Promoting Gender Equity Through Schools: Three Papers on Schooling, Gender Attitudes, and Interventions to Promote Gender Equity in Egypt and India.

Abstract

Gender is an important social determinant of health. As such, addressing gender inequities is an important mechanism for reducing health disparities and promoting well-being. This dissertation focuses on schools, an important setting for the development of ideas and practices about gender and other social inequalities. It draws on literature on the reproduction and reinforcement of gender in schools, as well as on international development discourse that focuses on schools as agents of social change, to examine how schools shape children’s ideas about gender, and how the Gender Equality Movement in Schools (GEMS) intervention creates opportunities for change.

Chapter II uses data from the Adolescence and Social Change in Egypt survey to examine the association between school characteristics and student attitudes about gender. School structure, school climate, and staff attitudes are all associated with student attitudes about gender. Girls’ attitudes are more sensitive to these school characteristics, though they matter for boys for specific attitude domains as well.

Chapter III, using data from the GEMS Survey in Mumbai, India, focuses on violence in schools and its association with student attitudes about violence, and examines the impact of individual and school violence on the effect of the GEMS intervention. School violence is associated with student attitudes and moderates the effects of the GEMS intervention. Both individual experiences of violence and higher school levels of violence were associated with greater endorsement of violence. In addition, the intervention was generally less effective for children who experienced violence in school, and in schools with higher levels of violence.

Chapter IV explores teacher perspectives about gender equity in Mumbai public schools, describing how the discourse of gender equity is used strategically by teachers to accomplish their professional responsibilities given the gender inequities in their own and their students’ lives, and highlighting the potential for programs like GEMS, which provide a space for critical reflection, to "undo" gender.

As a whole, these papers contribute to the literature at the intersection of public health, education, and gender studies, and suggest productive avenues for future research and intervention, as summarized in Chapter V.