Bending the Bow: Targeting Women's Human Rights and Opportunities
(A publication of the Open Society Institute's Network Women's Program, August 2002)

Gender Equity and Empowerment in Education

Education is a human right and an indispensable element of economic and social progress. Under communism, women in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union pursued the many educational opportunities available to them, maintaining one of the world's highest levels of women's education, including fields considered nontraditional for women in other parts of the world. However, the end of the Soviet system, the pressure of market forces on the educational sector, and the emergence of diverse cultural values in regard to women's education have changed the landscape of education in the region. While some of the changes, such as the introduction of tuition fees, have made higher education less accessible to all, deeper analysis often reveals a variety of disadvantages accruing particularly to women and girls.

From its inception, the Women's Program has seen education from the perspective of human rights, active citizenship, and the development of civil society. The Program is founded upon the belief that open societies cannot develop fully without the contribution of women's critical thinking and perspectives. A network of gender and women's studies programs and scholars leads the effort to reform education from a gender perspective appropriate for the region. The Women's Program has strengthened this network through support for conferences, fellowships, and exchange programs. Small grants help start new women's studies programs, provide core library collections, and translate classic feminist texts. One of the Program's most successful programs, Empowering Education, trains teams of teachers and educators to integrate gender issues into primary and secondary school and university curricula. As one Empowering Education trainer stated, "We can't change existing roles between women and men, girls and boys, or strengthen the role of women without changing society as a whole. To do this, we need to start in the schools."

The State of Gender Equality in Education

Since transition, the enrollment ratio of boys and girls has remained relatively equal in primary and secondary school. However, the number of all children in primary school is falling in many places, such as the former Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

The picture is more complicated at the secondary school level. In Central and Eastern Europe, for example, the enrollment rate of girls in secondary school has increased in some countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, but declined in others, including Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, and Russia. In Central Asia, on the other hand, declining enrollment is common for both boys and girls, though for different reasons.

The additional obstacles girls face include conflicts over religion, lack of safe transportation, and the fear of being kidnapped for purposes of sexual slavery and bride-stealing (in Central Asia and the Caucasus). In Uzbekistan, the government has expelled female students from universities for wearing religious dress, particularly veils. At the same time, the resurgence of patriarchal practices sometimes linked to religious interpretations inhibits girls' access to education. In Albania, even in suburban areas around the capital, girls are often not allowed to leave the house unless accompanied by an adult male relative.

Equally significant is the content and quality of education. The prevalence of stereotypical gender attitudes in textbooks, classroom interactions, and curricula is widespread in countries throughout the region, at every educational level. In Romania, for example, a study of gender equality in education found that primary school textbooks portray women as school teachers, villagers, and fruit or flower sellers, while men are pictured as astronauts, policemen, doctors, actors, and masons. Women are also seen as housewives, while men devote themselves to working in the public arena. "Retraditionalization has accompanied the transition throughout Central Asia and the Caucasus," said Cassandra Cavanaugh, formerly of Human Rights Watch. "In school, girls are educated to be submissive, quiet, good wives and daughters-in-law."

Widespread gender stereotypes at the primary level of education lead to further gender segregation at secondary and especially higher levels of education, which in turn leads to economic inequality for women in the work force. Even though women often outnumber men in institutions of higher education, women predominate in low-prestige fields that are poorly compensated. The market now values business and technical professions. At university, women go into education or law while men select engineering or computer sciences. The pattern of gender segregation is clear in Lithuania, where women have long outnumbered men in higher education. In 1998–99, women in vocational schools selected courses in crafts, household management, and the service sector, while men selected courses in engineering, transport, and communications. At the university level, women selected education professions, where they comprised 77.6 percent of all students, while men chose technical studies, comprising 68.7 percent of total students.

The predominance of women with educational degrees is significant at a time when governments throughout the region are cutting education budgets.

In Russia, for example, government expenditures on education in 1997 fell to less than one-third of expenditures in 1990. As a result, teachers, who are overwhelmingly women, are badly paid and often wait months for their salaries. Many take second jobs. In Bulgaria, they work as insurance agents or salespersons and also take agricultural jobs to make ends meet. Teacher demoralization reduces the quality of education and results in a growing shortage of teachers in many countries. In rural areas of Moldova, where women comprise 85 percent of the teachers, women with university degrees would rather sell goods in the market than take teaching jobs. As the region's economies struggle to modernize, women without training in technical fields are at risk for being left out of transitioning economies.

Engendering Education

Throughout the region, women are struggling to revitalize education so that it responds to their own needs as well as the needs of new societies. As many communist countries began to feel the influence of perestroika during the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, gender and women's studies programs began to emerge as centers of intellectual vitality and critical thinking. They offered a new kind of space where academics and activists, often working across ethnic and national boundaries, could come together to examine society, challenge existing power relations, and imagine creatively the future. At the Women's Program Founding Forum in September 1997, the working group on education raised challenging questions for the Program's future work. How will women and girls gain access to educational opportunities in the future? How will regional cultures become aware of injustices organized along gender lines, when "the woman question" is seen as a discredited relic of the communist past? How will activists and educators raise general social awareness about violations of women's rights and "women's damaged citizenship?" How will the new scholarship about women arising from the international women's movements of the last 30 years enter the region? How will the region contribute to the international development of women's and gender studies?

In 1997, the Women's Program started to explore how best to expand and link the work and talents of emerging women's studies programs. Despite their vigor, the programs were few in number, poorly funded, and at different stages of development. Programs in Central and Eastern Europe (Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia) were much further along than in most countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Both academics and activists understood that in order to build women's movements, they needed to develop a shared understanding of society and history based on women's experiences in their own countries.

In September 1998 in Belgrade, the Program held its Inaugural Conference on Gender/Women's Studies for Countries in Transition, bringing together 140 women from 30 countries. Co-organized by the Belgrade Women's Studies Center, the conference marked the first time practitioners in gender or women's studies from across the entire region came together to learn from each other, support each other, and strategize for the future of the field. One of the key questions was how to continue to develop high quality research and teaching in the region, while maintaining the connection with activist and democratic agendas.

Biljana Kasic, a founder and director of the Center for Women's Studies in Zagreb, Croatia, recalled that the conference provided "the opportunity to confront the diversity of women's studies centers, ideas, initiatives and their programs" and to initiate projects and future collaborations. The many different forms and locations of women's studies generated exciting debates, from how knowledge should be created to how regional scholars should position themselves conceptually in relation to "the West" and the "global South." If women's studies frameworks emerge from women's experiences, how would this region articulate its similarities and differences from global feminist paradigms? In particular, "the conference breached the divide between academics and activists—a divide we find in every region, and one we must work constantly to reach across," said Dasa Duhacek, coordinator of the Belgrade Women's Studies Center. At the conclusion of the conference, participants formed the Women's/Gender Studies Association of Countries in Transition, devoted to the exchange of ideas, support, and resources across the countries of the region, with the Belgrade Women's Studies Center as Interim Secretariat.

At the same time, the Women's Program pursued several strategies to help institutionalize existing programs, while encouraging the development of women's studies in countries where it had not yet existed. In August 1998, the Women's Program collaborated with the Gender and Culture Program of Central European University to produce the first Gender Studies Directory, a country by country compilation that was translated into local languages by several Soros foundations. An expanded edition appeared in June 1999, including listings of independent teaching and research centers; university-based programs; key individual resource persons; documentation centers; and publications. There were additional listings for government organizations and professional associations in some countries.

Women's studies in the region often starts outside traditional academic institutions, reflecting both its potential marginality and a generative link between politics and scholarship. Some centers and programs focus on teaching while others prioritize research. A number of women's research institutes produce scholarship to inform public policy, while some independent women's studies and documentation centers see their mission tied directly to grassroots women's movements. Increasingly, new gender studies programs are able to affiliate immediately with universities.

To nurture and strengthen this diverse network, the Women's Program initiated a Women's Studies Fellowship Program in 1999. In collaboration with the Soros foundations, the Fellowship Program sponsored one-month study visits by 36 scholars—from Albania, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Ukraine, Slovenia, and Yugoslavia—to established gender studies centers in nine cities, including Kharkov, Prague, Moscow, Bucharest, and Central European University in Budapest. After this exchange of ideas and information, several participating scholars made plans to collaborate on regional research projects, coordinate curricula and course syllabi, and organize teaching exchange programs. Soros foundations in Albania, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Tajikistan agreed to support pilot gender studies programs.

Support for emerging gender studies initiatives also came from collaborative funding with OSI's Human Rights Fund in Budapest and Central European University's Gender and Culture Program. In 1998 and 1999, the three programs awarded small grants to help gender studies programs and centers set up offices, develop curricula, and hold symposia. The body of gender research and analysis continued to grow in countries throughout the region, work that was informed by international scholarship but specific to the national and regional experience. Feminist journals such as Identities in Macedonia also started to appear and multiply, as did opportunities for scholarly exchange. Overall, the Women's Program and Soros foundations have provided support to over 50 gender studies centers, programs, and initiatives in the region.

Creating Access to International Thinking on Women's Issues

Recognizing the need to increase women's access to significant works in the field of gender studies, the Women's Program in 1998 initiated a four-year library and translation collaboration with two other OSI network programs, the Library Program and the Center for Publishing Development. Working with small selection committees of women's studies specialists from the region, the Women's Program created three comprehensive collections for libraries and gender studies programs or women's NGOs.

"It was an ingenious idea to put together those two most neglected categories: women and books," said selection committee member Slavica Stojanovic. A writer and translator herself, Stojanovic serves as a consultant to the Women's Program of the Fund for an Open Society–Serbia. "Women in the region used to read...[but] with the new system of values and the crisis, the instinct was endangered."

The first year targeted the needs of women's studies programs and centers, offering choices of three sets of up to 50 books—classic texts in women's studies, advanced work in gender studies, and practical books on women's issues. In 1999, the "women at risk" collection complemented the Program's work on violence against women and women's health. In 2000, the collection focused on ethnic/minority women and women in conflict situations. Over three years, the Library Core Collections program awarded approximately 150 collections to gender studies programs, libraries, and NGOs.

In collaboration with the Center for Publishing Development, the Women's Program also launched a four-year program to translate 20–25 books each year into local languages. Competitive translation grants went to publishers and women's groups able to demonstrate translation and marketing skills. Classics translated in 1998 included Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in Romania and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in Slovenia; and, among works uniting theory to practice, bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom in Albania.

To support culturally appropriate translation of books on "women at risk" in 1999, the Women's Program and the Gender and Culture Program held an intensive workshop that included regional experts in translation, one of the original editors of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and translators who had received grants. In discussing some of the practicalities of translating Western classics for diverse regional audiences, the group generated new insights about the challenges of cross-cultural communication. Translations of such concepts as feminism, gender, and sexual violence, among others, generated heated debates.

Given the racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts in many countries in which OSI operates, the translations list for 2000 highlighted works on ethnic/minority women and women in conflict and peace-building situations. Among those selected for translation were The Veil and the Male Elite by Fatima Mernissi in Azerbaijan; and Gender and Nation by Nira Yuval-Davis, published in Latvia.

The final year, 2001, reflected increasing world attention to globalization and the need articulated by Women's Program coordinators and grassroots NGOs for more information on women's economic empowerment. Titles included: Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structures of Constraint by Nancy Folbre and Tony Larsen; Gender and Economics–A European Perspective by Dijkstra Geske and Janneke Plantenga; and Gender, Globalization and Democratization by Rita Mae Kelly.

"Translation grants and library core collections projects play an extremely important role in the region," said Djurdja Knezevic, director of Zenska Infoteka, a women's information and publishing center in Croatia. "This is the only project that systematically supports translation and publishing of women's/feminist books."

The four-year program succeeded in encouraging publishers' interest in translation and publication in the region. Many of the titles have been commercially successful, reaching general readers. The next goal, as the Women's Program and colleagues see it, is to promote further translations of writings by women from the region into other regional languages, as well as into English.

Promoting Regional Scholarship on Women

To continue the momentum generated by the Belgrade conference and to help scholars build a regional body of research, the Women's Program sponsored several events, conferences, and programs on women's studies. One of the main trends in the development of women's studies around the globe has been the effort to restore women's agency in history. The countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have been particularly engaged in analyzing their past, exploring the misuse of history to support changing political agendas.

The first regional women's history conference convened in October 1999 in Minsk, Belarus, with support from the Women's Program, the MacArthur Foundation, and several other funders. Scholars came together with a shared sense of urgency regarding the need to include women in the process of reanalyzing and reconstructing history in the region. One result is the publication of Gendered Histories from Eastern Europe, a collection of articles by 29 authors, edited by Elena Gapova, Almira Usmanova, and Andrea Peto.

As another means of recovering the "unofficial" realities and experiences of women in the countries of the Soros foundations network, the Women's Program initiated work on women's oral history at the network and national levels. "Women's Memory: Oral Histories from Transition—Theory and Practice," the November 2000 workshop cosponsored with the CEU Gender and Culture Program, drew women from 18 countries in the region, plus Turkey. Workshop participant Elmira Shishkareva, Women's Program coordinator for the Soros Foundation–Kyrgyzstan and a historian herself, noted the absence of researchers from Central Asia and the Caucusus and volunteered to host another workshop.

Consequently, in July 2001, in collaboration with the Soros Foundation–Kyrgyzstan, the Women's Program sponsored a women's oral history workshop for 20 researchers (from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan). Led by an international team of scholars from Hungary, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and Uzbekistan, the workshop provided new concepts and opportunities to practice new skills (such as the ethics and the "art" of conducting in-depth interviews; oral history methodology; and gender analysis). Individual consultations helped participants refine their research plans. Multicountry working groups addressed the following topics: ethnic minorities; the impact of transition on women; political conflicts and violence against women; rural women; and women's memory and history.

The program includes an ongoing mentorship component, linking researchers with workshop faculty. The Network Women's Program and participating Soros foundations are supporting the research projects of many of the workshop participants. Participants received an extensive Women's Oral History Reader in Russian.

A second edited volume, including the new research of participants, will be distributed widely.

"People are very grateful to be listened to," said Ketevan Kobaladze. "They feel abandoned by the government, their families, etc. This project makes them feel like their stories will be written somewhere and read." Kobaladze is one member of a nine-person team working on "Women's Oral Histories: Multiethnic Georgia in the Last Century," supported by the Open Society Georgia Foundation and the Women's Program. The project provides a gendered perspective in examining how ethnic minorities living in six regions of the country view each other and how that impacts ethnic conflicts, economic crises, and the country's future stability.

Empowering Education Program: Gender-Sensitive Training

While values and stereotypes about gender roles and relations are embedded most deeply in family and home life, they are reinforced in schools, at virtually every level. There is a pressing need for educational reform throughout the region and, in particular, the countries of the former Soviet Union. Although gender-sensitive and equitable educational models are badly needed in the regional educational systems, they are not always a priority for schools or a realistic option.

The Empowering Education initiative of the Women's Program presents a participatory, alternative educational approach for schools, universities, NGOs, educators, and human rights activists who understand the importance of talking about human rights and providing nonthreatening gender-sensitive education for both boys and girls.

Halyna Phedoryshyn, director of School 13, the largest school in the Lviv region in Ukraine, stated, "Empowering Education covers a lot of issues relevant for youth, such as effective communication, which are important because earlier no one paid any attention to them, and now these issues are important for our contemporary society. It prepares them for adult life and gives them concrete tools to deal with important problems, such as domestic violence and gender stereotypes."

In 1999, in cooperation with the International Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine, the Women's Pro-gram initiated the Empowering Education program to train teams of teachers and educators to introduce gender issues in secondary schools and some universities across the countries of the former Soviet Union. The Empowering Education program currently operates in secondary schools and in some universities in Ukraine and eight other countries of the former Soviet Union.

Leading this program is the Women's Information Consultative Center (WICC) in Ukraine, which conducted a successful pilot training program in three Ukrainian cities from 1996 to 1998. From 1999 to 2001, WICC trained teams in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Teams are teaching the innovative curriculum in high schools, some universities, pedagogical colleges, and for other target groups (such as rural families) in major cities and in the provinces. Although the main target group is secondary students, other groups also participate, and new groups are continually being researched and developed. For example, Empowering Education for kindergartners is currently in the works, due to demand from educators, administrators, and parents. In Tajikistan, Muslim leaders participate in trainings.

Constantly evolving curricula based on participant need include topics such as gender-based violence, conflict resolution, women's human rights, and UN instruments and mechanisms.

The training manual for the program, originally written in Ukrainian, has been published in Russian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Tajik, and English. It includes exercises covering such topics as gender issues and successful communication techniques, dialogues on diversity, and strategies to elicit student attitudes about gender and gender roles. In one warm-up exercise, participants tell stories about their own names, helping to draw out the cultural layers that surround individual identity in each country. Subsequent exercises, such as discussions, brainstorming, case studies, role play, and creative work (drawing, pantomime) focus on working effectively with others. During each session, participants discuss the Empowering Education principles promoting active citizenship and their expectations.

In each country, the cooperation of the Ministry of Education is critical to the success of the program. In Tajikistan, for example, the Ministry of Education participated in the selection of schools in which to conduct trainings and issued letters of support to the school directors. In both Tajikistan and Georgia, local universities requested workshops for their education students. In Tajikistan, at the invitation of teachers from the Department of Journalism of Russian Tajik Slavonic University, trainers now conduct weekly seminars on the Empowering Education methodology.

Ukraine has served as a model for other countries, paving and helping to formalize Empowering Education. In April 2001, WICC received a license from the Ministry of Education and Science in Ukraine to provide postgraduate courses in gender issues and successful communication techniques. This is the first time an NGO has received such a license in Ukraine.

In the summer of 2001, the first Empowering Education Camp took place in Karpaty, Ukraine. In addition to participants from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, the camp included participants from Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, and Laos, who had not worked with Empowering Education before. They explored the innovative methodology hands-on in training sessions that were held in English for the first time.

Empowering Education's emphasis on multicultural learning had its first global test. "I found that many of the youth were very interested in me," recalled Aye Aye Khaing, of the Women's League of Burma. "They are so active and creative. I noticed that they all spoke Russian. They seemed to be able to cooperate and understand each other even though Russia had occupied their countries. Seeing this made me realize that it is possible for us also to work out our situation. We can start doing this with all ages; the education process is for everyone."

Priorities for the Future

WICC's experience in Ukraine represents precisely the kind of participation that NGOs in general, and women's NGOs in particular, are seeking within the educational reform process now taking place in the region's countries.

In support of such efforts, the Women's Program worked with the Institute for Educational Policy (IEP) to make gender an integral part of the educational reform process. A seminar in December 1998 prompted joint work on the Gender Equity in Primary and Secondary Education project, which will produce a practical, change-oriented report to provide educational reformers with the concepts and tools for promoting gender equity in education. As with many other fields, education reform must start with encouraging governments to collect and provide consistent gender-disaggregated data.

In the coming years, the Women's Program is committed to strengthening efforts to integrate nonsexist curricula, textbooks, and pedagogy into education at all levels. The Program will encourage ministries of education and international donor agencies to ensure long-term support for gender studies and gender-sensitive education. Institutionalization of innovative programs such as Empowering Education and socially engaged gender studies programs will help change the culture of education in the region. Education remains a focal point for the Program's cross-cutting commitment to the empowerment of girls, who will help shape the future of women's movements, democratization, and the development of open societies.