Because I am a Girl - Plan USA

or domestic tasks, they may sometimes
be able to juggle these chores more easily
with school than boys who work outside
the home.
Experts do not necessarily agree on all these
factors, so more work needs to be done on
examining this issue. Class, with poverty
and ethnic origin as well as gender, may
also have a role to play. In many countries
where boys are failing, working-class boys,
those from ethnic minorities, and those from
poor neighbourhoods, are more likely to see
school as something for girls and to state
that it is not cool for boys to be seen to be
keen on education.
Jamaica: changing schools to
change boys’ behaviour 39
Jamaica has one of the highest homicide
rates in the world, mostly committed
by young men. Their socialisation
begins at home but continues in a
society that holds strong stereotypes
about male behaviour: homosexuality,
for example, is still illegal in Jamaica.
The dominant culture in many of the
country’s comprehensive schools
reflects the attitudes and expectations
of wider society rather than presenting
an alternative to it. As a result, boys also
learn to adopt a ‘macho’ and disruptive
attitude within school.
Boys’ underachievement is evident
at all levels of schooling. According to
a recent World Bank assessment, 30
per cent of boys were reading below
their grade level by Grade 6, and this
proportion continued throughout their
schooling. This trend in schools may not
be helped by teachers permitting boys to
play and be ill-disciplined, thus excluding
them from the learning that the girls, who
are expected to be more ‘domesticated’
and ‘docile’, are getting on with.
In this context, the Jamaican education
system has a key role to play in
addressing the problem of youth violence
and fostering socially and emotionally
well-adjusted children.
The ‘Change from Within’ programme
attempted to move beyond an exclusive
focus on academic performance – for
example, test scores and ‘chalk and
talk’ teaching. The programme started
T o m P i l s t o n / P a n o s P i c t u r e s
a new initiative aimed at promoting
and intensifying boys’ achievement
in Jamaican schools. The programme
has two strands. One is a participatory
action research strategy involving
the community, students, teachers,
administration and parents. The second
is the adoption of strategies to promote
change and build cooperation among
the schools. A review of the programme
found that it succeeded in reducing
school violence “by identifying and
building on positive features in schools,
and by changing a culture of dependency
on external interventions to one of selfreliance”.
40
There is a clear divide between the countries
where boys’ educational achievement has
become a problem – mainly upper- and
middle-income countries, including Latin
America and the Caribbean, and those
countries where girls still struggle to get an
education equal to that of their brothers.
What is clear, however, is that completing
secondary education for girls and for boys
is associated with better livelihoods, higher
incomes, better health and more empowered
girls and more gender equitable boys.
For both girls and boys, education is
important not just for what they learn
at every stage of their schooling, but for
the social skills and experience they also
acquire as part of the package. Education
has huge potential for building a positive
Adolescents
in school in
Jamaica.
foundation for their adult lives – but negative
experiences of school may also put children
off learning forever and reinforce negative
stereotypes of the opposite sex that are then
hard to shake off.
Parivartan – using sport to
change boys’ attitudes 41
Sport is an effective way of engaging boys
and young men. Parivartan uses cricket to
work on gender equality in India.
Parivartan, which means ‘change for
the better’, aims to help boys and young
men to see women and girls as equals,
and treat them with respect, and in doing
so reduce gender-based violence. It
does this by working with men and boys
through cricket, which is hugely popular
in India. Launched in March 2010,
the programme enlists cricket players,
coaches and community mentors to serve
as positive role models for school-age
boys in more than 100 Mumbai schools. It
teaches that aggressive, violent behaviour
doesn’t make them ‘real men’ – nor does
it help win cricket matches.
“I’ve learned how to be polite, how
to talk, how to be respectful to girls and
women,” said Jadhav.
“I’ve learned that controlling is not a
way to love a girl, but [the way to love]
is to give her space in her life,” said
Parivartan mentor, 20 year-old Rajesh
Jadha.
Leena Joshi, director of Apnalaya,
one of the main local partners in the
Parivartan programme, told Gillian
Gaynair from the International Center
for Research on Women (ICRW) that
she believes the effort is timely – if not
overdue. “We have all worked – NGOs,
governments – on women’s issues very
specifically,” Joshi says, “and I think in
the whole process, the men have been left
behind.”
The Parivartan programme is an
initiative of ICRW in collaboration with
Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF),
Mumbai School Sports Association
(MSSA), Apanalya and Breakthrough.
M i c h a e l B i s c e g l i e
3 Quality as well as quantity –
how to teach about gender in
maths lessons
“Boys are better mathematicians because
they think in [sic] deeply and try to find
better solutions.”
Study in Pakistan 42
“If teachers and others, consciously or
unconsciously, falsely communicate that
boys are less able to learn languages, or
that girls are less capable of mathematics
and science, the students’ self-confidence
may suffer, and they may lose interest for
such subjects.”
Norwegian White Paper 43
While many Northern countries are
struggling with the reasons for boys’ underachievement,
they may at the same time
continue to reinforce gender stereotypes in
the classroom and in the way schools are run
and perceived by the children. UNESCO’s
2007 Education for All Monitoring Report
notes that: “Teaching materials tend to
promote gender-specific roles, for instance
portraying male characters as powerful
and active and females ones as sweet,
weak, frightened and needy. Game playing
can often conform to stereotype, with
boys playing with blocks and girls in the
‘housekeeping corner’, and with girls in
general having less access to the larger and
more active toys and playground space.”
An Australian study noted that: “Teachers’
simplistic and essentialist understandings
of gender drive much of the curriculum
and pedagogy in our schools, and more
Adding it all
up in Bolivia.
64 the s tate of the world’s girls 65