Gender and education in South Asia

In postcolonial South Asia, gender issues have been a prominent concern within the education sector, though often animated by logics and impulses that have little to do with changing women’s subordinate status or challenging norms and institutions of patriarchy. In this chapter, I analyze the central trends that have shaped policies towards women’s education and gendered patterns of access and inequality in the education sector in South Asia. My review of the body of research and policy on gender and education illustrates that there are four main trajectories. Each coincides with a different period in the history of development policy and planning in South Asia in which international institutions such as the World Bank and international NGOs such as Oxfam are infl uential ‘agenda setters’ that shape education priorities in the region. The fi rst phase was framed by alarmist calls for population control in the region that led international agencies to emphasize women’s education as a means to reduce fertility rates. This phase, inaugurated in the 1950s, circumscribed the gender and education discourse to women’s reproductive roles and the extent to which education could infl uence women’s fertility choices. The second phase marks the launch of a global compact on girls’ education. This compact was shaped by the Asian miracle of the 1980s with reference to Southeast Asian countries that demonstrated high growth rates and rapid industrialization. The impetus here was to carry over the lessons from South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore where mass expansion of schooling for both boys and girls was seen to play a crucial role in the economic growth of these countries and their rapid ascendency from ‘developing’ countries to ‘middle-income’ countries. The emphasis on gender parity in schooling became an important objective in the region as a whole at this time. The third trajectory coincides with the period of neoliberal economic reform in the 1990s where women are explicitly positioned as economic actors and, with the appropriate training and skills, could contribute to their family and community’s welfare. The fourth phase is an emergent one in which we see innovative critical research on the gendered structures and the structuring of gender in and through education expanding the theoretical contribution of this subfi eld beyond programmatic and policy concerns that relate to women’s access to education.