraction of one teaching consultant's time per region in the public school system has been allocated for nonsexist curriculum development. Moreover, such slender resources are often under threat, both from ideological attacks by the political Right and from cost-cutting campaigns within the bureaucracy. Furthermore, this work is not always certain of its directions. There is a continuing dilemma about the value of sex-segregated schools or classes. Almost all the educational debate has been about heterosexuals; there is very little serious work on discrimination against homosexuals in the education system. There are problems concerning the mainstream curriculum that are just beginning to emerge; and there are massive, though so far almost undiscussed, problems about how specialists should work with classroom teachers to change sexism in schools. At this point there is a need not only to renew the campaign for resources for countersexist educational work but also to rethink basic ideas. This article is intended as a contribution to that task. It reports research on gender relations in Australian secondary schools and proposes a line of theoretical analysis that bears on some of the dilemmas of current practice.