International Higher Education, Fall 2004

The Challenge of Women’s Higher Education in Asia

Patricia B. Licuanan
Patricia B. Licuanan is president of Miriam College in the Philippines. Address: Miriam College UP, P.O. Box 110, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. E-mail: plicuanan@mc.edu.ph.

The value of women’s education has received global recognition over the past two decades. As early as the 1990 World Conference on Education for All, in Jomtien, Thailand, women’s education was cited as a top priority for international development agencies. The “Beijing Platform for Action,” the outcome document of the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, focused on 12 critical areas of concern. The education and training of women was one of these critical areas. Governments committed themselves to ensuring equal access to education; eradicating illiteracy among women; improving women’s access to vocational training, science, and technology and continuing education; developing nondiscriminatory education and training; allocating sufficient resources for and monitoring the implementation of educational reform; and promoting lifelong training for girls and women.

The “Human Development Report,” produced by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), utilizes the Human Development Index (HDI)) to measure quality of life in a wide range of countries. Through the HDI, specifically through the Gender Differentiated HDI or GDI, which is a measure of gender inequality in the achievement of the basic components of HDI (longevity, knowledge, and income), the importance of gender equality in educational attainment is stressed. In 2000, the United Nations held a Millennium Summit at which world leaders from 189 countries committed themselves to achieve eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), with gender equality and women’s empowerment as one goal. Goal 3 emphasizes, among other issues, the need to eliminate gender disparity at all levels of education.

A Focus on Higher Education
While the case for women’s education has been eloquently made, there has been considerably more attention to literacy and basic education. The relevance of women’s higher education is not revealed in the neglect it has received in most quarters of the international development community for years. The arguments for women’s higher education center on human resource development, economic returns, and gender equality and women’s empowerment. Women graduates must be seen as part of the human resource base of a country. Discriminatory practices in access to education and career opportunities are not only unjust but are a also flagrant waste of valuable expertise. Higher education for women leads to substantial economic returns achieved by raising productivity and the income levels of families.

While the benefits of educating women for the welfare of societies in general and their families in particular are well understood, education’s role in reducing gender inequality and benefiting women themselves is less clearly established. It is often assumed that education enhances women’s well-being, strengthens their voice in household decisions, improves their opportunities to participate in community affairs and the labor market, and gives them greater autonomy to determine the conditions of their lives. The empirical literature, however, reveals that education is a necessary but not sufficient investment for achieving gender equality and improving women’s well-being. Often it is only secondary or higher education that leads to improved options, opportunities, and outcomes for women. It is also suggested that the enabling environment (i.e., a range of social and economic factors) needs to be favorable before female education, even higher education, makes a real difference in women’s lives. Women’s education is most beneficial to women themselves in settings that are less patriarchal, where they have access to services, where they have real options and opportunities, and where market and social conditions favor positive returns.

Inequality in Higher Education
Global trends reveal a growing representation of women in higher education in many regions—with the highest ratios in Europe, Latin America, and the Arab States and the lowest representations in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Despite improved ratios of access and participation over the past decades, there remains a definite pattern of gender tracking in most countries with women dominating certain courses or fields such as liberal arts, home economics, nursing, and teaching; while men dominate courses in law, agriculture, engineering, and natural sciences. Gender tracking, which channels women into careers that are basically extensions of their domestic responsibilities and allows men to acquire more marketable skills and enjoy greater earning power, only exacerbates the problem of unequal opportunities for women.

The climate on Asian campuses has not reached desirable levels of gender fairness. Bias is revealed not only in inequality of access and gender tracking but also in curriculum, instructional materials, language, policies, programs, and projects. Women and gender programs and projects do not yet have widespread support, and mainstreaming gender into the curriculum is even farther off. Men outnumber women in the top-level posts of colleges and universities.

Women’s Colleges and Universities
In many countries in Asia, the enrollment of women in higher education is extremely low. Women’s colleges and universities play a particular role in these societies, where conservative families prefer to send their daughters to all-women institutions. But aside from allowing more women access to higher education, women’s colleges and universities in Asia (as well as elsewhere) are in a unique position to educate women for leadership. All-women institutions are good training grounds because in these settings women can more freely develop their leadership in a context that is relatively unencumbered by the cultural stereotypes and social pressures of a male-dominated society. Women’s colleges and universities provide women with successful role models and mentors as the proportion of female faculty and administrators are greater. Women’s colleges and universities provide the affirming and liberating atmosphere at a critical period in their lives to develop their confidence, self-esteem, and talents.

Gender-fair Education
The main challenge to women’s higher education, whether in the context of all-women or coeducational institutions, is to provide gender-fair education to students. Gender-fair education does not mean merely equal access to education for women and men, but more important, the equality of women and men in the very substance of education. Gender-fair education involves an aggressive move away from emphasis on separate and complementary spheres for men and women and on stereotyped careers to expanded options and outcomes. The attainment of equality, rights, and empowerment should not be accidental or simply an offshoot of a good education but rather an explicit, overarching goal. The challenge of gender-fair education is not simply to provide women students with the best education possible but to create an enabling environment in society.

Some major instruments of gender-fair education are affirmative action and quota systems, aggressive recruitment of female faculty and administrators, reform programs to remove bias from curricula and teaching materials, gender-sensitivity training for teachers and counselors, a review of policies and procedures for possible gender bias, and active recruitment of women into nontraditional fields of study. Also important are the identification and projection of role models among faculty, administrators, and alumnae; systematic inclusion of women among speakers and resource persons for campus events such as graduation; setting up of policies and mechanisms to handle sexual harassment cases; support services to alleviate the double burden of women on campus and to make campuses more family-friendly workplaces.

Women and gender studies programs and centers are important institutional mechanisms for gender-fair education. In addition to offering courses, these programs and centers do research, design and conduct training programs, and publish books and monographs. There should be efforts to link up with women’s nongovernmental organizations and activists for women’s empowerment. These partnerships are not only valuable models of cooperation and synergy but they also lead to high impact advocacy and action aimed at the larger sociocultural and political environment.

The challenge of gender-fair women’s higher education should be the transformation of women’s lives as well as the transformation of society itself.