Half the WorldWomen and technical education [Archives:2005/851/Culture]
Nisha
While coming back from a presentation on early marriage in Yemen, a colleague and I started talking about women and technology. To be precise, we were talking about why women in Yemen are not so visible in technical education streams. While supporting research on early marriage and later while conducting an assessment of gender and livelihoods situation in Hadhramaut, I found that there is a very high concentration of girls in the humanities and social science branches of learning. Some women are visible in the biological sciences at the university in Al-Mukalla. In Al-wadi wa Al-Sahara region of Hadhramaut, there is near complete absence of women from formal technical education. This is so despite the fact that the enrolment rates for girls in basic and secondary education has gone up.
If growing enrolment rates could be converted into improved retention rates, I am sure we will have a much larger number of young women with a desire to join undergraduate programmes. And many of them may want to pursue technical education. Even now, there is an interest among girls to pursue technical education but more often than not their interest does materialize into enrolment. Discussions with authorities in technical institutions often inform that there are no regulations to restrict women from enrolling. Still the absence of women is too stark to be ignored.
There are several complex reasons from women's absence from these institutions. Most of reasons originate from social attitudes towards women and the persistent effects of traditional restrictions on girls and women. Wrong informal career counselling at schools, by families and family friends to girls is very common. These advices are given according to gender stereotypes. Many girls recounted that they were told: 'since men bear the primary responsibility of earning an income for the family, it is more important for their future career prospects to have access to technical education'; 'family's limited resources should be invested wisely to bring benefits. Because boys will stay with the family, whether or not they are married, they really should be the first choice of family resources and technical education'; 'technical education is masculine, it is for men. It is not appropriate for a girl to work on machines'; 'girls are emotional beings, they lack a rational mind, which is essential for technical subjects so they will have a better chance of a good result if they study humanities or social sciences'. Such advices put undue pressure on girls to opt out from technical education. They also shape their view of what is appropriate education and career for them. And often, it is parents who decide which subject their daughter would study.
Of course, there are infrastructural and institutional obstacles too that keep women away from gaining education and training in technical areas. As per rules of an institution or the state access to a technical institution may be open and it may be unlawful to deny admission to a student because she is a woman. But in practice, women are denied admission due to financial constraints to provide basic facilities needed by women like transport and toilets or lack of women teachers or inability to provide separate classes for women.
I also found evidence from students of co-educational basic and secondary schools that the attention that a teacher usually gives to students is also gendered. Many girls feel discouraged by the way their teachers focus to ensure learning by male students in the class – answering their questions, helping them understand the subject and encouraging them. These girls feel excluded from classroom learning. It is not uncommon for a girl to be snubbed by a teacher if she persists in getting her questions answered or laughed at by others in the class for trying to gain attention.
One important way out of this situation is to change current teacher training. At present, teacher training does not look into societal aspects that affect girls and boys enrolment and retention in technical education programmes. Teaching, even if technical, is a human activity. It cannot influence human minds by imparting education and training in a mechanical way. It cannot regard that the responsibility of a teacher is merely to teach in the same way irrespective of who is the student. Girls and boys are socialized differently by our societies and the socialization process affects freedom that they have as girls and boys to pursue a particular education or training programmes and also the ways in which they learn.
Teacher training should be very clearly opposed to gender stereotyping. Teachers and schools should be careful in imagining students' innate abilities as girls and boys or future careers. To be effective, teacher training should be supported by changes in the curricula and teaching methods so that girls are welcomed into technical programmes and feel included in the classroom learning. Otherwise, teacher training will merely serve as a shiny exterior to deflect the attention away from deeper social attitudes. Also teacher training should not be one time event because even if we have a group of gender sensitive teachers, there would still exist older teachers whose training paid no attention to gender issues.
The strongest encouragement for girls to join technical education, to me, appears to come from two sources: supportive parents and single-sex institutions. Girls during a conversation in a village, Al-Gurfah, shared that they are keen to learn computer use and programming and that there are several computer education institutes. But their ability to learn is limited by the financial constraints and co-educational nature of these institutes. They demanded 'women's only' institutions because in single-sex institutions physical access to computers, for example, is unaffected by boys or men's tendency to claim rights to and competence in the use of computers in a way that discourages them. While training in mixed-sex institutions will be good for preparing girls for greater participation in the labour market the way it is, ie, male dominated, short and medium term measures like single-sex institutions are needed to convince parents and encourage girls to enter technical education in large numbers.
University faculties like engineering, information technology, architecture, etc need to make specific attempts to encourage women's enrolments. The obvious absence of women teachers in such faculties is also a deterrent to girls joining these faculties. Coming from a segregated background, it is extremely hard for girls to cope well in male dominated faculties. They face problems in looking up to male academics as mentors. This problem will persist even if male teachers are gender sensitive. The social set up does not view close female-male interactions favourably. The need, therefore, is to look at the issue and address it from a multi-dimensional perspective.
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