‘Even with higher education you remain a woman’: a gender perspective on higher education and social change in the Toliara region of Madagascar

Abstract

This article investigates some issues related to gender and education based on a qualitative, empirical study of women in higher education in the Toliara region of Madagascar. The focus is on how women’s participation in higher education has created changes in gender relations, and how these women have succeeded in achieving higher education. In spite of the interviewed women’s more influential social position and individual freedom, we found that the traditional gender expectations and economic expectations from the extended family are still present. Indeed, it appears that with rising social position and individual freedom, the pressure and demands from their extended families increase.

Keywords:

• higher education
• gender roles
• academic women
• gendered practices
• Madagascar
• extended family

Notes

1. The study was part of a research‐based co‐operative programme between the University of Toliara in Madagascar, the University of Stavanger and the Centre for Intercultural Communication in Norway in the period 2002–6. One of the research projects was about obstacles that prevent girls from taking higher education in the Toliara region.

2. The concepts of tradition and modernity are stylised, abstracted models of aspects of the world (Weber 1919/1978). Such dichotomies are oversimplified and are of a different order than the social reality that they presume to describe. The act of differentiating between traditional and modern values is meant to bring out contrasts. Most values are transitional, falling between traditional and modern and marked by aspects of both these concepts. Our use of the concepts traditional and modern values are therefore ideal types, models to think with.

3. See Note 2.