Why Should We Teach Gender Studies?

In the United States, members of the press describe a female presidential candidate as “rude,” “nasty,” and “angry” for confronting a political rival as well as a president who expresses racial violence and misogyny in his speeches and who mocks her cultural heritage. In Mexico, a school principal blames a group of female students for sexual harassment that is committed against them. In Brazil, the elected president declares war on any philosophy that speaks for the rights of women and minorities. With this toxic context, we need, more than ever, Gender Studies in schools.

Gender perspective, as Susana Gamba, an expert in Gender Studies, defines it, is the epistemological conception of reality from the viewpoint of each gender and its relationship with power. This perspective is the basis from which Gender Studies start. Explained this way, it seems somewhat complicated and purely academic, but gender perspective is something necessary and straightforward; it concerns us all as academicians, researchers, professors, and everyone responsible both for the production and the distribution of knowledge.

Gender Studies 101

Gender ideology is a term that certainly ignites heated conversations at all levels, including family gatherings and water cooler discussions, academicians trying to define social phenomena, or even politicians whose agenda is to pronounce themselves for or against conceptions of gender. The topic is trendy, and it is something we talk about all the time, but do we know what it means? We can define it as a set of principles in which female academicians who are experts in gender studies have found consensus; it is the basis of discourse about the gender perspective. If we want to understand the ideology of gender, we must first talk about the studies that produce the knowledge on which this ideology is based.

The concept of gender as a social platform from which the roles attributed to each sex are derived began to be studied in the late 1940s. The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was one of the first academicians to start to conceptualize the idea of gender and how this influences how women are socially constructed. One of the most important postulates of Beauvoir’s discourse is that no one is born a woman, she becomes a woman, referring not to the biological sex of women, but to the social symbology from which we come to understand the models of behavior and the social hierarchy of those born with the female biological sex.

In 1968, Robert Stroller, professor and researcher of psychiatry known for his theories on the development of gender identity, extended the understanding of these concepts by pointing out the difference between biological sex, gender, and the roles of each one. These concepts form a social structure composed of symbols, representations, norms, values, and practices that are elaborated not only based on anatomical, sexual and physiological differences but on the attributes we assign to them. This is entirely social and gives meaning to the relationships among people classified in a gender.

Stemming from the work of Stroller, women’s studies, later called Gender Studies, began to make a presence in the curricula of higher education institutions. But what is taught at Gender Studies courses? The subject is expansive, and those who study it can learn very diverse concepts related to gender and how it is perceived in social, economic, and political levels. In general terms, almost all instances that seek to teach the discipline do so on the definition of gender, its differences, and connections to biological sex, as well as the philosophical, anthropological, and social constructions with which we form the idea of masculinity and femininity. These courses also examine the intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic class, capacity, sexuality, and other dimensions that differentiate in the conceptualization and hierarchy of people on the social ladder.

The goal of an academic degree in Gender Studies is for students to learn to identify, analyze cultural practices and traditional notions that revolve around gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation, as well as understanding how gender is an influential factor in people’s lives from a social, political, and economic point of view. This knowledge is valuable if you want to delve into explaining how the differences in gender play an important role in both the microcosm and macrocosm of society. But there is value in the idea that Gender Studies need to stop being an elective subject but should be injected into the common core of curricula generally. The reason is simple: we do not know how to name or describe the social imbalances nor the exercises of invisibility that are exerted over women and other social minority groups.

The necessity for an education with a gender perspective

In previous articles, we have discussed how the social dynamics that concern gender, ethnicity, or race, negatively affect access to education, job opportunities, as well as the validation and the production of knowledge for women in academia. There still exist within the academic and scientific community, cases of women and people from racial minorities and LGBT who are not entitled to speech and publication of their work and debate without jeopardizing their employment position, physical integrity, or the residency in their own countries.

The situation for students is just as worrying. In Alaska, a teenage girl was disqualified from a swimming competition for a small malfunction with her swimsuit. A sexualizing judgment by adult viewers accentuated the incident. In the rest of the country, 53% of the public schools have strict dress codes that disproportionately affect the female student population. In Mexico, a group of high school students had to organize a protest to speak out against their own principal, who had justified instances of sexu
al harassment towards them by male students, holding the girls accountable for the incident. In this context, there is a clear urgency for an educational drive towards an idea of gender that frees us from the conceptualization of the female gender as an anomaly, secondary to the male and inherently sexual. And the place to start is not until college but at schools.

Gender studies and primary education?

Schools are the best place to discuss the idea of gender and its social implications in a friendly way that helps children and young people form a more egalitarian conception of how we construct the way we understand male and female genders. They don’t have to be complex ideas or readings involving topics that might be considered sensitive, such as those handled by Beauvoir or Stroller. A simple experiment like the one done by the organization Lifting Limits in five schools in the United Kingdom has set the tone for how education about equality can begin in the early years.

Small actions can be taken, such as questioning the amount of literature available in which girls have agency and weight in the narrative; textbooks that mention the historical and scientific achievements of women on a par with that of men, and a conscious intention of freeing teaching discourses from stereotypes that are derogatory for female students. These are the types of measures that prepare children and young people, not only to have a more balanced vision of the world in terms of gender but also to help them build cognitive structures so that, at more advanced educational levels, they can understand the concepts and themes that Gender Studies cover, as well as the problems that this discipline aims to analyze, examine, make visible, communicate, and, eventually, resolve.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0