| Volume 40 Number 2 Higher Education and Global Gender Equity  |
 Contents |
|
Director's Outlook |
|
From Where I Sit |
|
Featured Topic |
|
In Brief |
|
Campus Women Lead |
|
Global Perspectives |
|
Data Connection |
|
Links |
|
Opportunities |
|
For Your Bookshelf |
|
About This Issue |
|
|
|
Women and Education in the Early Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective By Nelly P. Stromquist, professor of international education policy at the College of Education, University of Maryland Education is widely recognized as a critical mechanism for equalizing life and career chances for everyone, but particularly for girls and women. The empirical evidence is clear: schooling has numerous benefits for girls’ and women’s individual and family situations, including lower child mortality and illness, greater education for offspring, and higher participation in the labor force. Educated women engage in better decision making about marriage, spousal relations, household management, and type of employment than those with no schooling. They also tend to work for remuneration, which fosters economic development and increases their autonomy. In this brief article, I describe and analyze the situation for women’s education throughout the world. I do so from both a gender and a national development perspective, attentive to ways to improve women’s participation in society at large as well as to how gender relations are currently being transformed. I make comparisons across world regions, although significant variation clearly exists within these regions.
Collaborating across Disciplines on Global Women’s Education By Susan Bourque, E. B. Wiley Professor of Government, and Rosetta Marantz Cohen, Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies, organizing fellows of Smith College’s “Why Educate Women?: Global Perspectives on Equal Opportunity” Since its founding as a woman’s college in 1871, Smith College has been committed to advancing women’s empowerment and facilitating women’s access to domains traditionally reserved for men. This historical commitment necessarily affects the work of Smith’s faculty across disciplines. Many of us arrive at the college without a specific scholarly interest in women’s education. But as we grapple with the complexities of how best to teach the very bright women students who surround us, we often come to focus our research on problems related to women’s education—historical and contemporary, domestic and international. Drawing that work together and finding ways of sharing, collaborating, and expanding the scope of our scholarship across disciplinary boundaries has been a longstanding goal and challenge for faculty at Smith. Thanks to Smith’s Kahn Liberal Arts Institute, selected faculty and students were able to address this challenge directly during the 2010–11 academic year with an interdisciplinary, collaborative project titled “Why Educate Women?: Global Perspectives on Equal Opportunity.” Centering its year-long programming on the project, the Kahn Institute granted space, staffing, stipends, and weekly dinners for participants who were interested in sharing their work and deepening their understanding of women’s educational issues across divisions and fields. Participating faculty came from ten different departments: government, education, sociology, French, Spanish, exercise and sport study, mathematics, English, religion, and engineering. These faculty invited exceptional students to apply for the project and selected seven seniors to join the seminar. Together, participants engaged in a bracing series of open-ended, interdisciplinary discussions and debates that gained richness and complexity as the year unfolded. |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
