Viewing the e-learning landscape through the lens of gender

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Viewing the e-learning landscape through the lens
of gender

• Gill Kirkup, Deputy Director Institute of
  Educational Technology, Open University, UK
• URL http//iet.open.ac.uk/pp/g.e.kirkup/

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Personal Introduction

• Deputy Director (responsibility for taught
  courses) in particular an MA in Online and
  Distance Education.
• Nearly 30 years as a distance educator combining
  research/practice in
• distance education and the use of media for
  learning
• gendered media preferences in distance education
• the relationship between gender and technology
• specifically gender and information and
  communication technologies (ICTs)
• developing courses for women
• e-learning and gender issues

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Overview of presentation

• What might we mean by gender
• What might we mean by e-learning ?
• What is gender mainstreaming-
• and its tools and methodologies
• What are the gender issues in e-learning?
• Access to the technologies
• Familiarity and confidence with the technologies
• Interaction styles in social software (Web 2.0)
• Educational use, preferred media and learning
  orientation
• Gender relations and power
• The shaping and production of knowledge (Web 2.0)
• What are the gender mainstreaming activities for
  any e-learning implementation?

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Hardings four aspects of gender

• A property of individuals
• A relation between groups
• A property of symbolic systems
• A way of distributing scarce resources
• There is a debate about how far feminist theory
  has produced gender difference in identifying
  inequality.
• Gender has not disappeared or been transformed
  -online

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Sometimes these four attributes are collapsed
into TWO main ways of understanding sex /gender

• 1. The sex gender system
• a set of social relations between men which have
  a material base that enables them to dominate
  women ( Mitchell)
• Concern with the sexual division of labour,
  social divisions around sex/gender. (
  traditionally the focus of Equal Opportunities or
  Gender mainstreaming)
• 2. Gender identity
• identity and subjectivity of a particular gender
• Discourse (post-modern feminism is sometimes
  accused of collapsing everything into discourse)
• Issues of embodiment
• Performativity of gender ( Butler)

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What might this mean for gender and learning?

• Students are constantly re-defining themselves
  and performing gender through the process of
  their learning and the construction of meaning
• As teachers, researchers, and the invisible back
  room technologists are part of this community,
  all engaged in constantly remaking ourselves, and
  our disciplines.
• As teachers and educational designers we must
  develop activities using the tools of VLE to
  create active learning that acknowledges gender
  in a productive and respectful way?

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E-learning defined by Wikipedia

• An all-encompassing term generally used to refer
  to computer-enhanced learning, although it is
  often extended to include the use of mobile
  technologies such as PDAs and MP3 players. It may
  include the use of web-based teaching materials
  and hypermedia in general, multimedia CD-ROMs or
  web sites, discussion boards, collaborative
  software, e-mail, blogs, wikis, text chat,
  computer aided assessment, educational animation,
  simulations, games, learning management software,
  electronic voting systems and more, with possibly
  a combination of different methods being used.
• It is also broader than the terms Online Learning
  or Online Education which generally refer to
  purely web-based learning. In cases where mobile
  technologies are used, the term M-learning has
  become more common.
• E-learning is naturally suited to distance
  learning and flexible learning, but can also be
  used in conjunction with face-to-face teaching,
  in which case the term Blended learning is
  commonly used.

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Gender Mainstreaming

• In July 1997, the United Nations Economic and
  Social Council (ECOSOC) defined the concept of
  gender mainstreaming as follows
• "Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the
  process of assessing the implications for women
  and men of any planned action, including
  legislation, policies or programmes, in any area
  and at all levels. It is a strategy for making
  the concerns and experiences of women as well as
  of men an integral part of the design,
  implementation, monitoring and evaluation of
  policies and programmes in all political,
  economic and societal spheres, so that women and
  men benefit equally, and inequality is not
  perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming
  is to achieve gender equality."
• The term is now applied to systematic processes
  for policy and institutional audit and change.

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The three-legged stool of mainstreaming Booth
and Bennet 2002
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Tools for Gender Mainstreaming

• 1. Gender disaggregated statistics
• Gender disaggregated statistics are a vital
  management tool for understanding the often
  different situations of women and men. All too
  often such data is not collected or collated.
• It can often be entirely acceptable that one sex
  rather than another should benefit more from
  specific services or budgets, so long as this
  reflects evidence-based need, rather than being
  simply demand-led or worse, the consequence of
  chance or indirect discrimination.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
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Tools for Gender Mainstreaming

• 2. Gender impact assessments
• Should be made BEFORE a policy (or legislation)
  is implemented. It is designed to help policy
  makers understand the relative impact of the
  policy or practice upon men and women
  respectively, and address any adverse effects.
  Sometimes described as wearing a gender lens or
  having a gender reflex.
• It should focus on three questions
• representation (what is the gender distribution
  of relevant decision-making bodies?)
• resources (what is the distribution of/access to
  resources for men and women?) and
• reality (do men and women profit from the
  measure? Who gets what, why and on what
  conditions?)

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
12
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming

• 3. Equality indicators
• Raw data, even when disaggregated by gender, are
  limited in what they show without baseline
  statistics to set and measure performance
  targets. Equality indicators need to be
  developed for benchmarking purposes so that
  comparisons can be made over time or space. The
  identification of equality indicators should be
  an on-going process with new information about
  how gender inequalities are maintained enabling
  the development of new indicators and the
  refining of existing ones.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
13
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming

• 4. Monitoring, evaluating, auditing
• Gender equality needs to be regarded as a
  performance indicator, and treated the same way
  for evaluation purposes as, say, balancing the
  books. It is thus essential to monitor the
  effectiveness of policy.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
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Tools for Gender Mainstreaming

• 5. Gender balance in decision-making
• A gender balance in decision-making is needed to
  address the democratic principle of gender
  mainstreaming. In the Research Directorate of the
  EC, there is a rule that all the scientific
  committees of the Directorate must have at least
  40 of both genders.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
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Tools for Gender Mainstreaming

• 6. Engendering budgets
• Budgets can, and indeed, need to be engendered.
  It is legitimate to ask what proportion of public
  budgets in all areas, are spent on men and women,
  and girls and boys respectively.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
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Tools for Gender Mainstreaming

• 7. Visioning
• Visioning is at the heart of mainstreaming and
  requires the imaginative reconsideration of the
  use of resources, time, or public space, in
  gendered terms. The tools just described are
  designed to help with this process.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
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What are the gender issues in e-learning?
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General access to the Internet and ICTs

• In the developed world women and men have equal
  internet access. University students have the
  same ICT access and are familiar with all sorts
  of devices- mobile and wireless devices
• Differential access has more to do with age, race
  and economic class than gender.
• But men and women have different patterns of how
  they use the internet and what for.
• Men spend more time online than women.
• Women are enthusiastic online communicators and
  they use email more a more robust way.
• More men than women perform online transactions
  buying and selling.
• Men pursue and consume information online more
  aggressively than women.
• Men use the internet more than women for games,
  sports and hobbies.
• Men are more interested in technology than women,
  have more confidence in their knowledge and
  technical skills.
• Source Deborah Fallows, How Women and Men Use
  the Internet. Washington, DC Pew Internet
  American Life Project, December 28, 2005.

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Familiarity and confidence with the technologies

• Women are very small and in some countries
  decreasing proportions of student studying ICTs
  becoming expert with the technology
• In households women access technology but dont
  own it or chose it
• There is a long tradition of women students being
  less confident them men with the technology even
  when they are performing similarly.

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Interaction styles in social software

• Gendered patterns of language use in computer
  mediated communication
• Women attenuated language and positive
  socioemotional content
• Men more authoritative language and negative
  socioemotional content.
• Women engaging in emotional labour online
• Blogging- as many women with blogs as men, but
  women more likely to be using blogs to keep in
  touch with people, and be relating personal
  experience. Men try to entertain.
• Differential use of social software such as
  facebook and myspace- girls use for keeping in
  contact with friends boys for making new contacts
  and flirting- sexual behaviour

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Educational use, preferred media and learning
orientation

• Student support issues women look for support
  and connectedness with others ( Kirkup Price)
• E-learning, he-learning, she-learning ( Selwyn)?
  -Women use computers and the internet more for
  study purposes than men-
• Confidence with technology,

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Gender relations and power

• Classroom ambience and access to equipment
  gendered.
• Effect of mixed and single sex groups- boys
  perform well on technical tasks when in groups
  with girls and girls perform poorly.
• In CMC, language can maintain/produce power
  differentials
• In email interactions men and women respond
  differently to people in different power

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The shaping and production of knowledge (Web 2.0)

• Second-life, and online networks and communities
  extension of gendered behaviour ( myspace and
  Facebook use)
• Gender difference in online interactions and
  language reproduce power differentials, which
  could produce gendered credibility and authority.
  ( Haraway Modest witness

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How to

• Bring sensitivity to these issues to Gender
  mainstreaming processes in your work?

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How can you use the following mainstreaming tools
in your e-learning policy and practices?

• 1. Gender disaggregated statistics
• 2. Gender impact assessments
• 3. Equality indicators
• 4. Monitoring, evaluating, auditing
• 5. Gender balance in decision-making
• 6. Engendering budgets
• 7. Visioning
• ( See Checklist hard copy)

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End Thank you for spending your Friday afternoon
engaging with the topic of gender and e-learning.
Gill Kirkup