Jane Gaskell

Gender matters from school to work

Making gender a central concern in the analysis of work and schooling, this book explores the way young men and women experience and account for the relations between school and work and analyzes the way schooling and work have been organized by patterns of gender and class inequality.

The Reproduction of Family Life: Perspectives of Male and Female Adolescents.

Abstract This paper explores the ways male and female adolescents plan to allocate responsibility for domestic labour. It is argued that incorporation of elements of the domestic ideology combines with an awareness of structural barriers to reproduce traditional patterns. The importance of segregated labour markets and provisions for child care are discussed.

The participation of women faculty in Chinese universities: paradoxes of globalization

This paper contributes to a discussion of how globalization is affecting women faculty in different countries around the world. It reports on a collaborative, international research project designed to understand the participation of women faculty members in Chinese universities, sketching the historical context necessary for understanding womens place in universities in China, describing the process of surveying university faculty on gender issues and reporting the findings of the survey for universities that prepare secondary school teachers. The paper concludes that in China, ‘gender consciousness’ is a major barrier preventing womens full participation as faculty. As a result, women are likely to increase their disadvantage in the next few years as Chinese universities expand, diversify, emphasize research and broaden their links with the rest of the world.

The Changing Organization of Business Education in the High School: Teachers Respond to School and Work.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the way teachers understand and shape the relationship between vocational education in the high school and a changing labor market. It takes as its focus business education, where a curriculum that has been in place since the turn of the century is coming increasingly under question because of the introduction of computer technology into the office, increasing youth unemployment, and the process of streaming in the school. The article explores the way teachers continue actively to reproduce the social relations of the workplace in their classrooms, even as they search for new curriculum ideas that will better meet the changing requirements of the labor market and the school.

Gender and Course Choice: The Orientations of Male and Female Students.

Gender differences in course enrollment in the high school are very pronounced. Most of the academic work on course enrollment has focused exclusively on class tracking and has ignored gender. This paper proposes a framework for looking at course “choice, ”and explores the way course choices are embedded in the social organization of gender and class categories both inside and outside the school.

White Collar Vocationalism: The Rise of Commercial Education in Ontario and British Columbia, 1870–1920

ABSTRACTThe authors trace the origins of commercial education in nineteenth century middle class schooling and examine its relation to the vocational reform movements of the twentieth century. They explore the role of practical education in middle class support for secondary education, the significance for commercial instruction of the proliferation, fragmentation and feminization of office employment, and the impact on school reform of the intense competition between private and public business educators. Attention is drawn to the dynamics of gender as well as class in the emergence of vocationalism and the shaping of public education.

Gender and Skill

The notion of skill is central to the way inequality is justified in the workplace. Because different jobs demand different amounts of skill, it is argued that they deserve different levels of reward. A “skilled” job will pay a higher salary and command greater respect and autonomy for its incumbent than an “unskilled” job will. The rationale for inequality based on skill was formulated elegantly in the functionalist version of stratification theory (Davis and Moore, 1945). It is taken up by plumbers and electricians when they defend their relative wages on the basis of their skill and their long apprenticeship. It is taken up by doctors and lawyers who defend their privileged position on the basis of their complex skills and lengthy training.

Learning from the women's movement about educational change

The womens movement in the 1970s and 1980s was a global phenomenon that achieved significant educational change. More analysis of how it developed and had an impact on education can inform our understanding of the possibilities for change today. This paper explores how the womens movement changed schooling in Vancouver in the 1970s, using a framework based on the idea of building civic capacity. The movement arose from a global politics, coalesced locally around new ideas, and created new relationships and institutional forms that drove school reform. Although the particular institutional forms that were created did not last, the impact of changed ideas and a new politics of equity have persisted, albeit in contested forms. The metaphor of building civic capacity for educational change is useful in focusing attention on ideas and institutions, but must be understood as contingent, shifting and fragile.

Reflections on women and success in the academy

Women have come a long way in academy since I started my academic career in the early 1970s. The number of women and the percentage of women who are students and faculty have risen; academic culture has become more diverse and less sexist; the curriculum has expanded and become more inclusive. The markers of progress are varied, but I have no doubt that things are better than they were for women who are considering academic careers. That said, there is a long way to go. While women students constitute substantially more than 50% of the student population in North America and Europe, women are still under-represented among full-time faculty, among some of the most highly paid specialties, among the academic leadership and among elite researchers. Despite concern about the feminization of education and the failures of boys – for example, Somers (2013) lamenting the educational problems of boys in the New York Times this week – and a waning emphasis on providing equal opportunity for women, it is clear that gender continues to handicap women in the university workforce. There have been a large number of reports and studies that explore how this works and why. Reports such as the European Commission’s (2012) Structural Change in Research Institutions: Enhancing Excellence, Gender Equality and Efficiency in Research and Innovation, the American Association of University Women’s Why So Few? (Hill 2010) and the OECD’s (2006) Women in Scientific Careers have all explored and documented the under-representation of women in positions of power in universities. These studies tend to emphasize women in the science and engineering disciplines, where salaries are highest and anxiety about global competition is greatest. But the under-representation of women in the senior ranks of the social sciences and humanities also continues, affecting the careers and prospects

Approaches to Poverty in the Toronto School Board, 1970–1990: No Shallow Roots

Abstract This paper explores educational change in the Toronto school board between 1970 and 1990, a period that saw an intense focus on improving the education of inner city students. Based on interviews with key change agents, it argues that a social movement was key to the changes that were experienced. The ideas about education and the relationships that brought some coherence to the movement are illustrated and linked to educational change.