Achieving Gender Parity in Education: Achievements and Limitations of Millennium Development Goal 3

Abstract

For a number of reasons, girls’ educational enrolment has historically fallen short of boys’ enrolment in many countries worldwide and particularly in poorer communities. In the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG3), the international community resolved to address this lack of parity. They did so for a host of reasons, some associated with a desire to promote gender equality, but also because girls’ education is believed to have wider social benefits. Moreover, it fits with the neoliberal worldview promoted by international institutions and rich-world governments over the past three decades.

This chapter begins with an outline of historical patterns of gender inequality in school enrolment globally and the purported explanations for such patterns. It goes on to consider Millennium Development Goal 3, the reasons why the “gender gap” attracted the attention of policy makers in the 1990s and the consequent expansion of girls’ enrolment in school. The limitations of parity of enrolment are then considered – firstly in terms of persistent obstacles to girls’ academic success in some education systems and secondly in relation to the failure of girls’ education to bring about social and economic transformation that might significantly reduce gender inequality and improve women’s life chances. Finally, this chapter sets out three alternative ways of accounting for the relationship between schooling and its impacts on girls and young women. These focus on the mechanisms of power through which schools affect girls’ lives, the ways in which schooling functions to reproduce relations of both gender and capitalism, and the ways in which education’s impacts are produced both contextually and relationally. All three accounts all pay close attention to what happens in schools, how schools relate to their wider contexts, and the impacts on individual girls and wider gender relations.