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Gender perspectives in mathematics education: intentions of research in Denmark and Norway

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Abstract

A framework is presented for analyzing gender perspectives in mathematics education (structural, symbolic, personal and interactional gender), and the Danish and Norwegian researchers’/teachers’ work within the field of gender and mathematics is presented with reference to these four perspectives. Furthermore, the gender issue in TIMSS and PISA is briefly discussed. The main thread through the article is the researchers’ willingness and intentions of investigating the gender perspectives in mathematics education. However, so far, these research intentions have not been realized in Denmark and Norway.

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Notes

  1. Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen is a professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Oslo. In the early 1980s, she did her Ph.D. in Denmark where she was one of the very first to study classroom activities from a gender perspective.

  2. Originally, the aspects were named ”gender identity” and ”gendered subjectivity”, but later Nielsen has changed the term into gendered identity to make visible the possible change.

  3. A study on “gendered mathematics” was designed and carried through by the Danish psychologist Kirsten Grønbæk Hansen in the early 1990s (the empirical investigation) and later. She studied the activity in the mathematical classrooms in technical schools (vocational education and TX—technical higher secondary school). The main purpose of the study was to investigate the personal meaning of mathematics to the students and how this was connected with the cultural meaning of mathematics. The examples given in this section to illustrate the theoretical framework are findings from her work (Hansen 1991, 2000).

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Kari Hag, Lisbeth Lindberg and Lena Lindenskov for invaluable help with providing Danish and Norwegian material on the gender and mathematics issue, and to Inge Henningsen, Gail FitzSimons, Jeff Evans, the reviewer and the editor for constructive and critical comments to an earlier version of this article.

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  1. The School of Teacher Education, Malmö University, 206 05, Malmö, Sweden

    Tine Wedege

  2. The Department of Mathematical Sciences, Norwegian University of Technology and Science, Trondheim, Norway

    Tine Wedege

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Correspondence to Tine Wedege.

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Wedege, T. Gender perspectives in mathematics education: intentions of research in Denmark and Norway. ZDM Mathematics Education 39, 251–260 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-007-0026-3

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