Unmasking Gender Biases in Zimbabwean Schools
By Edmore Mutekwe, doctoral candidate, and Maropeng Modiba, associate professor, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park Kingsway Campus

Despite longstanding debates on the topic, the problem of gender inequity in Zimbabwe is far from resolved. In 2004 the Zimbabwean government adopted the National Gender Policy, which sought to address several critical challenges related to empowering girls and women in education, training, politics, the economy, and decision making. As a result, girls now enjoy equal access to primary and secondary education. However, educational institutions continue to reproduce disparities along gender lines. Many educators and educational texts advance gender stereotypes that direct boys and girls to adopt highly polarized social roles.

Our research aims to unmask the gendered nature of the Zimbabwean school curriculum and explore the effects of faculty attitudes on student aspirations. Through this work, we hope to promote gender equity among students beginning at an early age. By exposing the factors that engender patriarchy in Zimbabwean society, we envision making greater strides toward overall curricular reform, including in higher and tertiary education.

Methodology

We designed a qualitative research project to establish how the school curriculum orients students to specific careers by disseminating gender biases and patriarchal ideologies to young learners. Faculty and student participants came from four secondary schools randomly selected as a cross section of the target population. We held focus group discussions with thirty sixth-form girls and conducted individual interviews with an equal number of teachers from the four schools.

We questioned both categories of participants about girls’ career preferences, the motivations for girls’ aspirations, and the relationship between those aspirations and the subjects girls studied. We also explored teachers’ perceptions of what careers are considered appropriate for boys and girls and of whether their attitudes and expectations influence their students’ educational and career aspirations. Finally, we analyzed history text books randomly selected from participants’ classrooms to determine how texts and images portray boys and girls or men and women in society.

We used content and discourse analyses to interpret the data gathered from these focus groups, interviews, and texts. This approach helped us explore and unmask gender role biases, ideologies, and stereotypes that polarize the educational and career aspirations of learners along gender lines (McRobbie 1982). We identified several mechanisms that engender patriarchy in Zimbabwean society and limit students’ educational and career aspirations.

Textbooks and Teachers’ Expectations

Our research revealed that textbooks propagate patriarchal ideologies, while teacher attitudes and expectations compound these texts’ influence. These findings are consistent with those of Meyer (2008), who found that patriarchal values embodied in the school curriculum disadvantage girls as a whole compared to boys as a whole. 

Our analysis of textbooks indicated that boys generally have access to an array of educational goodies—or relevant cultural capital (Bourdieu 1992)—that is systematically denied to girls. This cultural capital is conferred to boys through the patriarchal ideology embedded in the curriculum and in the educational literature used in the classroom (including textbooks, pictures, and wall charts), as well as through sexist discourses (the language and actions of teachers and students) (Nhundu 2007; Gordon 1995).

Teachers’ attitudes and expectations about “appropriate gender roles” for boys and girls further compound the effects of the educational literature. Like the texts we examined, teachers tended to categorize academic subjects as either “feminine” or “masculine,” a practice known as “gender typing” (Gordon 1995). Subjects like mathematics and pure sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology) fall in the “masculine” category, while the “feminine” category includes subjects like home economics, humanities, and typing.

What students learn at school therefore depends on ideologies about gender that are embedded in the curriculum in both explicit and hidden forms. The “hidden curriculum” includes gendered and patriarchal ideologies that schools subtly transmit to pupils (Barrow 2005). The most influential of these ideologies are not necessarily those formally acknowledged and publicly articulated through official documents, but rather those that are subliminally ingested as part of general or professional enculturation. 

Orienting Learners toward Specific Careers 

Gender typing is one of the major avenues by which schools channel learners into the occupational trajectories they ultimately follow. Prejudicial and biased teacher attitudes and expectations and persistent cultural myths, misconceptions, and stereotypes constrain girls’ aspirations. These factors inhibit gender equity in educational institutions and can actually exacerbate discriminatory tendencies. The result is a sustained pattern of occupational disadvantage for girls, a pattern so complex that it seems intractable to those who might initiate changes in the system.

Into what occupations do girls plan to move as a result of these disadvantages? A significant number of girls interviewed (eighteen of thirty, or 60 percent) indicated an interest in traditionally female dominated careers such as nursing, teaching, cosmetology, hotel and catering, and pharmacy. Forty-eight of sixty participants (80 percent, or twenty-three girls and twenty-five teachers) suggested that if Zimbabwean educational and occupational opportunity structures were more open, girls and women would have broader career aspirations, including in traditionally male fields such as engineering and technology. Only twelve respondents (20 percent, or seven girls and five teachers) argued in favor of the status quo on the grounds that gender disparity is useful for the purposes of division of labor.

The forty-eight respondents (80 percent) that alleged biases in the Zimbabwean occupational landscape attributed girls’ limited agency to gender role stereotypes and the discriminatory tendencies typical of Zimbabwe’s social structures (Mills [1959] 2000; Giddens 2001). Several educators linked girls’ anticipated career trajectories with their families’ influence, society’s attitudes toward marriage, how tasks are allocated to girls and boys in the home, girls’ sexual harassment by boys and some teachers, and the extent to which teachers themselves serve as role models. The girls’ own perspective is that the school curriculum should be more gender neutral or conducive to equal competition across genders. Another reason many girls (twenty-one of thirty) cited for choosing particular careers was a desire not to be away from children and the home, reflecting values instilled by gender role socialization.

Not surprisingly, we found a significant correlation between the subjects studied and girls’ anticipated careers. Eighteen of thirty sixth-form girls (60 percent) studying the arts, humanities, languages, and commercial subjects indicated an interest in teaching, hotel and catering, and commercial careers, while twelve of thirty (40 percent) studying sciences (chemistry, physics, and biology) showed an interest in fields such as pharmacy, medicine, and nursing. The former subjects tend to have higher numbers of female students than the latter. Thus as early as the sixth form, many girls have self-selected into different educational and career tracks.

Concluding Remarks

Understanding both the overt and covert ways in which gender ideologies operate and are manifest in the school curriculum is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for alleviating the effects of gender inequality and promoting learning equity. Yet no national or governmental policies exist in Zimbabwe to specifically suggest gender-sensitive discourses in education. Many girls and teachers who participated in our research pointed out the need for governmental programs that promote gender equity in learning. A gender-balanced curriculum has the potential to foster a gender-balanced labor force that mobilizes all its available human resources effectively. Because early aspirations formed as a result of gender role socialization ultimately affect the gender balance of higher education programs and of the workforce, promoting gender parity from the earliest levels of schooling is critical. We hope that our study will draw attention to this important issue and bring Zimbabwe closer to achieving the gender equity to which it aspires.

References

Barrow, Robin. 2005. Common Sense and the Curriculum. London: Allen and Unwin.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. “Principles for Reflecting on the Curriculum.” Curriculum Journal 1 (3): 307–14.

Giddens, Anthony. 2001. Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gordon, Rosemary. 1995. Educational Policy and Gender in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe Journal of Educational Research 13 (8), 10–18.

McRobbie, Angela. 1982. “Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity.” In Popular Culture: Past and Present, edited by Bernard Waites, Tony Bennett, and Graham Martin. London: Croom Helm.

Meyer, Ann E. 2008. “Cultural Particularism as a Bar to Women’s Rights: Reflections on Women’s Gender Roles in an African Society.” British Journal of Education 30 (6): 31–34.

Mills, C. Wright. (1959) 2000. The Sociological Imagination. London: Oxford University Press.

Nhundu, Tichatonga. 2007. “Mitigating Gender-typed Occupational Preferences of Zimbabwean Primary School Children: The Use of Biographical Sketches and Portrayals of Female Role Models.” Sex Roles 56: 639–49.