Telling the Story of Gender Inequality during the Covid-19 Crisis in Education and Introducing Feminist Alternatives to Change the Reality

• In Event: Policies for gender justice in education across different geographies: The role of feminist actors in countering the 'gender ideology' fallacy

Proposal

Research from different fields demonstrates that the disruption caused by Covid-19 exacerbated social problems. In education, early scholarly works mostly focused on issues related to technology, evaluations, or racial discrimination that were worsened as a consequence of remote teaching and learning. Even if after 2022 a more representative quantity of gender-focused studies saw the light, only few education researchers analyzed situations and problems that emerged in the first months of the emergency from a gendered perspective. In order to highlight the relevance of those early gender-focused academic efforts in education, this narrative literature review brings together gender-focused pieces that saw the light during the most difficult times of the Pandemic in countries of all continents. Put together chronologically, these academic efforts tell the story of transnational burdens, risks, and divides that increasingly affected women during this crisis in education from the beginning in the absence of effective and protective education policies. To analyze the selected studies, I used a framework composed of three branches of feminist theories. The first one, proposed by Brenner (1998; 2000), helps understand the social and economic origin of gender inequalities. The second branch is Intersectionality, which helps explore the conjugation of obstacles —such as gender inequality, race discrimination, and social class— that affect women’s opportunities on a daily basis (Carbado et al., 2013). The third branch proposes feminist strategies to decolonize education, through practices such as situated knowledge, collaboration, and mind freedom that can help overcome the consequences of gender oppressions in today’s education system (Icaza & De Jong, 2018).
Findings reveal that some of the issues that women faced during the Covid-19 crisis in education are related to transnational gender disparities that have been affecting education actors historically. In the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic, such disparities created material negative consequences for women in education around the world, such as lack of access to technological devices, lack of opportunities to study or work from home, family opposition to get an education, domestic violence, and rejection from the job market as a consequence of motherhood. In brief, female teachers, students and mothers during the first months of the Pandemic received fewer opportunities and were assigned more responsibilities in comparison to their male counterparts (Wannamakok et al., 2020, Plan International, 2020; UN Women & Eclac, 2020). Likewise, this narrative literature review illustrates feminist praxis and alternatives ways to rebel against systemic injustices. Gendered-focused literature reveals that centering our efforts on developing decolonial strategies at times of emergencies may prevent the education system from perpetuating economic inequities and gender oppression. Such alternatives have the potential of pivoting education in emergencies into a space that supports more humane practices, such as self and collective discovery (Vergès, 2018), which in turn should enhance our readiness to respond to emergencies. Finally, based on ideas from practitioners and scholars that decolonize teaching and learning through survival projects and strategies, this narrative literature review ends with a toolbox for the policymakers who take the responsibility of facing future crises in education.

Author

• Patricia Grillet, University of Hawaii / East-West Center