Introduction to Model United Nations Q: What is the United Nations?
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- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26.
- Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 28 and 29.
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education, Articles 3 and 4.
- Economic and Cultural Factors
- gender discrimination
- Cultural Factors However, cultural differences such as patrilocality , patrilineality
- Relations Between Economic and Cultural Factors
- Policy approaches As shown in the above section, culturally rooted gender
- Gender Discrimination Within the School System
- Gender Bias Within Textbooks Textbooks are a core part of learning in many classrooms and are estimated to use up to 95% of classroom time. 8 Discriminatory
- Policies for Change Setting global education goals in the past provided an impetus for governments and NGOs to redress gender
- Discrimination towards Pregnant or Parenting Students
- Gender-based Harassment
- Transition into the Workforce and Support Systems
- patrilocality
Amman Affirmation, 1996. Describes education as necessary for democracy, mutual respect, and participation in the modern world.28 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Articles 10 and 14. Declares that discrimination against women in education, career and vocational guidance, and information on family health shall be eliminated, as women have an equal right to enjoy the benefits of education as men.29 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26. Declares that everyone has the right to education and all education should be directed to develop the human personality and human rights.30 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Article 5. States that all nations should prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination, as everybody has the right to equal education.31 Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 28 and 29. Decided that all children have a right to education, which primary education should be compulsory and free, that secondary education should be available to all children, and that higher levels of education should be available on the basis of merit.32 Convention Against Discrimination in Education, Articles 3 and 4. Declares that states should undertake to halt any practices that involve discrimination in education in order to promote equality on the basis of individual merit and not gender or race.33
Figure 1(a) displays the male to female college enrollment rates against GDP for multiple nations in the World Bank’s World Development Indicators data set.34 As shown, male bias decreases as GDP increases, implying a causal relationship: as economies grow, the educational opportunities for women increase; or, as women gain access to education, the increase in skilled labor allows economies to expand. However, women’s access to education is not necessarily only based on the economic state of their nation, as cultural aspects often offer greater insight into the issue. Both China and India are labeled in Figure 1(a) because of their large populations and their strong societal preference towards sons. However, both nations are relatively moderate on the scale of educational bias. 
When using economic development to explain gender discrimination, some factors to consider include the household income disparity, physical infrastructure, technology, and fertility, the effects of which would be compounded by poverty. Services become more developed as countries’ economies expand, displacing economic sectors like agriculture and industry.35 Agriculture and manufacturing require brute physical strength, granting a comparative advantage to men in the early development stages of a nation; this explains why female education and labor productivity increases with development.36 In a study surrounding economic reforms in China, women had a greater advantage in picking tea leaves off of the newly introduced cash crops as opposed to men’s advantage in picking fruit, and there were fewer sex-selective abortions and less neglect of female children.37 As women’s share of household income increased, they gained bargaining power, had a weaker son preference, and prevailed in household decisions, helping to introduce equality between the genders. As economic opportunities for women rise, the benefits of education and gender equality also increase.38 A theory known as “The U-shaped Hypothesis” describes the relationship of women and the development of nations. Developing countries move towards factory production and manual labor, causing a withdrawal of women from the labor force due to the social stigma of women in manual labor jobs (the bottom of the U).39 However, as development continues, female wage opportunities increase as the sector shifts towards services -- jobs considered more respectable for women -- and rates of female education and entrance into the workforce grow (the rising of the U).40 The prospect of jobs and the freedom to take advantage of new job opportunities (as men are often forced into a family business) allows women to change their ideas of traditional feminine options and to become more educated and independent.
However, cultural differences such as patrilocality, patrilineality, traditional support from sons, the dowry system, the role of sons in religion, and the idea of female purity all result in a lack of female education and freedoms. Women are often undervalued in the workplace or schools because of their traditional roles as mothers or housewives.41 In countries that greatly value the family, women are important within the household and hold key roles in organizing and running the house, but are generally seen as having no place in schools or with careers.42 These perceptions are only enforced by traditions such as patrilocality and patrilineality that keep inheritances and businesses with the males.43 The idea of female purity and safety often reflects interests of keeping young girls virginal and young wives faithful and has been shown to be an immediate cause of reduced education and career opportunities.44 Parental fears surrounding safety on long trips to school or any interaction with male peers or teachers keep girls’ school participation down. Girls receiving bicycles, schools built in a village, and the construction of “girl-friendly” schools with sex-segregated classes and bathrooms raise participation in rural areas of Pakistan and India.45 However, this concern does not only pertain to education; disallowing women from working outside of the house helps to reduce “pollution” from men outside of their families, maintaining their purity and desirability in upper caste women in India. Female seclusion (purdah) is also a tenet of Islam, and, like Hindu women, Muslim women in predominately Muslim nations have low workforce participation. However, there is less statistical bias towards boys in Muslim nations at birth and in inheritance.
Economic development affects and is affected by culture. For example, in studies including the one surrounding the introduction of cash crops, at first the men worked in physical-intensive fields while women cared for the family, providing an economic incentive to farming families to raise more sons and become biased towards the sons. However, gender gaps persist when economic environments change, showing that they reflect factors other than the economic development of the nation. Immigrants continue to show sex preferences in their children, an example being sex-selective abortions, or an abortion of a female child due to its sex, even when their economic environment has completely changed.46 The continued son preference in the face of lessened economic incentives suggests that these gender-related practices, although possibly based in economic factors, are embodied in societal traditions or beliefs.
As shown in the above section, culturally rooted gender norms have not been dissipated by advances in GDP or development and often require explicit policy intervention. Economically caused gender bias should also not be left to resolve itself via economic growth. One type of gender-progressive policy is granting legal rights to women. A powerful example of this tool is India’s move to reserve political seats for women: a fraction of seats at various levels of government are, by mandate, held by women. The most direct impact of the law change on women's welfare has been to close the gap in women's representation; female leaders implement policies that better reflect the policy preferences of their female constituents. Moreover, this reform has begun to reshape attitudes toward women as leaders and raised the aspirations of and long-term investments in girls. However, enforcement of such legal reforms is often weak, and there is still a lack of training and education for women elected into government positions.1 For example, the legal reform granting women rights to ancestral land in India is far from universally enforced. 1 Similarly, bans on prenatal sex determination, dowry, and child marriage are often minimally enforced. A second policy tool is the provision of financial incentives for parents to invest in or have girls; for example, many states in India offer incentives to have daughters. Conditional cash transfer programs such as Progress/Oportunidades in Mexico give a larger financial incentive to educate girls than boys, responding to the higher dropout rate of girls.1 Another approach is to shift household financial resources to mothers based on the hypothesis that more influence in the household for women will help break the cycle of gender discrimination, as women have less of a pro-boy bias than men do. There are several pieces of evidence that prove that when women control a larger share of household income, girls' outcomes improve. However, this approach has an important limitation, as the differences between men and women in their gender attitudes are sometimes surprisingly small, or even counterintuitive. In India, tolerance for gender-based violence is 37% among women and 33% among men. Similarly, when asked about their ideal sex composition of children, 20% of women and 19% of men wanted strictly more sons than daughters. In other cases, women do state more progressive gender attitudes than men, but not by a wide margin. For a World Values Survey question about whether a university education is less important for girls than for boys, in China 23% of men and 18% of women agree with the statement.1 The similar gender attitudes of men and women imply that more decision-making power for mothers would not necessarily translate into significantly better treatment of girls. Women’s non-progressive views can be shaped by practical concerns. For example, women gain status in the household and enjoy greater well being once they give birth to a son.1, 13 In addition, the lack of role models for women means that they could simply fail to realize that equality for women is possible. Thus, another policy approach is to try to change women's attitudes and help them realize the possibilities, perhaps by creating specific group role models. Although without this specific goal, commercial television appears to have reshaped women's views, for example about having a smaller family size in India16 and Brazil17. Several scholars have linked birthrate decline to female education; educated women generally prefer smaller families, allowing them to pursue their own interests while investing more resources and time in each child 16. Television depresses fertility because many of its offerings provide a model of middle-class families successfully grappling with the transition from tradition to modernity, helped by the fact that they have few children to support 16, 17. Changing men's attitudes is equally important. On one hand, mothers' gender attitudes appear to be more influential than those of fathers in shaping children's gender views; on the other hand, fathers typically have more say in the household about decisions affecting girls, such as how much to spend on their education.3, 4
In some more developed countries, such as the United States and European nations, there are laws that guarantee the right to education free from sex discrimination. For example, in 1972 the US enacted Title IX, promising free access to education without sexual bias.3 However, even in first-world countries there is bias within the educational programs. In the United States, according to a paper written on “How Schools Cheat Girls”, girls “...significantly outperform boys on reading and writing tests, while almost matching them in math and science,” but receive less and often much more negative attention from teachers than that towards their male peers.13 The American Association of University Women published a report in 1992 detailing how the socialization of gender within the school system causes girls to feel unequal to boys; seating or organization by gender affirms that boys and girls should be treated differently, ignoring acts of sexual harassment allows the degradation of girls, and tolerating different behaviors because “boys will be boys” perpetuates the oppression of girls.13 Although girls have potential to meet or surpass boys academically, they are socialized in ways that work against gender equality. As shown in a 1990 study by Good and Brophy, girls are taught that neatness, quietness, calm, and popularity are more important that competence, while boys are taught to be independent and active within the classroom. Girls who asserted themselves in ways contrary to traditional femininity were labeled with derogatory, even vulgar, terms. A 2001 study by Reay and a 2000 report by Jones, Evans, Byrd, and Campbell found that a girl’s femininity in primary school is defined in relation to the boys in the room: ‘girlies’ flirted with boys, ‘tomboys’ played sports with the boys, and ‘spice girls’ played rate-the-boy on the playground. Assertive behavior from the girls was seen as a character defect, while boys’ misbehavior was seen as a desire to be independent.13
Textbooks are a core part of learning in many classrooms and are estimated to use up to 95% of classroom time.8 Discriminatory gender norms and practices are conveyed through many textbooks and lower girls’ engagement in the classroom and limit their expectations in educations and future opportunities. However measured -- in lines of text, proportions of named characters, mentions in titles, citations -- women are under-represented in textbooks and curricula.8 Cited in the Education for All Global Monitoring Report of 2008, Chinese pre-primary and primary textbooks showed frequent female characters only in reading materials for very young children; the proportion of male characters rose from 48% in books for 4-year-olds to 61% for those for 6-year-olds.8, 14 In social studies texts all scientists and soldiers were depicted as male, and females represented three-quarters of service personnel and only one-fifth of the historical characters in total. In India, more than half of the illustrations in primary English, Hindi, mathematics, science, and social studies textbooks showed only males, while only 6% showed only females. In six mathematics textbooks used in primary schools, not a single woman was depicted as an executive, engineer, shopkeeper, or merchant.8 This gender bias is suspected of diminishing girls’ achievements to a largely unknown extent. For example, in almost all international educational tests, girls have an advantage over boys in reading; however, in 16 of the world’s least affluent countries with the greatest gender bias in textbooks, girls were behind boys by 4%. Textbook bias is near universal, with the only exception being Sweden, whose textbooks may actually depict males in stereotypically feminine tasks more often than found in real life. Textbook bias is also uniform in the proportion of named characters or the highly gender-stereotyped roles in the household as well as in the occupational division of labor; women are portrayed as accommodating, nurturing, passive conformists, while men are portrayed as impressive, noble, and commanding. These stereotypes constrain not only girls’ but also boys’ ideas of who they are and who they can become. 8, 14
Setting global education goals in the past provided an impetus for governments and NGOs to redress gender bias in education, as shown in the EFA Global Monitoring Report of 2015. One of three strategies in Pakistan’s 2001–2015 EFA action plan to improve gender parity and equality was a call for curricula and textbooks to be free of gender bias. In addition, international agencies including the World Bank have promoted policies and initiatives to tackle gender bias in textbooks in low-income countries. Several large education initiatives – including in Bangladesh, Chad, Ghana, Guinea and Nepal – had explicit components aimed at eliminating gender bias from curricula and textbooks. Similarly, UNESCO has also funded gender audits of textbooks, including in Jordan and Pakistan. In China, the Ford Foundation funded research to investigate gender bias in textbooks and supported the development of education plans, activities and reference materials to promote gender equality.8 Despite these attempts to provide greater gender balance, however, recent studies show that bias in textbooks remains pervasive in many countries, including Georgia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, and some high-income countries such as Australia. A 2015 study in Pakistan, for example, found no change in the negative portrayal of women in Pakistani textbooks since 2004. In Iran in 2012, men made up 80% of characters in books designed by the Ministry of Education.9 In Australia, despite there being more females than males in the country, a study carried out in 2009 found that 57% of the characters in textbooks were men. There were double the amount of men portrayed in law and order roles, and four times as many depicting characters engaged in politics and government.10 A lack of political leadership and weak support by civil society limit enactment of policy reform to eliminate gender bias in instructional materials. In some instances, policy recommendations from the global level have failed to find sufficient national support, resulting in slow progress. While the findings of the Ford Foundation research were widely disseminated in China, some stakeholders were skeptical about the importance of advocating for change. In Pakistan, resistance within institutions responsible for curriculum reform and textbook production has contributed to the low political priority given to textbook revision, reinforced by a lack of public support. Another challenge, as found in some states in the United States, is that key professionals responsible for providing guidelines for textbook production and approving textbooks lack adequate knowledge regarding gender sensitivity. However, there is improvement in some countries as textbooks reflect gender equality and women and girls’ active participation in society. In Jordan, women are portrayed as prime ministers, as soldiers and pilots. In Palestine, they are shown as street demonstrators, and voting. Some Indian and Malawian textbooks challenge students to identify gender bias in accompanying illustrations and urge them to discuss these stereotypes with their peers. Likewise, Sweden holds a progressive approach to gender in its textbooks.
Separate is not equal or fair. In studies surrounding sex-segregated schools, girls often receive lower quality facilities, treatment, teachers, and materials.15 Sex-segregation is also involuntary, keeping girls from following their interests if a class is deemed all-boys. Before the enforcement of directives such as U.S. Title IX in 1972, girls were kept from enrolling in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. Sex-segregation has “not generated methodologically sound empirical evidence showing societal benefits, and it maintains and exacerbates sexist attitudes” and gender stereotypes.18 Sex-segregated programs portray exclusion as acceptable, devalue diversity, and create extra costs in running two parallel programs.18 Pseudoscientific theories about how boys’ and girls’ brains function and how they learn used to justify such practices are unfounded and include biased, harmful concepts about traditional femininity and masculinity.15
Pregnant and parenting female students often face severe obstacles to educational equality, leading to high dropout rates; 70% of teenage pregnancies result in dropouts. Schools treat young mothers as behavior problems and deny them full access to an education, fail to provide necessary services to support them in their parenting responsibilities, and engage in policies that lead them to drop out of school3. Some students reported an outright push to leave their school and move to a school with substandard education. More subtly, schools continue such discrimination by refusing to excuse absences for doctor’s appointments, refusing makeup work, expelling students from clubs on morality bases, or subjecting students to disparaging comments and disapproval from staff.3
Many schools trivialize or fail to take adequate steps to prevent or stop sexual harassment in the classroom. This permissive attitude is another way of reinforcing the socialization of girls as inferior to boys. By ignoring sexual harassment within schools, the schools grant tacit approval, passing on a message that girls are not worthy of respect and that exerting power over girls is an appropriate behavior for boys. Schools worldwide have issues with gender-based harassment, interfering with the quality of education and the opportunities available for each child.3
Although it may appear as if men and women have the same opportunities for pursuing careers, a lack of legal rights and the discrimination caused by ideas of feminine values and roles still results in a difficulty for women to move into the workforce. Many countries have cultural norms that favor men over women, such as patrilocality and concern for a woman’s purity, that explain low female employment in areas such as India, China, the Middle East, and North Africa.4 Gender gaps within the workforce are systematically larger in poorer countries, suggesting that either underdevelopment itself explains gender inequality or that the lack of women in the workforce keeps the nation from achieving its potential.
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