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Gender and Education for All
THE LEAP TO EQUALITY |
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| Box 3.18. Student ‘choices’ are never unfettered | |
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Despite girls doing well in school in many contexts, parents may continue to hold stereotypical views about the abilities of girls relative to boys. In Mali, for example, almost one-third of 300 households surveyed said that the reason they differentiated between boys and girls was because boys were more intelligent. These expectations, being constantly reinforced within the home environment, inevitably influence subsequent behaviour.
Furthermore, the world of work also gives gendered messages, which influence boys’ aspirations in different ways to those of girls. In Chile, a survey of aspirations of out-of-school 14–17-year-olds revealed that two-thirds of boys hoped to find a job, compared with only one-third of girls; on the other hand, over half of the girls hoped to get back to school compared with less than half of the boys. In the older group of 18–24-year-olds, more women hoped to study and more men hoped to find work.
These aspirations indicate that boys see the world of work as their dominant opportunity and are keen to enter it early, whereas girls are more likely to want to stay on in higher education in order to improve their chances in the labour market. Somewhat perversely, labour market discrimination seems here to be fuelling greater gender parity in education. This outcome, however, is far from
| | being generally the case. It is more common for restricted job opportunities for women to lead to lower educational persistence and performance. An example is given by Togo where a general lack of employment for women, and a scarcity of jobs for school-leavers and diploma-holders since the implementation of economic reforms, is reported to have undermined the demand for girls’ schooling.
Occupational expectations are widely reported to influence subject choice.
PISA survey data explored the occupations students’ expected to have at age 30, and found that female students in the participating countries were far more likely than males to report expected occupations related to medicine, biology, nutrition and teaching. Male students on the other hand were more likely to expect careers associated with physics, mathematics or engineering. It is unsurprising that subject choices reflect these occupational expectations.
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Note: PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) is an initiative covering twenty-eight OECD and fifteen non-OECD countries, aimed at measuring ‘how well young adults at age 15, and therefore approaching the end of compulsory schooling, are prepared to meet the challenges of today’s knowledge societies’.
Sources: Avalos (2003); UNESCO Institute for Statistics/OECD (2003b, p. 12); Lange (2003a, 2003b).
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