Gender and Education in Central Asia

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

Gender equality has been one of the main priorities in educational reform in Central Asia for over a century. The first efforts at expanding women’s access to education and other human rights date back to the beginning of the 20th century during the first achievements of the women’s suffrage movement in Europe. These achievements were reincarnated in the Bolshevik’s women’s rights agenda in pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia, whose struggle for women’s liberalization, educational opportunities, and universal voting rights, together with the struggle for access to capital for peasantry and factory workers played a pivotal role in the October revolution, the fall of Tsarism and, eventually, the creation of the Soviet Union. As the Soviet leadership tried to maintain imperial Russia’s grip on Central Asia, the problematization of gender became an important tool in the recolonizing discourse of the Soviets. This facilitated the framing of the traditional social structures in Central Asia as patriarchal and backward and the valorization of the educational reform efforts in the region as acts of civilizing modernization (Kennedy-Pipe, 2004).
With the declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the arrival of the new West-driven modernization project across Central Asian countries, gender has been re-problematized on the educational reform agenda in Central Asia. Central Asia countries are now part of international gender assessments (such as the Global Gender Index) and are committed participants of the UN’s initiatives aimed at the elimination of discrimination against women and the achievement of gender equality around the world. Influenced by the Western liberal democratic values, gender equality in education has surfaced in the region’s policy discourse for the first time.
Although to a different extent, women in the countries of the region continue to have less economic and political power, as well as experience greater rates of poverty, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. They are more likely than men to be unemployed. The gender wage gap is larger than the similar gap in other countries of the world. Women are persistently under-represented in the governments and leadership positions across the countries of the region. Finally, 18% of women in Central Asia have reported being victims of domestic violence in 2023 (Paramo et al., 2023). The deteriorating state of gender equality in the region can be attributed to increasing socio-economic disparities, declining educational quality, and the resurgence of patriarchal traditional and Islamic norms and practices, which have been brought about by economic liberalization at the expense of social support and associated policies. Unsurprisingly, Central Asia has recently seen an increase in domestically originating gender equality activism (Mattei, 2022). Although the situation with the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals is harder to assess in the absence of official statistics, gay activism is also present in some countries of the region (Amatbekova, 2023). Overall, gender will stay a key item of the socio-economic reform agenda in Central Asia for decades to come.
Gender equality remains a significant focus in the region’s educational reform efforts. In some aspects, gender equality indicators in education are similarly low across the countries of the region, whereas, in other aspects, the region is very heterogeneous. For example, across all Central Asian countries, women are poorly represented in educational leadership at various levels, whereas in Kazakhstan women’s representation in leadership surpasses the global trends (UNESCO Almaty, unpublished). In addition to that, they continue to be rather underrepresented as both faculty and students in science, technology, mathematics, and engineering fields (UNESCO Almaty, unpublished). On the other hand, in terms of rates of enrollment in postsecondary education, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have women outnumbering men, whereas the opposite is true for Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (UNESCO Almaty, 2021). On a similar note, the representation of female teachers at the tertiary level varies between 37% in Tajikistan to 66% in Kazakhstan (UNESCO Almaty, 2021). The variation in achievement on gender equity parameters is determined by differences in socio-cultural and economic factors. Educators in the region are increasingly concerned about achieving greater equality in education.
The book presented in the session serves as a timely and pivotal contribution to the field of gender and education research in Central Asia, offering a foundational framework for comparative research on the ways the region’s educational policies, contents, processes and practices impact gender relations. Despite the growing body of educational (Hernández-Torrano, 2021) and gender studies research (Kataeva et al., 2023) in post-Soviet nations, including those in Central Asia, their global influence remains marginal in a global context. Moreover, there is a scarcity of comparative studies within the region concerning education (Li, 2019) and gender studies (Kamp, 2009), with limited integration between these disciplines. This lack of disciplinary interaction emphasizes the urgent necessity for scholarly dialogues at the intersection of education and gender studies from a comparative standpoint. This book, therefore, seeks to provide a comparative perspective on education and gender dynamics in the region, aiming to enrich our comprehension of education’s role in social transformation and reproduction within Central Asia.
The purpose of this book is to present the on-going research on gender equality in education in Central Asia. The edited volume brings together established and emerging scholars from Central Asia and scholars conducting research on the region from the West to explore policies, statistical trends, and representative research on gender equality in education across post-Soviet Central Asia. In particular, the book provides (1) an overview of the development of policies aimed at the promotion of gender equality in education adopted by the governments of Central Asian countries since the countries became independent from the Soviet Union; (2) a comparative summary of statistics on change in gender equality indicators at various levels of education in the four countries throughout three decades of independence; (3) a sample of current research on various issues related to gender equality in education across the region by scholars from the region and beyond. We cover all five countries in the region – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, although to a different extent.

Sub Unit

• Book launches and Workshops / Book Launch

Chair

• Aliya Kuzhabekova, University of Calgary

Book Launch Presenters

• Emma Harden-Wolfson, McGill University

• Lyazzat Shakirova, University of Toronto