Gender canyon: getting girls into schools in the South is literally a matter of life and death … Can `gender-sensitive' education help … ?

New Internationalist, August, 1999

Involving the local community.

Ensuring that schools are safe places, with clean water and latrines.

Rooting out gender bias from textbooks and materials. Given that biased examples tend to show males in positions of activity and authority, this might superficially seem like a reform detrimental to boys. In reality boys also benefit when they are encouraged to make choices based on who they are rather than on who society expects them to be.

Even when a country has managed to offer a primary-school place to all boys and girls, however, as is broadly the case now in East Asia and Latin America as well as in the industrialized world, the need for gender-sensitive education by no means disappears. Girls can find it even harder to make it into secondary school than they did to get through the door in the first place. Yet dropping out at this point can be disastrous. In some parts of Thailand, for example, it is particularly vital that girls make it across the precarious bridge from primary to secondary school because it is at this point, as they enter adolescence, that they are most vulnerable to being recruited - or even abducted - by agents for the sex industry.

Another risk at this age is early pregnancy, which in many countries causes girls to be automatically expelled from school. An innovative project in Botswana has established a daycare centre alongside a junior secondary school. Pregnant girls receive three months' maternity leave during which they keep in touch via extension courses; they then return to school and have their baby looked after. In return they work for a few hours a week in the daycare centre, which doubles as a living classroom teaching parenting and life skills to both male and female students. Meanwhile a popular campaign has forced Botswana's government to allow pregnant students to take exams and be re-admitted to their original school. (5)

Boys in trouble

What are the implications of the `gendersensitive' classroom for the rich world? Here, as the 1990s have unfolded, a different kind of gender divide has emerged into the light - that between the majority of the world's countries, where the primary problem remains girls' exclusion from school and the opportunities it affords, and the minority where girls are markedly outperforming boys.

In the industrialized countries it is only fairly recently that boys' underperformance has become a major concern. Girls have always, it turns out, tended to do better than boys up until their teens but the traditional view has been that boys, who develop later, catch up by the time of the major public exams at 16 and beyond. The trouble is now that boys are no longer catching up - in Britain last year, for example, 51 per cent of girls achieved five or more passes in the exam for 16-year-olds and only 41 per cent of boys. (6) It is with a certain irony that feminists have noted the worry about this of politicians and commentators who were distinctly unworried about girls' disadvantage in the past.