Gender Equity Movement in Schools

Gender equity is a wide-ranging social and political movement concerned with the elimination of discrimination based on gender and the promotion of equal opportunities for all individuals regardless of sex. The field of gender equity evolved from the more expansive civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and sought overall to unveil the pervasive nature of sexual discrimination and widen access of opportunities for all women, regardless of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and social class. Since that time, feminist researchers, teachers, community activists, and policymakers in the United States and other Western countries have fashioned a broad public forum to meet the goals of gender equity across diverse professions and multiple public institutions. Gender equity advocates maintain that discrimination based on sex results from beliefs, policies, and practices of institutions and governments that have supported the unequal treatment of girls and women as compared to boys and men. Such treatment may or may not be intentional, but it results in the denial of equal opportunity and rights for girls and women. These unjust beliefs, practices, and policies based on gender have resulted in a condition of pervasive sexism within society. Sexism can be overt or covert, intentional or not so, the results of which have clear unfavorable political, emotional, social, psychological, and economic consequences for girls and women in society.

The gender equity movement is fundamentally opposed to the widespread practices of sexism evident in society. The feminist theories that undergird the movement maintain that gender is a social construct more than a biologically determined identity. As such, gender identities are largely determined by the beliefs, values, and practices within a given society. Because males are favored and considered to be superior to females in particular domains, they have, simply by virtue of their gender, been given more rights, opportunities, and privileges than females. The jurisdictions that enjoy the highest status are not those typically available or awarded to females. Likewise, the areas in which females are considered more knowledgeable compared to males are those that are often regarded as less valuable in society, as a whole. Child care, teaching, and housework, for example, which are most often the responsibilities of women, are under-valued and underpaid within the larger society. Thus, the tacit practices, beliefs, and policies of society work to sustain notions of inequality between the genders and perpetuate an enforcement of the divisions of power and privilege among males and females. This phenomenon effectively limits access and curtails opportunities for women.

In the larger feminist movement, divisions among political, grassroots, and community activists, on one hand, and academics, researchers, and policymakers on the other, have existed for decades. Early on, grass-roots feminists used highly visible forms of political action and demonstration geared to expose the public to a wider recognition of gender biases and sex discrimination in an aim to achieve dramatic systemic and institutional change. Their work has successfully wrought greater awareness of gender discrimination and social inequalities and fostered the initiation of sweeping national and state laws that criminalize discrimination and exclusion based on gender. In contrast, some academics, policymakers, public institution advocates, and others have utilized methods that work within existing traditional structures to effect change among public perceptions, new policies, innovative research, and relevant education to discourage discrimination and widen the opportunities for women through the institutionalization of new attitudes and knowledge for social change. The gender equity movement has most often been associated with this latter school of thought. Gender equity advocates often maintain that the goals of parity between the sexes can be accomplished through the creation of policies and legal measures within institutions that seek the eradication of gender discrimination through a focused push toward the acquisition of parity of access and opportunities for all women and girls.

...