Presidential Invited Session: Gender Issues in Education within and beyond China

Group Submission Type: Presidential Invited Sessions

Proposal

Gender is a significant perspective in discussing educational philosophy, policies, and practices at all stages of education worldwide. Campaigning for women's rights and interests is a continuous effort of many important international organizations and human-right-valued countries and individuals, with women’s right to education being one of their main goals. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set up by the United Nations in 2015 addressed ‘Quality Education’ and ‘Gender Equality’ as the two of the seventeen most urgent global challenges, emphasizing the importance of enabling and ensuring girl’s and women’s equal right to quality education and vocational training throughout all phases of their lives. Education not only equips girls and women with instrumental knowledge and skills, but improves their self-cognition and rational power, and gives their will and ability to participate in social life extensively. Educated girls and women are more likely to enjoy better prospects for health, employment, family and social status, and overall well-being. It is therefore always worthwhile to explore and discuss how education can benefit and empower more women, enlightening their self-awareness and inner potentials, and how to create a more equitable social environment for women, so that their power can be more effectively and fully utilized in both private and public lives.

Similar to many other countries, gender is a long-standing heated topic in Chinese society and education contexts. China experienced a long patriarchal society. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century, with the introduction of modern ideas, that universities started to have girl students. During the 70 years since the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949), the government has been committed to promoting equity in education and has made a series of achievements. The national enrolment rate of compulsory education for girls increased from 15% in 1949 to 99.07% in 2000, only 0.07% lower than that for boys (Song & Tan, 2004), climbing above 99.99% in 2015, basically the same as that of boys, and remaining at this level for the following 7 years (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021). In terms of higher education, both women at undergraduate and postgraduate levels outnumbered men, with the proportions being 51.0% versus 49.0% and 50.9% versus 49.1%. In 2020, The national average length of schooling for women and men aged 15 and above in China reached 9.59 years and 10.22 years, with the gender gap narrowing from 0.8 years in 2010 to 0.6 years (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021).

While acknowledging the achievements, there are still many gender-related issues in Chinese education contexts which deserve close attention and in-depth reflections, for example, gender differences and characteristics in learning engagement, behavior, experience, and outcomes, gender structure imbalance in teachers, academics, and faculty, insufficient development of gender education, complex gender-based teacher-student relationships, and so forth. In addition, these educational issues can induce further gender-relevant social problems, including but not limited to the dilemma of female student employment, the glass ceiling of women’s career development, women’s struggle between career and family, and women's identity anxiety.

This panel session was designed to showcase and discuss the long-standing and emerging gender topics in increasingly complex and diverse educational contexts. We start from the gender issues relevant to teachers in compulsory education. As the professionals leading the growth of students, teachers' understanding of gender is crucial to the development of gender education, especially for young children. Professor Xinrong Zheng and Dr Chao An representing their research group talk about the changing trend of the gender structure of primary and secondary school teachers in China, discussing these teachers’ gender awareness and concepts, analyzing the possible important impact of these gender issues on Chinese children's development. Our focus then moves to the gender-based features of student learning experience and outcomes, which directly reflect gender equalities and inequalities in current education systems. Lanwen Zhang representing her research group reports the latest findings about gender gaps among Chinese undergraduate students on both learning process and outcomes on the basis of the data from the China College Student Survey (CCSS) 2021. She also explores the potential reasons for the findings and offers associated suggestions to higher education institutions. Following this presentation, Dr Liping Ma and Dr Xin Li draw our attention to doctoral education, sharing their study in relation to the role of advisor-doctor gender match in improving the academic performance and early career development of female doctoral students. They provide policy and practical advice on improving the disadvantageous position of female scholars in China's academic labor market and on helping female doctoral students with better career development in academia. In addition to the local context, we also care about the gender issues that happened in the transnational education mobilities. Dr Xuemeng Cao based on her longitudinal study exploring the experiences of UK-educated Chinese students, tell the story of one particular participant, a female student carer, demonstrating how complex caring responsibilities impacted women’s decision on studying abroad, overseas lives, and post-graduation career plan. She further discusses the concerns shared by female student carers and common challenges that Chinese students in the ‘One Child Policy’ generation need to face.

This panel session aims to investigate gender-based educational issues from various dimensions – from teachers to students, from compulsory education to higher education, and from the national system to international mobility. Although the presented studies take Chinese education participants (e.g., teachers in compulsory and higher education, local and overseas students) as cases, we hope to invite discussions on gender issues of wider stakeholders in more countries and regions. We also look forward to hearing the critical feedback and inspiring ideas on developing more gender-equitable education worldwide.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• jinghuan shi, Tsinghua University

Individual Presentations

• Gender Structure and Gender Concepts of Primary and Secondary School Teachers in China - 新蓉 郑

• Gender Difference in Learning Behaviors of Chinese College Students - Ianwen Zhang; Wanyi Xie, institute of education,Tsinghua University; Fei Guo, Tsinghua University

• Advisor-doctor Gender Match, Academic Performance and Early Career - Liping Ma, Peking University

• How Caring Responsibilities Impact International Students’ Learning and Development: The Story of a Chinese Single Mother from A Gender Perspective - Xuemeng Cao, Tsinghua University

Discussant

• Jing Lin, University of Maryland, College Park