The Role of Gender-Focused Courses in Higher Education in Fostering Student Agency for Gender Equality in Kazakhstan

• In Event: International higher education I: policy, governance, and gender equity

Proposal

This paper is part of a larger project on the policy enactment of mainstreaming gender equality in higher education in Kazakhstan. In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, gender relations are shaped by Soviet legacies while being rearticulated through the discursive projects of nation-building (Durrani et al., 2025). Soviet policies constructed the “Eastern woman” as a backward subject in need of liberation, legitimizing state intervention through a civilizing mission (Northrop, 2004). This intervention reconfigured gendered subjectivities by positioning women within a binary logic grounded in physiological difference and heteronormativity (Peshkova, 2021). Women’s integration into education and labor was framed as a display of socialist modernity. Post-independence, Central Asian states constitutionally enshrine gender equality without explicitly celebrating Soviet legacies (Durrani et al., 2025). Educational reforms and ratification of global rights treaties reflect a continued commitment to gender equity. However, retraditionalization narratives now reframe women as bearers of cultural continuity while positioning men as protectors and architects of the nation (Kudaibergenova, 2018; Rutland, 2023). As a post-Soviet state, Kazakhstan has formally committed to gender equality through national gender equality policies (Durrani et al., 2025). With UNDP support in 1999, gender mainstreaming was institutionalized via gender-sensitive training for civil servants, healthcare workers, judges, and statisticians, alongside the introduction of over 60 gender-focused courses in higher education in disciplines such as business, economics, and social sciences. However, a gap existed in how these gender mainstreaming initiatives are enacted and to what effect. Thus, the following research questions guide the study: How do students enact these curricula in practice? What impact do these courses have on students’ critical thinking, agency, or ability to challenge norms?
The study draws on poststructuralism and Butler’s theory of performativity to understand gender as always a doing performed within the pre-existing gender discourses. Butler argues that people view gender within a binary framework, such as man and woman or female and male. She refers to this as a “heterosexual matrix” that mandates obligatory heterosexuality as the normative standard. Within this binary framework, gender and sexuality are intricately connected, marginalizing same-sex desire and relationships and reinforcing rigid gender norms and stereotypes, further alienating those who identify outside the male/female binary. However, according to Butler (1999), gender is constructed through repetitive gender performance. These repetitions are the acts of reenactment and reexperiencing a set of meanings that are already socially established and legitimized. In addition, poststructuralist lenses allow us to understand gender discourses within the social, historical and political frames that produce institutionalized gender norms and explore how young people internalize and perform gender. Butler’s theoretical framework is particularly valuable for examining how certain gender expressions are regulated and how gender norms become entrenched over time.
The study is based on 13 focus group discussions with 59 higher education students, including 50 female and 9 male undergraduate and graduate students from nine universities across South, West, and Central Kazakhstan, universities where gender-focused curricula were taught. The study seeks to understand how students perceive and enact the gender-focused curricula’s discourses, knowledge and competencies in their professional and personal lives. Most participants were enrolled in social science majors, such as psychology, linguistics, and the humanities, which typically attract more female students, a likely explanation for the gender imbalance in our sample. Despite efforts to recruit students from business, economics, science, and engineering majors, we found that gender-focused courses were not offered in those disciplines at the time of data collection.
Focus group discussions were conducted in Kazakh (the state language) or Russian, (the language of inter-ethnic communication) depending on the participants’ preferences. The discussions were digitally recorded, transcribed, and then translated into English for the analysis.
The preliminary analysis shows that gender-focused courses had a transformative potential on students that allowed them to notice implicit gender messages, become more reflective of gender practices, and realize the existence of multiple gender equality issues that students were not aware of before. However, the study also shows that some gender-focused courses could endorse and produce idealized masculinities and femininities and introduce the norms of behavior that are deemed to be essential for a Kazakh woman and man. The concept of ‘doing gender’ (Butler, 1999) was evident in student responses as they reflected on the role of men and women in Kazakh society. We could observe highly gendered spaces where men are traditionally depicted as leaders, protectors, and ‘makers’ of the state, while women are perceived as ‘mothers of the nation’. However, some students also attempted to ‘undo gender’, resisting prescribed roles and questioning the rigid behavioral codes assigned to women and men in Kazakh society. The paper offers recommendations for reimagining and reinvigorating gender mainstreaming policies in higher education in Kazakhstan and beyond.

References:
Butler, J. (2002). Gender trouble. Routledge, 2002
Durrani, N., Kataeva, Z., & Kuzhabekova, A. (2025). Policy context for gender equality reforms in education in Central Asia. In A. Kuzhabekova, N., Durrani, N., & Z. Kataeva (Eds.) Gender and education in Central Asia (pp. 21-46). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75301-5_2
Kudaibergenova, D. T. (2018). Project kelin: Marriage, women, and re-traditionalization in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan. In M. Najafizadeh & L. Lindsey (Eds.), Women of Asia: Globalization, development, and gender equity (pp. 379-390). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315458458
Northrop, D. (2004). Veiled empire: Gender and power in Stalinist Central Asia. London: Cornell University Press.
Peshkova, S. (2021). Thinking with gender about Central Asia. In R. Isaacs and E. Marat (Eds) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (pp. 362-376). Oxon, New York: Routledge.

Authors

• Zumrad Kataeva, Nazarbayev University

• Naureen Durrani, Nazarbayev Univeity