This chapter considers Theme 4 of the "Hamburg Declaration": Adult learning, gender equality and equity, and the empowerment of women. It has a fourfold purpose. It begins with a review of the balance of progress to date in conceptualizing gender. Second, it examines the objectives of CONFINTEA V and VI from a gender perspective. Third,…

Although the school constitutes a key cultural arena for the production and reproduction of gender identities, few studies have addressed gender discourse in educational institutions in developing societies. Such studies are especially sparse in Arab society in Israel. This study goes some way to addressing what is often absent from many…

The debate in the UK about gender equity and equal opportunities for girls and boys has been "captured", in the last two decades, by an overriding concern with the issue of boys' apparent under-achievement. More recently, however, there has been a reaction to essentialist approaches related to "boy-friendly" pedagogies and…

This paper examines how an ongoing educational panic over failing boys has contributed to a new celebratory discourse about successful girls. Rather than conceive of this shift as an anti-feminist feminist backlash, the paper examines how the successful girl discourse is postfeminist, and how liberal feminist theory has contributed to narrowly…

For the pat 40 years, educators and researchers have largely discussed sex equity issues, particularly in the K-12 settings. However, within the last few years gender equity issues have become a hotly debated area of research. One may contend that sex is biologically determined maleness and femaleness; whereas, gender is influenced by cultural,…

This paper summarizes recent research on the way women define themselves, the way they reason about moral dilemmas, the way they learn, and how they view success and maturity. Two related questions are then addressed: (1) Are the characteristics of women compatible with the dominant mode of operating in organizations or institutions? and (2) How…