This article reports results of an ethnographic study of how girls are positioned, and position themselves, in relation to gender regimes in three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary education: Restaurant Management & Food, Health & Social Care, and Vehicle & Transport. The comparison shows that there are different…

Physics- and computer-related disciplines are strongly male dominated in Western higher education. Feminist research has demonstrated how this can be understood as reflecting a strong privileging of mind and rationality (over body/nature/emotions) in these disciplines, which harmonises with broader notions of masculinity as transcendental and…

Purpose: This article investigates female vocational students' strategies for becoming part of a workplace community, what these strategies are and how they are tied to the formation of vocational identities within male-dominated industrial work. Of particular interest is how female students enrolled on Swedish upper secondary industrial…

Access to early childhood education has increased over the last two decades, with global enrolment rates showing gender parity in access among boys and girls. Despite this gender parity in access, the pre-primary education system does not always deliver on its potential to tackle gender inequities and address harmful gender stereotypes while they…

For this study, Swedish upper secondary schoolteacher students were interviewed about their experiences and perceptions of teacher work in light of the traditional gendered division of labor in teaching. While female teaching has been signified by caring work, male teaching has been signified by distant teacher-pupil relations and the use of…

Many countries call for more men to be teachers in early childhood education and care (ECEC). In Sweden, the issue has been discussed since the early 1970s, but despite these discussions there is little Swedish research that examines the notions and expectations associated with male teachers. International research has found that perceptions of…

The aim of this article is to acquire knowledge regarding children's influence and the construction of gender during free play situations in preschools in different local contexts. Attention is focused on both children's choices and pedagogical practices in which free play takes place. The research draws on ethnographic studies based on…

Research has shown that teaching gender theories tends to be an educational challenge and elicits student resistance. However, little is known about students' learning processes in social science. This study aims to explore these learning processes by drawing on feminist pedagogy and conceptual change theory. The results show that when students…

The aim of the current study is to investigate whether Swedish secondary school students perceive mathematics as a female, male or gender-neutral domain. A sample of 1300 students in two age groups, 15- and 17- years, answered a questionnaire and about 50 students participated in interviews. The main part of the inquiry form consists of "Who…

Several recent reports on the status of women in US academic institutions have recommended more generous family policies to encourage and retain more women among academic staffs. Many of the policies suggested are modelled on those that have been in effect in Nordic countries for decades. The status of women among Finnish and Swedish academic…

The Swedish educational system states that work in schools should depict and mediate equality. One way of achieving this is through fiction, which according to the syllabus provides students with knowledge about the living conditions of women and men during different epochs and places. The present paper examines gender in a Swedish school,…

Background: Research on PE indicates that the subject is marked by rather stable gendered patterns of behaviour and perceptions of the subject. This paper marks an attempt to outline a theoretical approach that makes it possible to interpret what is going on in the gym in a way that might challenge the reproduction of gender. Purpose: To…