Will Brehm  1:34
Supriya Bailey, welcome to FreshEd.

Supriya Baily  1:37
Thank you for having me today.

Will Brehm  1:40
About a year ago, you were in Oslo, Norway, walking in front of the Nobel Peace Center. And you saw an image that disturbed you. What was that image?

Supriya Baily  1:52
That’s a great question. My colleague and I, who co-wrote this article, Halla Holmarsdottir and I were the co-chairs of the gender and education committee for the Comparative and International Education Society. And we’ve been talking a lot about gender. We were in Oslo, Norway, and we walked right in front of the Nobel Peace Center. And we saw two banners outside the Nobel Peace Center. Very typical for any museum that you would see. You would see, you know, two banners advertising an exhibit inside. But it was the image on the banners that really bothered us. The first image was a woman who had pursed lips, and sort of red lipstick mouth, and big sunglasses, and she was wearing a bikini top. On the other side was the other image on the banner, and it was a young man who had sort of a stubble and what we would call in the US, a sleeveless shirt, a wife beater shirt as sometimes they’re called here. And he was carrying a machine gun. And this just is not surprising if you were looking at sort of a magazine or something like that. But what really shocked us was that it was outside the Nobel Peace Center. And we tried to follow up and go in and it was advertising a social media exhibit. What their hope was that they were trying to say was that anybody could tweet about peace. But the reality was that they were still using these images that are so gendered. And so representative of what we see as traditional myths of how we see women and men in society. One very sexualized and one very much endemic of being violent. And so that was what we saw.

Will Brehm  3:44
So, you take this issue and relate it to education. And you say that you see troubling patterns of quality and opportunity when it comes to gender. Can you explain some of these patterns that you notice?

Supriya Baily  4:00
Absolutely. So, one of the things that these images led us to continue to talk about was that we see a lot of people who say the work around gender is done. That there are, for instance, rising numbers of girls in schools. So, you know, you’ll see in the US, for instance, 55-56% of undergraduates enrolled in higher education are women. We’ll see in the numbers that come out of the United Nations that at basic education levels, you’re seeing about 50-50 in most countries of the world. And so, when people see women leading countries, when they see women leading organizations, the natural response has been, what work do we need to still do around gender? Gender is done. Women are represented equally in many of these spaces, and if they’re not, they’re usually in a country where there’s a lot of other problems anyway, and so those issues have to be addressed in a different fashion. And so this really is concerning to us because there are a lot of issues in schools, in colleges, in spaces of higher education and learning, that hinder the ability for men and women to be able to access the type of education that they want without being boxed into particular gendered roles, gendered norms, stereotypes, or even to be able to exercise their agency in a way that is helpful for them to being able to do what they want to with their lives.

Will Brehm  5:45
So, you said that the work of gender is perceived by many as being finished or complete. But you would argue otherwise. So, what’s an example of where the work of gender is not done?

Supriya Baily  6:00
The work of gender still needs a lot of work when you think about quality of education. And that’s sort of at the heart of our article, is that if you look at education and quality of education, what makes up good quality? Quality can be defined in many different ways for different people. So, it can be the type of curriculum. You know, what do you go to school and learn? Is that of high quality? Is the environment in which you go to school safe? Is that of high quality? Do you have time at home to study? Are you given space at home? Are you given free time? Are you asked to do more chores? All of that quantifies itself as quality. And so, when you talk about gender work in education, what we really are realizing is that while the numbers are aligning, what’s not aligning are those questions about quality? About who are the teachers who are teaching girls versus boys? A lot of times you have segregated schools but you don’t have high quality teachers who have been hired for some schools. Are you looking at quality of the curriculum? Are you looking at quality of the facilities? And so, when you talk about what’s not yet been done for gender in education, there are people who are talking about these issues. There are places that are recognizing that we need to look at all of these attributes of education. But the thing is that when we focus on benchmarks, and we focus on enrollment figures, and we focus on access, we tend to forget that there are other issues at play that affect the long-term ramifications of why people go to school.

Will Brehm  6:20
So, in a sense, you’re saying that the statistical numbers that suggest we have parity in terms of access isn’t the same as saying we have equality in quality?

Supriya Baily  8:12
Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. Because the parity in numbers tells us what’s happening in terms of the physical presence of girls and boys in school. But what it doesn’t tell us is, what are the experiences that people have in schools, and especially girls? So, what are the experiences around safety? What are their experiences around curriculum? All of those affect whether girls stay in school, whether they’re successful in school, and what kind of impact it has on their lives after they have finished school. Whether it’s basic, or secondary, or tertiary, it doesn’t matter which level.

Will Brehm  8:55
And the differences between the notion of parity and equality and even equity, need to really be teased out so we can have a more complex understanding of what gender and education means. So, what are the differences between those terms?

Supriya Baily  9:17
So, with parity, it’s the most basic. If we see this as a continuum, parity is the most basic of the three, where it’s really numbers for numbers. Do we have 100% literacy rates between boys and girls? Do we have 100% enrollment? Is it 50-50? Are we looking at a classroom and ensuring that you have 10 students who have taken a science lesson and 10 students who’ve taken another science lesson? It’s very much the numbers to make sure that you are looking at a fair breakdown in terms of numbers. Equality is a little bit sort of further along on the continuum. And what equality tries to do is say, well, we recognize that parity is not enough. But we want to make sure that everyone has a fair process to be able to access education. So, this puts us in the place of things like gender blind admissions, or not looking at boys and girls by their names but ensuring that everyone is treated fairly. That the experience of education is one that is equal, equally fair, but it doesn’t get at what equity does, which is sort of that next level, which says, I’m looking at the history of what the experience has been for this group of people or this person or this individual. So, it takes into account the structural sort of domains within which a person might be struggling. What equity tries to do is ensure that people’s experiences are weighted in different ways so that they are given the best shot at the kind of education that they really want and need.

Will Brehm  11:28
So, these three terms seem as if they could easily be conflated. So, parity equals equality, but you’re saying that’s not the case. Can you give an example of where these terms have been misused and misappropriated?

Supriya Baily  11:45
I don’t know if they’ve been misused or misappropriated but what I would say is that they have been confused. Because if we’ve been talking for so long about access. So, if the United Nations has said, through the Beijing Platform for Action, we’re going to enroll boys and girls in primary education. That’s going to be our focus is that we’re going to get all boys and all girls into schools, in a particular region of the world. So, we’ve seen movements of people saying we need to get them into school because how they’re measuring success has been to measure the enrollment figures. And so, it has not been I don’t think misappropriated as much as it’s been the only way that people have been able to benchmark success. And so, but in benchmarking that success in that way, it has, I think, allowed us to not focus on the structural issues that affect girls in school. It has not addressed things like gendered violence, and quality. So, what we’re trying to do here is saying, fine, up until now, looking at parity, looking at numbers, looking at access, is one way of moving forward. But it can’t be the only way to move forward.

Will Brehm  12:09
And this other way of moving forward is to really focus on equity and, as you say, some of the structural factors that gender our education systems. So, can you tell me a little bit more about what these structural factors are? Or at least the ones that you have identified?

Supriya Baily  13:38
Yes. So, one great way to talk about this is looking at instrumental benefits of education versus substantive benefits of education. And those are sort of big terms to basically say, why are we educating people? In a lot of places, we educate people because we want them to have a good life. But a lot of times when it comes to gender and education, the conversation that happens is that we educate women or girls, because they’ll take care of their children. They’ll make sure that their children are healthy. They’ll join the formal sector of the economy, and they will help the country move forward. These are structural decisions around educating women that have nothing to do with the woman herself. It has to do with policies and practices to ensure development agendas that help with ensuring sort of long term social, economic, political, cultural benefits. Which is all great. That’s what we’d like to see as well. But it has nothing to do with education for education’s sake for that individual person. And so, structurally, one of the constraints has been, especially when you look at the developing world, this focus on saying that educating a woman is -there’s this great phrase in India that people say, “You educate a man you can educate an individual. You educate a woman, you educate the family, or educate the nation”. And the reality is that that’s a burden. That’s an unnecessary burden that we’re placing on 50% of the population to be able to have to do something that is really not being asked of the other 50%, so to speak.

Will Brehm  15:39
And another issue is around gender being a social construction. And I think that this term social construction can be rather confusing to people when they think about gender, or other social processes. In your understanding, what does it mean for gender to be socially constructed?

Supriya Baily  16:03
Absolutely. So, this starts right at childhood. And so why do we think that girls like pink and boys like blue? There’s no reason that an infant baby, a baby born today, would have a predilection for pink or blue. And we recognize that now. But that’s what we mean by socially constructed. That we have attributed certain aspects of our lives to say, girls do this, boys do that. Girls don’t lift weights, boys don’t cry. This affects both men and women. It affects boys and girls in schools because it hinders opportunities. So, we still have many cultures, many societies where you don’t want your son to grow up and be a nurse, or you don’t want your son to grow up and be something that is traditionally seen as a female, care-related occupation. On the other hand, you don’t want to see women in what might be considered as traditionally male domains. And I talked a little bit about the trades, for instance, and how we do not see young women going into schools of plumbing, you know, mechanics. Those kinds of opportunities -construction- all of which are relatively well paid and would be fine to have both men and women in those domains, but we don’t see that. And so, the social construction of gender really emerges from our notions that have been developed over centuries that define how we are to act in this world based on our sex. So, our sex defines our gender, and then our genders then defines our role in society. And this is what becomes very complicated because in schools, a lot of times we are ensuring that these gendered roles and norms are sustained. So, a teacher who believes that the girls should stay after school and clean up the classroom, the teachers who believe that the boys are just playing when they’re teasing a girl. These are things that become part of how we say these individuals act because of their gendered roles.
And so, part of what limits our ability to change schools and to change education is the beliefs that exist and are embedded in families, that’s embedded in school structures, embedded in our national governments. So, for instance, we have a policy in India that we talked about in our article, where it is called the Companies Act. In 2012 or 2013, India decided that they were going to create a policy that would ensure that every corporate board had one woman on that board. And what it resulted in was all these corporate boards who last minute didn’t align to the spirit of the law, but they needed to align to the letter of the law. And what they did was they looked for their daughters or their wives or their mothers and found somebody who was female in their lives and said, You need to just be on this board so that we can comply. And I think part of our concern around structures and quality is that when we comply, we make sure that we meet those numbers. So, parity of ensuring that every company has a female representative on the board is a parity figure to ensure that women are more engaged in corporate life. But on the other hand, what it does is it limits who those women are, it limits the power that those women have to be able to really make change, because they are not there because they have the right degree, or they have the right experience, what they’re there for is because they’re a straw figure holding up a law to ensure that somebody can go back to the powers that be at the United Nations and say, here we go, we have complied with this law.

Will Brehm  20:47
And this is where gender inequality can intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, and class to kind of create what is called intersectionality. And so could you just describe that concept a little bit more and maybe provide an example.

Supriya Baily  21:07
So, intersectionality, is this notion that -well, it’s not really a notion as much as it is a fact that we don’t have just one identity. So, we are not just female. We are female who speaks a certain language, who comes from a certain country, who might be heterosexual, might be disabled. There are lots of layers to who each individual person is. And that layering is what intersectionality is all about because you’re not always being looked at in terms of that one dimension that is exposed at that moment. And so, for instance, you can see in some places of the world, if you speak a certain language in that community then you might be a woman, you might be disabled, you might speak a local language versus a national language, and you might be less likely to be encouraged to go to school. And so, it’s not just one aspect of your identity that either allows you to be successful or allows you to struggle. And so, it’s the combination of all of those identities together. And so, intersectionality really is about recognizing that you can’t just look at this issue of gender inequality as one that is about men and women, because gender inequality affects men as well. And so, part of intersectionality recognizes that there’s a hierarchy of people. So, you could have people at various stages on these ladders of social access and privilege. And different pieces of your identity help you climb that ladder more quickly, or less quickly, depending on how much we value what those pieces of your identity are.

Will Brehm  23:24
And this hierarchy of people connects to the distribution of power, and how distribution of power can cause structural violence to women and girls.

Supriya Baily  23:40
Yes. So, one of the things we have to realize is that as we’ve been very successful with basic education -moving forward, getting girls into school- we’re not yet seeing that same level of success at secondary levels and at tertiary levels. And part of this is because of the structures of power that exist within the family, within the community, within sort of regional or national borders even. Where, for instance, a girl might be told, yes, you can go to school up till this age, but then you need to be married. Or you can go to school up till this age, and you can go to college but we’re really going to encourage you to do something that is considered something that would fit within your gendered norms, or the social construction of your gender. So, it happens everywhere. So, it’s not just something that’s limited to parts of the world where people might be more traditional, or more religious, or less educated or have less resources. It has nothing to do with any of that. When you look at gender inequities, they occur almost everywhere in the world and in education. And so, you’re seeing those constraints happen right from childhood all the way through lifelong learning programs. And so non-formal education programs, you see that those constraints affect both men and women differently.

Will Brehm  25:14
So, in your work, have you found any examples of school systems or classrooms or individuals where gender equity trumps, or is the focus, rather than gender parity?

Supriya Baily  25:32
Yes. Over the last few years, I’ve had some amazing experiences with teachers around the world. And one of the things I found is that there is a strong drive for us to engage boys and girls in classrooms in ways that allow for them to be who they want to be and to be treated fairly, but also be provided opportunities that give them a little bit of a jump so that they can move forward if they’ve been historically marginalized in their classrooms. But that’s not really the story here. In this work, what we’re trying to do is to push scholars and policymakers and researchers to not just be satisfied with the numbers. So, we’re trying to ensure that people are not just saying, well, we’ve got 50-50, we’ve done this, we’re successful, let’s move on. We need people to talk to teachers, we need people to talk to parents, we need people to talk to administrators, leaders, policymakers to say, “So, what’s next”? And one of the things that we’ve pointed out is the Sustainable Development Goals that have just come out. And the reality is, the more that we look at them, the more…they do aspire to ask for great things for people on various levels. But again, when we are asked to measure how far we’ve come, I think that measurement is going to be very difficult because it’s going to be much easier to come back to numbers rather than to understand the experience of what’s happening in schools for girls and boys.

Will Brehm  27:47
Well, Supriya Baily, thank you very much for joining FreshEd.

Supriya Baily  27:51
Thank you for having me.

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