International Women’s Day on March 8th is an opportunity to both reflect on recent progress and a call for action to accelerate gender parity in education. In many parts of the world, girls and women still struggle to have the same rights and access to education as their male counterparts. On the occasion of this important day, we sat down with Mioko Saito, the Institute’s expert on gender equality in learning achievement, to discuss what IIEP is doing to promote gender equality from the first phases of educational planning.
IIEP: How are you working with education planners and other stakeholders to help eradicate gender inequality in education systems?
Mioko Saito: In 2014-2015, IIEP initiated a major gender mainstreaming project in all of its training materials for the Advanced training programme (ATP). It is expected to make an impact through our participants – educational planners from all over the world –who are responsible for making policy about gender equality in education. This is because first, training is at the core of IIEP and is a priority activity, and second, the training materials are the most visible and the most disseminated IIEP products as they are also used in research, technical assistance activities and shared with partner training institutions. I am responsible for constructing the gender mainstreaming “stock-taking” grid to evaluate various criteria (terminology, stereotypes, references, data, equality type, level or issue) and provide concrete proposals in order to make IIEP’s training materials more gender sensitive and responsive. This includes consultation with all of the Course Coordinators to discuss the feasibility of the proposals, to decide on the ‘commitments’, and to monitor progress in implementation. Based on this experience, I will organize and coordinate an IIEP Distance Course in 2016 entitled Monitoring and evaluating gender equality in education.
IIEP: While we’ve seen a lot of progress in recent decades and the number of girls out of primary school has halved since 1999, there is still a lot to be done. What are some of the most valuable resources today to continue the fight for gender equality?
Mioko Saito: It is a very important question. When I worked on a UK Department for International Development (DFID)-funded project on the review of interventions enhancing girls’ education and improving gender equality during 2013-2014, we were able to illustrate interesting interactions between various types of interventions (resources, policy, and norms) and different levels of outputs (participation, learning, and empowerment). For example, the provision of toilets and sanitary towels could improve the enrolment, but not the learning achievement. Employment of female teachers is usually justified as providing role models, but they need to be also equipped with high subject knowledge in order to have impact on girls’ learning. There is some promising evidence on the interventions dealing with addressing the norms, such as girls clubs and working with boys on gender equality.
