Hidden figures: showing the importance of women in science

Tomorrow is the second year of celebrating the new UN Day on Girls and Women in Science. This subject seems to be picking up steam. It has even hit the big time – featuring in a blockbuster Hollywood film, Hidden Figures, about the role of black women responsible for doing the equations behind the space trips of astronauts for NASA. Formally recognizing this issue in a UN day – a previously hidden manifestation of gender inequality – is worth celebrating.

It’s worth remembering that gender equality in education cannot be boiled down just to what’s going on in the classroom. The links between education and work show why. What happens in the labour market can affect what happens in schools and universities. The different ways that women and men participate in labour markets is not just down to the level of education they have under their belts, but is also due to the influences of cultural norms, stereotypes and discrimination.

Smashing the glass ceiling

Within institutions, women can find it difficult to reach senior positions, hitting a ‘glass ceiling’. Likewise, relatively few women occupy senior leadership positions in key economic institutions. Significant pay gaps exist between women and men doing the same job in virtually all occupations. In many high-income countries, even though more women complete secondary education than men, still men will earn more.

Sharing, learning, leading: the E-9 countries and SDG4

With the advent of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), existing education partnerships are re-assessing how best they can pool their knowledge and efforts to achieve the ambitious global goal in education (SDG4). One of those partnerships is the E-9 Initiative, established at the Education for All Summit in New Delhi in 1993. From an international perspective the E-9 countries – Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan – are a distinct constituency. As a group they constitute the nine most highly-populated countries of the Global South and represent 53% of the global population. Over two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults and over half of the world’s out-of-school children reside in these countries.  They have acute, and often similar, education challenges to overcome.

This time it was the turn of Bangladesh to assume the rotating presidency of the E-9 initiative and host the ministerial meeting, which took place in Dhaka on 4-6 February. The GEM Report, in collaboration with UNESCO, prepared a background note for the meeting, which served as a basis for discussion on possible future areas of focus of the E-9 initiative.

What did you learn in school? Is ‘B’ for Banana? Or Burka?

Across the news this week is proof of the explosive nature of textbook content if not got right. The Education Ministry in Bangladesh has released a new version of textbooks for grade one to grade ten that many say display a shift towards radical Islam.

Bangladesh has always had separate religious books in schools for followers of different faiths, and textbooks for other disciplines have always been secular. This year, however, the new books have religious content in disciplines that are not about religious studies at all.  First graders now learn that ‘O’ is for ‘orna’, which is a type of scarf worn by devout Muslim girls, rather than for ‘ol’, a type of yam, for instance. In addition, and oft-cited in the press, 17 poems have been removed, which local media is reporting happened at the request of a group of conservative Islamic religious scholars – Hefazat-e-Islam – who reportedly told the government they were ‘atheistic’.

A few years ago, Hefazat-e-Islam rose up in the capital city of Dhaka, asking for Islamic education to be mandatory, including making changes to textbooks. Since then, leaders of Madrasa schools have been calling for changes to be made to textbooks, including in the way gender equality is portrayed. Now, there are no conversations between boys and girls in textbooks, and you won’t be able to find illustrations of girls not wearing head scarfs. Biology lessons no longer cover the word ‘period’ for girls. Names of people affiliated with religions other than Islam have been replaced, including that of Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote the national anthem for Bangladesh.

Education – know your rights

Today is the international day of zero tolerance to female genital mutilation (FGM). Globally, it is estimated that at least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone some form of FGM. If current trends continue, 15 million additional girls between ages 15 and 19 will be subjected to the practice by 2030. No matter which way you look at it, FGM is a blatant violation of the human rights of girls and women.

The new Sustainable Development Agenda has a target dedicated to eliminating ‘harmful practices’ standing in the way of Gender Equality and women’s Empowerment (SDG 5), which includes child marriage and female genital mutilation. In some countries the practice is still happening with huge frequency. A staggering 98% of girls aged 15-49 years in Somalia have been subject to the abuse, as have 97% in Guinea and 93% in Djibouti.

Our latest 2016 GEM Report took pains to show the vast and beneficial impacts that education can have on all of the other SDGs, including  on social development outcomes such as SDG5 on gender equality.

By imparting core skills such as literacy, education facilitates women’s access to information about social and legal rights and welfare services. Learning to read and write helps women be more confident in identifying and challenging inequality, unjust traditions, and norms and practices that perpetuate their low status. For instance, low levels of education are a significant risk factor in perpetuating and experiencing intimate partner violence.

Young people take over the UN to discuss Quality Education

Image: Twitter

Yesterday, almost 900 young people from over 85 countries took over the UN General Assembly for the UN Youth Assembly. The theme: Realizing the 2030 Agenda: Youth in Action looked at the role of young people in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and education was front and centre of discussions with participants receiving copies of the GEM Youth Report.

Aaron Benavot, Director of the GEM Report delivered a keynote presentation on SDG4 in the opening session. Following the opening session, the GEM Report led a panel discussion on quality education with colleagues from UNGEI, UNICEF, UN Women, INEE and ONE. The panelists discussed how the persistent barriers in access to education, particularly for the most marginalized, can be overcome; the ways in which education can have a transformative impact on other sectors; and the need to build effective partnerships between young people, government, local communities, the private sector and UN agencies.

The GEM Report’s keynote presentation challenged the young people to think critically about the education goal by examining what people should learn, when people should learn, who should learn and why we should learn.

The selective way in which countries cover the Holocaust in learning materials

by Peter Carrier, Georg Eckert Institute

This blog assesses how the Holocaust is addressed in official curricula and textbooks worldwide. It shows that, while discrepancies between historical knowledge in different countries challenge global citizenship, historical education nonetheless contributes towards greater awareness of human rights violations and the prevention of atrocities in the long term.  The UNESCO report about The International Status of Education about the Holocaust (2015) thus contributes towards our understanding of the impact of curricula and textbooks, as outlined in the 2016 GEM Report.

One of the most striking aspects of education about the Holocaust is that no country is alike. Even when two countries stipulate simply ‘the Holocaust’ in their national curricula, the event is invariably contextualised in idiosyncratic ways. England, for example, stipulates that the Holocaust be taught in the context of the Second World War, while the curriculum of Mexico demands that it be taught in the context of lessons about human rights violations. Some countries place the Holocaust squarely in the centre of the history of the twentieth century, while others place it within European history or do not mention it at all. In short, among the 195 officially recognised countries in the world, curricula stipulate at least 135 different versions of the Holocaust.

Representations of the Holocaust in history textbooks are more complex than those found in curricula. The UNESCO report International Status of Education about the Holocaust – A Global Mapping of Textbooks (2015) documents the narratives of the Holocaust in eighty-nine textbooks published in twenty-six countries since 2000. The findings show that there are broadly shared patterns by which the Holocaust is represented – patterns which convey recurrent geographical boundaries and time spans, protagonists, interpretative patterns, narrative techniques and pedagogical methods. However, all countries demonstrate narrative idiosyncracies by emphasising selective information and the local significance of the event, or by appropriating it in the interests of local populations.

Gender Equality in Post-Genocide Rwanda

This blog looks at the positive example Rwanda sets in promoting gender equality through its textbooks. It is part of a series of blogs on this site published to encourage debates around a new GEM Report Policy Paper: Between the Lines, which looks at the content of textbooks and how it reflects some of the key concepts in Target 4.7 in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

by S. Garnett Russell, Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and Director of the George Clement Bond Center for African Education

In 1994, Rwanda experienced one of the worst genocides in history. In just 100 days, more than 800,000 Rwandans were killed and roughly 350,000 women were raped. Today, Rwanda is held up as a paradigm for countries hoping to achieve gender equality in a post-conflict context. This blog highlights some of the work the country has done in pushing equal rights for men and women in its laws, policies, and through its education system via textbooks. It also shows, however, that deeply embedded views about gender norms will take time to change.

Let’s decide how to monitor school-related violence

Today, a large symposium is opening in South Korea on School Violence and Bullying: From Evidence to Action, with more than 250 participants from 70 countries coming together to discuss how to combat the issue.

A new Global Status Report on School Violence and Bullying is being released this morning by UNESCO and the Institute of School Violence Prevention at Ewha Womans University. It compiles data from 19 low and middle-income countries and found that 34 % of students aged 11–13 reported being bullied in the previous month, with 8% reporting daily bullying.

These are shocking findings. They sit alongside many other similar findings, which give us snapshots of school-related violence in different countries, and regions, and confirm that bullying and school-related violence are issues we all need to pay more attention to. But, as our new paper, released in time for this Symposium shows, these disparate findings, taken from various cross-national and national surveys can almost never be compared one with the other. From the perspective of a monitoring body aiming to look at the global prevalence of the issue, and help inform policy makers with those findings, this measurement issue needs addressing.

How can education help us rethink what we mean by prosperity?

We need to reconceive what it means to prosper. The current prosperity enjoyed by pockets of people across the world has had a devastating impact on our natural environment and left too many people behind. Education is often held up as the panacea for poverty, and while there is little doubt that education increases income, reduces poverty and contributes to economic growth, there is an urgent need for us to rethink how we educate ourselves in order for our economies to become more sustainable and inclusive.

Our publication, Partnering for prosperity: Education for green and inclusive growth, launched today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, describes the transformative role that education and lifelong learning can play in fostering green growth. Education can help make production and consumption sustainable, provide green skills for current and emergent industries, and orient higher education and research towards green innovation. At the same time, as the economy becomes greener, it must also become more inclusive. Prosperity must be conceived in ways that leave no one behind. Closer integration of education, economic and employment policies are essential for that change to happen.

We must stamp out stereotypical teaching tools

Gender bias in textbooks is one of the best camouflaged and hardest to budge rocks in the road to gender equality in education. Through stereotypical and unbalanced depictions of men and women in stories and illustrations, textbooks undermine values and attitudes conducive to gender equality and empowerment, a cornerstone in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Our latest policy paper, about which we’ve been running an extensive blog series over recent weeks, has taken a detailed look at the content of textbooks. This week we will be focusing on the way they cover gender issues and women’s rights, in order to help feed into an online WikiGender discussion with OECD and UNESCO. Partners for the discussion include UNGEI (United Nations Girls Education Initiative), FAWE (Forum for African Women Educationalists), GPE (Global Partnership for Education) and the Council of Europe. Join us online this week via the website, or tune into the Google Hangout this Friday at 3pm CET. It is lined up to be a vibrant discussion.