New Directions in Research on Women’s Education in the Third World: The Development of Women-Centric Approaches

Women’s education as a research concern is relatively new to academic scholarship as well as to policy makers and planners. Before the rebirth of the women’s movement in the late 1960s, academic research and policy studies focusing on women were virtually non-existent. Most disciplines be that discipline education, anthropology, sociology, history, political science, economics or literature ignored women or assumed that their roles were marginal to public life. ¹ There were but a handful of scattered individual studies which remained outside of the mainstream of research and all but ignored. This was the case in North America and Europe as well as in the third world. Studies of education and its outcomes were, when all is said and done, studies of males. Gender was rarely acknowledged, even as a background variable. Few studies even explored the existence of sex differences. In research on schooling in the third world, scholars may have focused on education and equality, but the only forms of equality of interest were based on class, ethnicity or race. ² Most were mute when it came to gender.