Gender respect: Empirical insights for (moral) educators about women’s struggles for respect in the Global South

Abstract

Promoting gender respect is essential to the development of both sexes and to gender equality. This article argues for the importance of moral education to support the struggle of girls and women to achieve respect within unequal and complex gender power relations, especially in poverty contexts. Evidence collected from a sequence of in-depth qualitative studies in the Global South highlights the diverse ways that the giving of respect and the struggle to be respected shapes women’s lives. We show that moral education has a role to play in foregrounding female voices in order to: better understand the poverty-gender-education nexus; recognise the contribution of women and mothers as moral educators; acknowledge girls’ struggles to gain self-respect, peer respect and mitigate disrespect; and, ensure sexual respect despite aggressive masculinities. Moral education programmes which encourage respectful relations between the sexes need to address these highly contextualised forms of struggles for ‘gender respect’.

Keywords:

• Gender
• gender violence
• gender respect
• power
• education
• Africa
• India

Acknowledgements

Ideas from this paper was presented at the global thematic consultation run by the UN on Addressing Inequalities: the heart of the Post 2015 development agenda and the future we want for all. We are also grateful for permission to quote from the various University of Cambridge research projects on education, gender and poverty conducted by Fatuma Chege, Shailaja Fennell, Fibian Lukalo, Angela Githitho-Muriithi, Manasi Pande, Georgina Yaa Oduro, Nidhi Singal and Arathi Sriprakash along with that of the authors. The views expressed here are the authors’ alone.

Notes

1. This concept was first highlighted by Wexler (1993) in his study of three metropolitan high schools in the US. He identified the ways in which social relations of schooling shape notions of self, the search for self-esteem and pride in self.

2. There are many more philosophical distinctions discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

3. The Global Monitoring Report (World Bank Group, 2016, pp. 234–235) illustrates this gender disparity in four areas, namely school enrolment, university enrolment, waged employment and representation in national parliaments. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the focus of this article, the ratio of girls to boys in primary school is 87% and 95% respectively; the ratio of women to men in tertiary education is 73% (80% in South Asia); the share of women in waged employment is 34% (27% in South Asia); and the share of seats held by women in national parliament is 22% (18% in South Asia).

4. See Arnot (2009) for more detailed discussion of these distinctions.

5. This is despite gender differences in male and female definitions of well-being and the role of wealth

6. See Fennell and Arnot (2008) for more discussion on this point

7. See doctoral research by Angela Githitho-Muriithi (2012) and by Manasi Pande (2014) on child labour in Kenya and child carers in India respectively that demonstrates the circumstances of female child waged and domestic labour. Female child labour can be seen as capability development (e.g. self-respect and affiliation) according to this research. Similarly, Nidhi Singal’s work (Singal & Jain, 2012) identifies the role that schooling plays in building independence and personal confidence amongst male and female disabled youth.

8. Forty youth aged 18 to 24 were interviewed along with their parents.

9. There has been much written in other contexts, including South Africa, USA and Colombia, about the way in which respect is intimately tied to men’s ideas.