Gender respect: Empirical insights for (moral) educators about women’s struggles for respect in the Global South

Abstract

Promoting gender respect is essential to the development of both sexes and to gender equality. This article argues for the importance of moral education to support the struggle of girls and women to achieve respect within unequal and complex gender power relations, especially in poverty contexts. Evidence collected from a sequence of in-depth qualitative studies in the Global South highlights the diverse ways that the giving of respect and the struggle to be respected shapes women’s lives. We show that moral education has a role to play in foregrounding female voices in order to: better understand the poverty-gender-education nexus; recognise the contribution of women and mothers as moral educators; acknowledge girls’ struggles to gain self-respect, peer respect and mitigate disrespect; and, ensure sexual respect despite aggressive masculinities. Moral education programmes which encourage respectful relations between the sexes need to address these highly contextualised forms of struggles for ‘gender respect’.