Gill Kirkup, Deputy Director Institute of
Educational Technology, Open University, UK
URL http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/g.e.kirkup/
Viewing the e-learning landscape
through the lens of gender
Personal Introduction
Deputy Director (responsibility for taught courses) in particular
an MA in Online and Distance Education.
Nearly 30 years as a distance educator combining
research/practice in:
• distance education and the use of media for learning
• gendered media preferences in distance education
• the relationship between gender and technology
• specifically gender and information and communication
technologies (ICTs)
• developing courses for women
• e-learning and gender issues
Overview of presentation
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What might we mean by ‘gender’
What might we mean by ‘e-learning’ ?
What is gender mainstreaming•
and its tools and methodologies
What are the gender issues in e-learning?
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Access to the technologies
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Familiarity and confidence with the technologies
•
Interaction styles in social software (Web 2.0)
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Educational use, preferred media and learning orientation
•
Gender relations and power
•
The shaping and production of knowledge (Web 2.0)
What are the gender mainstreaming activities for any e-learning
implementation?
Harding’s four aspects of gender
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A property of individuals
A relation between groups
A property of symbolic systems
A way of distributing scarce resources
• There is a debate about how far feminist theory has
‘produced’ gender difference in identifying inequality.
• Gender has not disappeared – or been transformed online
Sometimes these four attributes are collapsed
into TWO main ways of understanding sex
/gender
• 1. The sex gender system
• ‘a set of social relations between men which have a material
base… that enables them to dominate women’ ( Mitchell)
• Concern with the sexual division of labour, social divisions
around sex/gender. ( traditionally the focus of Equal
Opportunities or Gender mainstreaming)
• 2. Gender identity
• identity and subjectivity of a particular gender
• Discourse (post-modern feminism is sometimes accused of
collapsing everything into discourse)
• Issues of embodiment
• Performativity of gender ( Butler)
What might this mean for gender and
learning?
• Students are constantly re-defining themselves and performing ‘gender’
through the process of their learning and the construction of meaning
• As teachers, researchers, and the invisible ‘back room’ technologists are
part of this community, all engaged in constantly remaking ourselves, and
our disciplines.
• As teachers and educational designers we must develop activities using the
tools of VLE to create active learning that acknowledges gender in a
productive and respectful way?
E-learning defined by Wikipedia
An all-encompassing term generally used to refer to computer-enhanced
learning, although it is often extended to include the use of mobile
technologies such as PDAs and MP3 players. It may include the use of webbased teaching materials and hypermedia in general, multimedia CD-ROMs
or web sites, discussion boards, collaborative software, e-mail, blogs, wikis,
text chat, computer aided assessment, educational animation, simulations,
games, learning management software, electronic voting systems and more,
with possibly a combination of different methods being used.
It is also broader than the terms Online Learning or Online Education which
generally refer to purely web-based learning. In cases where mobile
technologies are used, the term M-learning has become more common.
E-learning is naturally suited to distance learning and flexible learning, but
can also be used in conjunction with face-to-face teaching, in which case
the term Blended learning is commonly used.
Gender Mainstreaming:
• In July 1997, the United Nations Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) defined the concept of gender mainstreaming as
follows:
• "Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the
implications for women and men of any planned action, including
legislation, policies or programmes, in any area and at all levels. It is a
strategy for making the concerns and experiences of women as well as of
men an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring and
evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and
societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally, and inequality is
not perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender
equality."
• The term is now applied to systematic processes for policy and
institutional audit and change.
The three-legged stool of mainstreaming – Booth
and Bennet 2002
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
• 1. Gender disaggregated statistics:
• Gender disaggregated statistics are a vital
management tool for understanding the often
different situations of women and men. All too often
such data is not collected or collated.
• It can often be entirely acceptable that one sex rather than
another should benefit more from specific services or
budgets, so long as this reflects evidence-based need, rather
than being simply demand-led or worse, the consequence of
chance or indirect discrimination.
From: ‘Mainstreaming Equality’ UK Equal Opportunities Commission, 2003
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
• 2. Gender impact assessments
• Should be made BEFORE a policy (or legislation) is
implemented. It is designed to help policy makers
understand the relative impact of the policy or
practice upon men and women respectively, and
address any adverse effects. Sometimes described as
wearing a ‘gender lens’ or having a ‘gender reflex’.
• It should focus on three questions:
• representation (what is the gender distribution of relevant
decision-making bodies?)
• resources (what is the distribution of/access to resources for
men and women?) and –
• reality (do men and women profit from the measure? Who gets
what, why and on what conditions?)
From: ‘Mainstreaming Equality’ UK Equal Opportunities Commission, 2003
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
• 3. Equality indicators:
• Raw data, even when disaggregated by gender, are
limited in what they show without baseline statistics
to set and measure performance targets. Equality
indicators need to be developed for benchmarking
purposes so that comparisons can be made over time
or space.The identification of equality indicators
should be an on-going process with new information
about how gender inequalities are maintained
enabling the development of new indicators and the
refining of existing ones.
From: ‘Mainstreaming Equality’ UK Equal Opportunities Commission, 2003
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
• 4. Monitoring, evaluating, auditing
Gender equality needs to be regarded as a performance
indicator, and treated the same way for evaluation
purposes as, say, balancing the books. It is thus
essential to monitor the effectiveness of policy.
From: ‘Mainstreaming Equality’ UK Equal Opportunities Commission, 2003
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
• 5. Gender balance in decision-making
A gender balance in decision-making is needed to
address the democratic principle of gender
mainstreaming. In the Research Directorate of the
EC, there is a rule that all the scientific committees of
the Directorate must have at least 40% of both
genders.
From: ‘Mainstreaming Equality’ UK Equal Opportunities Commission, 2003
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
• 6. Engendering budgets
Budgets can, and indeed, need to be ‘engendered’. It is
legitimate to ask what proportion of public budgets in
all areas, are spent on men and women, and girls and
boys respectively.
From: ‘Mainstreaming Equality’ UK Equal Opportunities Commission, 2003
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
• 7. ‘Visioning’
Visioning is at the heart of mainstreaming and requires
the imaginative reconsideration of the use of
resources, time, or public space, in gendered terms.
The tools just described are designed to help with this
process.
From: ‘Mainstreaming Equality’ UK Equal Opportunities Commission, 2003
What are the gender issues in
e-learning?
General access to the Internet and ICTs
• In the developed world women and men have equal internet access.
University students have the same ICT access and are familiar with all sorts
of devices- mobile and wireless devices
• Differential access has more to do with age, race and economic class than
gender.
• But men and women have different patterns of how they use the internet and
what for.
• Men spend more time online than women.
• Women are enthusiastic online communicators and they use email more a
more robust way.
• More men than women perform online transactions – buying and selling.
• Men pursue and consume information online more aggressively than women.
• Men use the internet more than women for games, sports and hobbies.
• Men are more interested in technology than women, have more confidence in
their knowledge and technical skills.
•
Source: Deborah Fallows, How Women and Men Use the Internet. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 28, 2005.
Familiarity and confidence with the technologies
• Women are very small – and in some countries
decreasing proportions of student studying ICTs –
becoming expert with the technology
• In households women access technology but don’t
own it or chose it
• There is a long tradition of women students being
less confident them men with the technology even
when they are performing similarly.
Interaction styles in social software
• Gendered patterns of language use in computer mediated
communication:
• Women: attenuated language and positive socioemotional
content
• Men more authoritative language and negative socioemotional
content.
• Women engaging in emotional labour online
• Blogging- as many women with blogs as men, but women
more likely to be using blogs to keep in touch with people,
and be relating personal experience. Men try to entertain.
• Differential use of social software such as facebook and
myspace- girls use for keeping in contact with friends boys for
making new contacts and ‘flirting’- sexual behaviour
Educational use, preferred media and
learning orientation
• Student support issues|: women look for support and
connectedness with others ( Kirkup – Price)
• E-learning, he-learning, she-learning ( Selwyn)? Women use computers and the internet more for
study purposes than men• Confidence with technology,
Gender relations and power
• Classroom ambience and access to equipment
gendered.
• Effect of mixed and single sex groups- boys perform
well on technical tasks when in groups with girls and
girls perform poorly.
• In CMC, language can maintain/produce power
differentials
• In email interactions men and women respond
differently to people in different power
The shaping and production of knowledge
(Web 2.0)
• Second-life, and online networks and communities –
extension of gendered behaviour ( myspace and
Facebook use)
• Gender difference in online interactions and language
reproduce power differentials, which could produce
gendered credibility and authority. ( Haraway ‘Modest
witness’
How to
• Bring sensitivity to these issues to Gender
mainstreaming processes in your work?
How can you use the following mainstreaming tools in
your e-learning policy and practices?
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1. Gender disaggregated statistics
2. Gender impact assessments
3. Equality indicators:
4. Monitoring, evaluating, auditing
5. Gender balance in decision-making
6. Engendering budgets
7. ‘Visioning’
• ( See Checklist – hard copy)
End
Thank you for spending your Friday afternoon
engaging with the topic of gender and e-learning.
Gill Kirkup