Afterword: Reading counter-narratives to gendered inequality in education transnationally

Abstract

Across the globe, women are struggling to overcome social and cultural confines, while creating new opportunities for their gender, by becoming leaders in research and career fields from which they have been historically excluded. This afterword responds to and builds upon contributors’ trenchant articles that highlight social, economic, and technological changes that women are making across cultures. Many women are still battling to gain basic human rights. Accordingly, researchers featured in this special issue bring attention to the inequalities that still exist for women worldwide while raising questions about how new shifts toward extreme conservatism and nationalism may impact women’s rights in the near future. As puzzled over by post-development scholars such as Ong, Hoogvelt and Sassen, in this era of neoliberalism it is now often difficult to decipher programs and organizations that are truly working toward positive changes for women in the developing world from those that are focused on their own self-interests. Throughout history, governmental and social structures have been designed to favor men, but women are now finding ways to make their voices heard through innovatively taking advantage of new communication technologies in both the developing and developed world. We join with contributors in highlighting women’s tremendous investment in change, discussing issues of gender and technology, as well as the work being done by women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. The contributors maintain that in order to create more opportunities for women, progressive researchers, policy-makers and activists must continue to collaborate connecting substantively to the struggles of women for a better life while working toward interdisciplinary solutions that address the ongoing inequalities that constrain their present and future circumstances.

There is a tremendous urgency in the manner in which the authors of this special issue treat the topic of gender and globalization in education and society. This intervention comes at an ominous time. We have seen, most recently in the United States with the election of Donald Trump, but also in Europe and elsewhere, the resurgence of the kind of conservatism that seems to want to redraw the world into camps defined by nation and localism and traditional values around gender roles. Often, in this kind of discursive policy space, issues regarding continued gender inequality in the economy and society and in the workplace, are treated with skepticism and disavowal. This special issue that focuses on both women’s challenges and their creative and innovative responses to real existing inequalities in education and society around the world is more than a riposte to this resurgence of a conservative order aimed at a backlash. The scale and reach of contributors involve a wider arch of critique and exploration that powerfully situates discussion of gender within the larger question of modernization and developmentalism and the rise of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in a transnational context. Where are we now with respect to discourses around change that see education as central to human transformations that must take place at the intersection of developing and developed worlds? How are women’s issues discussed in this zone of convergence in which the fate of the developing world continues to be cast as hopeless unless Third World actors adopt Western norms and infrastructural programs?

These articles are written at the intersection of gender, information, human rights and globalization. They are situated in exactly that place that Hoogvelt (2001), one of our leading sociologists of development, had told us developmentalism had collapsed. The once fast-moving train of modernization theory, and with it the traditions of scholarship associated with development studies, dependency theory and so forth, have all sputtered into a semi-comatose state of uselessness and irrelevance. In modernization’s stead, Hoogvelt insists, multinational corporations and opportunist policy-makers are now touting programs of neoliberal change around the developing world founded in volunteerism, philanthropy rooted in cause-related marketing, and the individualization of the modernization project itself as the practice of a paradoxical high risk-taking care of the self. In this sense, viewed from present political circumstances, Hoogvelt seems to have been clairvoyant.

What contributors remind us has been left out of the story of the programs of thought insisting on the transition from tradition to modernity – from Lerner, to Rostow, to the present – is the vital agency of women and their critical investment in change. Greenhalgh-Spencer et al. maintain quite provocatively that issues of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and technology are being rearticulated and redirected by women seeking productive space in contemporary educational and social worlds.

But all this has a backstory in which technology and change when viewed from the perspective and standpoint of women’s interests, needs, desires and organizational capacities has an ethical trajectory grounded in a critical humanism and new materialism. Adami in her article, for instance, provides readers with a historical backdrop, calling attention to the role of the forgotten voices of women in the worldwide struggle for human rights and their critical contribution to the elaboration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She raises profound questions about dominant and radical forms of historical accounting, popular memory and, by implication, the way we now talk about cosmopolitanism in a universalist language that suppresses the distinctive investments of women in change and the future.

But women’s investment and pro-active efforts to transform their worlds also draw dynamically on the new media environment provided by mobile phones as part of the elaboration of new communication technologies and electronic mediation more broadly. And in using technology in the way that Sanya suggests in her article, women chip away at the digital divide that favors men’s interests in the Third World and the First World. The remarkable role of women’s groups such as FIDA Kenya and Warembo ni Yes in Kenya is magnified by their innovative use of new techniques of mobilization bolstered by the affordances of mobile phones and text messaging to spread the word of change and popular democratic participation into communities of the rural poor. This is, indeed, both inspiring and illuminating. It challenges us to think really hard about settled areas of thought such as knowledge diffusion and technology transfer after the likes of Everett Rogers (2003) – particularly the notion of “reinvention,” or the radical adaptability and dynamic repurposing that defines the everyday existence of the poor and their own articulate application of technologies. This is an area implied in the work of postcolonial scholars such as Bhabha (2004) and Appadurai (2013) but never really fully empirically demonstrated by these postcolonial theorists.

Further ramifications of the differential relationship of women to technology must indeed be taken up as Greenhalgh-Spencer and Jerbi underscore in their article “Technography and design–actuality gap-analysis of internet computer technologies-assisted education: Western expectations and global education.” The article points us to the lacuna in the emerging program of ICT-assisted education in the context of the global South, particularly with respect to important gaps and problems of systemic mismatch between existing programs, infrastructure and targeted communities. This treatment of big data in the form of cognitive mapping of the ICT landscape as it pertains to girls’ access to education is simply groundbreaking work. It further advances our understanding of space and the power-geometry (Massey, 2005) of information and technological diffusion and how they are marked by gendered differentiation.

The authors collectively insist that technology does not get us out of stratification of the social order, specifically around gender. Indeed, as Gregg (2011) has demonstrated in her book Work’s Intimacy (a volume with which the authors of this special issue are clearly in dialogue), digitalization has facilitated the intensification of labor, spreading around new online work cultures that have saturated the domestic space of the home, and micro-urban areas formerly assigned to leisure. Women, as Jackson and Aiston tell us, now bear the brunt of the rough edges of the postindustrial transition associated with new flexible models of work and the labor process in what Sennett (2007) has called the “culture of new capitalism.” The promise of work–life balance is a broadly mass-mediated and hegemonic discourse in advertising, signified often by white men, and some black and brown ones, carrying the baby and pushing the pram. It is a promise of plenitude and fullness of the meaningful life that never comes.

What, then, the authors of this wonderful collection of essays suggest is that there is no simple path to a socially leveled world in which the graded nature of work and the differentials in status, rewards and remuneration will simply vanish. The “lean in,” exhortation of women by Sheryl Sandberg to coax women into assertive roles in society neglects the already deeply established structural embedding of gender inequality across all social institutions. Fortunately, as these scholars all insist, there are counter-narratives of women that offer critique and alternative ways of thinking about agency, subjectivity and change for women.

The “lean in” discourse which is one of the more recent articulations of postfeminist revisionism that distances itself from radical challenges to sexism and gender inequality, as Jackson tells us, avoids the fact that there are continuing barriers to women’s access to leadership roles and administrative power. In higher education as Gregg (2011) argues, we have witnessed a new intensification of labor and a continuing deferral of equality for women, in terms of access to leadership roles at the executive level, salaries and conditions of work.

What contributors to this special issue have sought to do is not only to foreground these continuing issues in the working and professional lives of women in the educational setting but to call attention to the discourses of critique and proposals for change that exist in women’s counter-narratives. They have, as Ahmed and Greenhalgh-Spencer do in their article on gender and mathematics in Kuwait, pointed us to alternative empirically-based findings about women’s capacity and achievement in the STEM areas. We have been alerted as readers of this special issue to the enormous creative energies of women and the complexity of the picture around gender and technology internationally.

Ultimately, we commend the contributors of this very important collection of essays for pointing us towards a network of connections that require a transnational and comparative methodological focus. Above all, Greenhalgh-Spencer et al. have sought a research path beyond methodological nationalism. They have maintained, quite trenchantly, that the hopes and aspirations of women for better futures reside, in part, in critical and analytical efforts to grasp the issue of gender inequality in its multidimensional nature and to craft solutions that invoke interdisciplinary and collaborative practices in research, policy and activism.