ABSTRACT
Despite the fact that research in the area of early childhood has heavily influenced policy for gender equity in education over the last ten years, for the most part early childhood, more than primary and secondary schooling, seems successfully to evade the focus of gender equity policy. A number of factors pull the attention of gender equity policy activity away from early childhood, including the traditionally isolationist cultures and philosophies of early childhood education; the impact of the economistic policies of global capitalism on education;1 and the instrumental focus on those levels of schooling where ‘streaming’ along gendered lines into different subject areas is clearly relevant to different career opportunities and to the persistence of a gender segregated labour market. While the articulation between students’ final years of schooling and the workplace has been the subject of a generation of gender equity programmes, the gendering of the schoolchild, or the processes through which children’s learning and behaviour is regulated in the early childhood years to take on public ‘student’ versions of being male or female, impacting on their learning and social relations throughout schooling, has received little attention.
