As an international social researcher working at the intersection of gender studies, education, racism and decolonization over 30 years, I have found that gender equality initiatives in educational systems in the UK, Europe, and South Asia operate more as hierarchical, reinforcing systems of male superiority and exclusion of certain women within institutional regimes of control and power, rather than attempts to dismantle interacting inequalities of gender, religion, class, migration, caste, sexual orientation and other protected characteristics. Unfortunately, I have also found that gender regimes in education, home and work are resistant to change and enduring, particularly within wider political and economic systems that prioritize free-market capitalism, privatization and productivity, irrespective of the means to achieve it.
In this short article I draw on two books I published by Palgrave Gender and Education Series: Gender Equality and Stereotyping in Secondary Schools in the UK, Hungary and Italy and Gender Equality in Higher Education in India: Beyond Access and Parity, in an attempt to demonstrate the perenniality of gender regimes in education across different disciplinarian and socio-political contexts.
Although my work has always paid attention to the wider inequality regimes operating across various domains of economy, polity, civil society and violence, my interrogations of power with educational institutional settings in the UK, Europe and India focused more on the interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings within an institution that lead to continuing gender inequalities, and the contingency, conditionality and fluidity of gender regimes in terms of divisions of labour, emotion and human relations, and culture and symbolism.
The idea of gender regime enables us to see that the experiences of inequality in the field of education can be explained neither as individual deviation nor in terms of biology or care responsibilities of women at home, in the private sphere. The idea of intersectionality as a framework for understanding gender as complex, multi-faceted lived experience enables us to interrogate gender regimes through various and interconnected axes of inequality and oppression, thus constituting monolithic approaches to gender equality, problematic and superficial.
Whole-school approaches and gender (Athena SWAN), race (Race Equality Charter) and LGBT (Stonewall) equality accreditation frameworks for higher education institutions are popular and widely used within the educational and business sectors in the UK, Ireland and Australia (Tsouroufli, 2018) and more recently in India. The Athena Swan Charter for Universities and Research Institutions has included the principle of intersectionality since 2015. However, such approaches have been heavily criticized for benefitting mainly white middle-class women, perpetuating the status quo of the institution, and on some occasions even exacerbating gender inequalities (Bhopal & Henderson, 2019; Tzanakou & Pearce, 2019).
The development and implementation of a Gender Equality Charter Mark (GECM) between 2016-18 revealed a disappointing picture for multi-cultural Britain in terms of gender and racial equality across different geographical locations and school regimes, with gendered and racialized ideologies, gendered divisions of labour, gender-based violence and sexism underpinning relationships and school practices.
Despite the differences between the UK and Hungary, in terms of national and socio-political regimes, and the overt hostility against gender studies, gender scholars and gender equality initiatives, some similar conclusions and concerns were inferred. Within the post-socialist state of Hungary structural and cultural gender (and other) inequalities were masked, while their operation continues to shape and be shaped and reproduced by school- and national-level patriarchal regimes. Although subversive voices emerged in the pilot schools, the individualization and neutralization of gender inequalities and a popular discourse of diversity rendered critical thinking and the unravelling of hierarchical gender relations challenging.
The regimes in the Italian pilot schools were heavily influenced by popular discourses of the feminisation of education as well as discourses of political correctness, egalitarianism and moral commitment to gender respect. More attention to teachers’ outdated views of gender, commitment from government and educational authorities to support schools in promoting equality and effective educational policies against school-related gender-based violence, xenophobia and Islamophobia, and about the modernisation of the formal curricula and career guidance could facilitate whole-school approaches to gender equality. Surprisingly, the research in the UK, Hungary and Italy completed in 2018, produced similar inferences with doctoral study of gender and teacher-student interaction in secondary schools in Greece conducted almost twenty years ago (Tsouroufli, 2000).
Our British council funded study of Indian Higher Education (HE) in 2021 aimed to go beyond the success of the narrowing of gender gaps in the overall access to HE by investigating different aspects of the gender question of higher education in India and unpacked the complex and elusive nature of gender equality, complicating issues of access and leadership, retention and campus space, curriculum and pedagogies, and progression and employability.
This was a mega study covering five Indian states and ten higher educational institutions from where we collected data about policies and practices of gender inequalities. Through multi-layered qualitative data, this study illuminated what can be called the gender regime(s) of higher education, unlike both the macro-studies based on quantitative data describing broad patterns, and the micro- studies explaining specific contexts.
Thus, the gender regime of Indian higher education intersects with the private gender regime of home and the public gender regime of workplace burdening women with the continuous, restrictive and troubling practice of juggling home, education and work. Though norms, principles, instruments and compliance mechanisms oriented to women, albeit in essentializing, tokenistic, regulatory, punitive and violent ways, it comes to be ensured that the experiences of inequality and sexism are integral to the system of HE. The current gender regime is however distinct because the structural gender inequalities in HE are interestingly embedded in and rather concealed by the gender parity in access, and also the institutional compliance with gender sensitivity mechanisms such as the one for women’s safety (Tambe and Tsouroufli, forthcoming). Moreover, the current gender regime intersects with the caste regime permeating all aspects of public and private life.
This regime is also measured positively through the audit culture which make structural gender inequalities unspeakable within a celebratory context of gender parity. Gender equality initiatives are embedded in the economic agenda of educational institutions whereby social justice efforts are combined with the forces of academic capitalism. Such non-threatening approaches to gender equality are essential in branding educational institutions as egalitarian and creating an illusion of choice, individual achievement and empowerment by suppressing the presence of systemic oppression. The ideas of diversity and non- discrimination have thus replaced anti-hierarchical and anti-capitalist understandings of gender equality. How do we identify, unravel and speak out about the elusive and multi- faceted nature of this gender equality regime continues to be a challenge, not only for Indian HE but for educational systems across the world.
References
Bhopal, K. Henderson, H. (2019). Competing inequalities: gender versus race in higher education institutions in the UK, Educational Review, 73, 2, pp.153-169.
Tambe, A., Tsouroufli, M. Conclusions. In Tsouroufli et al. (forthcoming). Gender Equality in Higher Education in India: Beyond Access and Parity, London: Palgrave Gender and Education series
Tsouroufli, M., Tambe A., Filippakou, O., Gole, S., Dyahadroy, S., Wadhwa, G., (forthcoming). Gender Equality in Higher Education in India: Beyond Access and Parity, London: Palgrave Gender and Education series
Tsouroufli, M. Redai, D. (Eds.) (2021). Gender Equality and Stereotyping in Secondary Schools: Case Studies from England, Hungary and Italy, London: Palgrave Gender and Education series
Tsouroufli, M. (2018). ‘An examination of the Athena SWAN initiative: critical reflections’ In Gail Crimmins (Eds.) Strategies for resisting sexism in the academy: Higher Education, Gender and Neoliberalism, Palgrave Gender and Education Series, pp.35-54.
Tsouroufli, M. (2000). Gender and Teacher-Student Classroom Interaction in a Secondary School in Greece. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Southampton
Tzanakou C. Pearce R., (2019). Moderate feminism within or against the neoliberal university: The example of Athena Swan. Gender, Work and Organization, 26, 8, pp. 1191-1211.