Situating gender and schooling in Australia

Our contention in proposing this special issue was that the present moment offers a paradox where evidence proliferates of how gender continues to profoundly and unevenly shape the lives of people in schools and wider society, yet policy responses are patchy at best. Cascading crises and public scandals have come to characterise wider public discourse on genders, sexualities and schooling. In recent years in Australia, reactive responses from educational systems have tended to follow media reporting e.g. on sexualised violence and predation (Chanel Contos, Grace Tame); sexist public behaviours of students and teachers at elite single-sex schools (e.g. St Kevins, Melbourne in 2020; Knox, Sydney in 2022, Cranbrook, Sydney in 2024), or controversies regarding programs such as Safe Schools (e.g. Law, 2017; Shannon & Smith, 2017; Ward, 2020). At the same time, the concept of ‘gender’ itself has been politicised in Australia, which has shut down thoughtful, critical conversations about this in schools (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020).

The broad arena of gender and education has been a battlefield in culture wars that have endeavoured to divide and distract people from questions that matter most, such as how are schools creating conditions where young people can flourish in all dimensions of their lives, where all young people feel safe and welcome, where they can form aspirations for their futures and work towards those with the support of their peers, their teachers and their school communities. Gender justice and inclusion are therefore fundamental human rights. In Australia, where all educational systems are propped up by significant government funding, it is imperative that gender equity is part of the mutual obligation that schools have to the society for which they are cultivating the young citizens of the future.

Gender equity policy complexities: there and then, here and now

Previous policy eras have seen attempts to implement wide-ranging proactive interventions around gender equity and inclusion in schools. The zenith (and the death knell) of these attempts was the moment of the national policy Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997), which was the culmination of a sequence of national evidence-based interventions in schooling for girls, and the moment when boys were explicitly written into educational policy as an equity group (e.g. Ailwood, 2003; Gannon, 2016, 2024a; Kenway & Willis, 1998; McLeod, 2017; Yates, 2008). Around this time, a range of related resources and professional development materials were also produced and distributed by the federal government [for example, primary and secondary versions of No Fear: A kit addressing gender-based violence (DEET, 1995)], and many further resources were produced by state equity units. The tide turned at the federal level with a change of government and many resources disappeared from view and gender equity units were gradually dismantled. Soon after, the Howard government’s Boys: Getting it Right Inquiry (House of Representatives Standing Comittee on Education and Training, 2002) and subsequent investments in boys’ schooling initiatives in the early 2000s assumed that boys were the victims of girls’ success (e.g. Lingard, et al., 2012; Mills et al., 2007). This reduced all aspects of educational experience to purely academic outcomes and intentionally failed to engage with social elements that the framework was also responding to. Arguably, broad attention to gender and schooling has lapsed over the last decades since these earlier periods. Yet many of the issues that were highlighted back then such as gendered stereotypes, inequitable educational outcomes and postschool pathways, curriculum biases, gendered violence and sexual harassment—some of these in new guises and with new complexities—are still evident in the present.

From this distance, glaring gaps are evident in this earlier policy era. These include intersectional understandings of how gender is simultaneously inflected by sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, regionality, Indigeneity and more (Callaghan et al., 2023; Jones, 2015, 2020; Keddie, 2017; Keddie & Mills, 2007; Kenway et al., 2006; Martino & Pallotta Chiarolli, 2003; Rasmussen, 2006; Robinson, 2005). This is not a shopping list of identities but rather indicates how gender is realised through dynamic, lively, affective processes. Nor is gender identity solely an individualised, internalised process—it is simultaneously relational, contingent, interactive, reliant on recognition and mastery of gendered norms—and also institutionally formed and regulated (Butler, 1990; Davies, 1989; Ferfolja, 2007; Rasmussen, 2009; Rawlings, 2017; Robinson, 2000; Saltmarsh, 2008; Wolfe, 2021). In the earlier policy period, gender was defined always in terms of binaries such as boy/girl, male/ female, masculine/ feminine. Unpacking or deconstructing how schooling and society have cultivated and privileged some versions of masculinities (Connell, 1995, 1996; Kenway & Fitzclarence, 1997) and femininities (Charles, 2010, 2013; Gonick & Gannon, 2014) in ways that limit young people’s potentials was part of the intervention work that was seen to be required. Critiques of the emergence of neoliberal individualism and postfeminism in schooling and media further contributed to understandings of the dynamism of gendered subjectivities and normativities.

Sexual harassment and school violence were amongst the strategic directions envisaged by the earlier policy Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997) and remain matters of concern (Gannon, 2019; Higham, 2018; Saltmarsh et al., 2012; Variyan & Wilkinson, 2021; Wescott et al., 2023). However, acknowledgment of the widespread impacts of homophobia was barely there in early policy work (Gannon & Robinson, 2021; Jones & Hillier, 2012). Considerations of cisgenderism and transphobia were not yet on the horizon (Jones et al., 2016; Wolfe, 2021). However as a federation of states, Australia has simultaneously had both ‘advanced’ and ‘pretty bad’ education policies specifically concerned with GLBTIQ students (Jones, 2015, p. 5). Currently, policy support for creating and maintaining ‘safe and affirming environments’ in schools for gender and sexuality diverse students is very uneven across jurisdictions (Ullman et al., 2024). Broadly, a ‘culture of limitation’ has played out in relation to gender and sexuality across most Australian states (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020), with a bureaucratic ‘silencing’ of issues pertaining to gender and sexuality diverse students that have been deemed to be ‘controversial’ or ‘sensitive’ (Ullman & Ferfolja, 2014; Ullman et al., 2024). Seismic shifts in social views around gender and sexuality diversity have taken place in Australia since then, with the scale of transformation clear in the positive result of the Marriage Equality postal vote of 2017. Such improvements to GLBTIQ equality and rights fuelled an opposing push for increased protections of religious freedoms (Ezzy et al., 2022), and were a catalyst for the Religious Freedom Review (Ruddock et al., 2018). Attempts to legislatively intensify gender and sexuality inequality in schools in the name of ‘parental choice’ and ‘religious freedom’ in NSW and federally have, thus far, not been successful. As we write this editorial, in Canberra the Australian parliament debates the current exemptions from the national Sex Discrimination Act that allow religious schools to dismiss teachers and expel students over issues relating to sexuality and gender identity.

Understandings of gender and sexualities have expanded hugely in recent years, with many young people, families and teachers expecting that schools better reflect the societal changes around them. Simultaneously, resistance has been vocal, influential and multidirectional—ranging from organised campaigns from conservative organisations (Callaghan et al., 2023; Law, 2017; Poulos, 2021) to the pernicious effects on young people of online misogyny, homophobia and transphobia of social influencers such as Andrew Tate (Westcott et al., 2023). Gendered and sexualised violence have been the focus of much public concern and have underpinned a spectrum of initiatives ranging from the Safe Schools anti-bullying initiative, which although it remains available in Victoria, was blocked at the federal level (Carden, 2019; Rasmussen & Leahy, 2018; Ward, 2020), to Respectful Relationships Education which is being cautiously introduced in some states (Keddie & Ollis, 2021; Pfitzner et al., 2022). Vocal demands for consent education have come from multiple directions (Burns et al., 2023; Burton et al., 2023; Contos, 2023). Sexualities and relationships education remains an important priority for educational researchers in the present (see for example, Jones, 2020; Ollis et al., 2022).

This necessarily brief spin through some of the policy and research attention to gender in Australian schooling began with the first (and last) national policy attempt to address a breadth of aspects of gender equality in schooling. This policy failed in that it was never implemented, in part due to a change of government (Gannon, 2016, 2024a). However, it marked a pivotal moment in gender and education policy collaboration and activism (Gannon, 2016). At the present moment, feminist education scholars who have worked for decades in this space understandably feel at least ‘a little fatigued’ (Keddie, 2023, p. 504) at the intransigence of gender inequalities and the volumes of excellent resources that have been overlooked, disregarded or abandoned through this time. Research into gender and sexualities education in Australia is vast in quantity, high quality and globally influential – as evidenced by the scholars we cite in this editorial. Yet the nexus of policy, praxis and research seems wider and more elusive than ever. Australian society and schooling continue to be characterised by a ‘culture of limitation…a messy plethora of perspectives, beliefs and attitudes’ that is detrimental for young people and wider society (Ferfolja & Ullman, 2020, p. 3). It seems extraordinarily difficult to write holistically or broadly about gender in Australian education at the present. Educational research tends to be fragmented according to substantive focus, sector, theoretical allegiances, and methodological framing. We need capacious concepts that can enable us to consider whose interests are currently being served in education and whose are not (Higham, 2022, 2024), and what the costs of this are for individuals and society, for our collective futures as a nation, and that do not lock us into the dead end thinking of competing victimhood or infinitely fragmenting identity politics. Perhaps ‘gender justice’ might serve as such a concept (Gannon, forthcoming). Importantly, young people’s activism and leadership in seeking gender justice has been a prominent feature of recent research including several of the papers in this special issue. Secondary schools have been the most volatile sites of intervention and concern, and this is also reflected in the papers that were submitted for this special issue.

Research in/about/for gender justice and schooling

All the papers in this special issue have come from recent empirical studies investigating gender and schooling, with young people, parents, teachers and alumni. Authors responded to our invitation to consider how gender continues to shape educational experiences for young people in their research. Some of the papers report on research with young people currently in schools, while other research considers the legacies of gendered schooling experiences. The special issue includes a range of publicly funded significant research projects (ARC Discovery, DECRA, Future Fellow) as well as fresh contributions from emerging researchers. Many were presented as part of two Gender and Schooling symposia held at Melbourne’s 2023 Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) annual conference.

While spectacular events tend to attract media and public attention, the papers in this special issue address and trouble more subtle and ubiquitous gendered practices in schools. Some of the papers grapple with aspects of educational policy directly, others implicitly. Collectively they interrogate stereotypical assumptions (e.g. single sex educational practices, regulation through uniforms, violence and behaviour, parental choice and values) that persist in everyday schooling and document their impacts on young people. Collectively their work demonstrates that schooling continues to be a critical site for the regulation of gendered and sexual identities, even though (and partly because) many young people are redefining genders and sexualities in more fluid ways. Further, it is clear that schools continue to be sites for the perpetration of sexual harassment and gender-based violence.

Many of the papers in this special issue privilege the voices and perspectives of young people and those closest to them. The qualitative designs that were adopted by researchers were intentionally directed towards the inclusion of perspectives that are often overlooked. However, it was evident in our discussions at the symposia that challenges have been greater than ever before in conducting research that includes young people’s voices (see also Johnson et al., 2019; Ollis, 2019). Schools, systems and researchers have become risk-averse given the savagery of some media reporting and public discourse around gender and schooling. Some of the disruption of educational research has certainly been impacted by the pandemic pause that was imposed in most states and sectors however other factors have also been at play through the last five or more years. Researchers are, above all, agile and creative in the face of obstacles in their inquiries about issues of social justice and education. Researchers have changed direction and conducted their research in independent or non-state schools, crossed state borders, conducted research with people who have already left school, and revisited existing data sets with a gendered lens in order to contribute to this special issue. We suggest that if we are to better understand the issues that currently surround gender and schooling for young people, then we need to speak to them and their teachers in all sorts of contexts. The papers in this special issue are an opening and an invitation to researchers to continue this work. In the remainder of this section we present how each of these papers responds to the question of how gender continues to shape the educational experiences of young people.

Kellie Burns and Brooke Manning (2024) draw on a feminist poststructuralist approach to explore in-depth interview data in their paper, ‘The complexities of negotiating school choice for parents with gender diverse children’. Education policies at all levels influence the experiences of these families and young people. Parents with gender diverse children described how the ‘right choice’ or ‘right schools’ were inclusive schools that actively supported and accepted their gender diverse students and were accommodating in gender affirming ways. These schools had flexible school uniform policies, were willing to confront and reorganise bathrooms, and had staff that were understanding, proactive and responsive. In contrast, the ‘wrong choice’ or ‘wrong schools’ were schools that rejected children’s gender fluidity or where gender diverse children felt marginalised. Their data presents the layered inequalities of the Australian educational marketplace, where parents are ‘choosers’, a powerful but misleading modality of neoliberal governmentality where choice is a privilege for parents who have the economic and social capital to provide them with the ‘possibilities of choice’. Burns and Manning conclude with the important reminder that every student has the right to attend a safe and supportive school, but this should not be contingent on parents making, or being privileged enough to be able to make, the ‘right choice’ for gender diverse children.

In ‘‘I want to make a difference’: Students co-researching school cultures of gender and sexuality’ (2024), Victoria Rawlings advocates for actively involving young people in research praxis, exploring the possibilities afforded by a Community-Led Research (CLR) approach. Drawing on research emerging from her three-year DECRA project, Rawlings illustrates some of the challenges and opportunities created by using CLR methodologies. Reporting on her work with student co-investigators, co-researching school cultures of gender and sexuality in two Australian schools, Rawlings argues that while it can be difficult to work with young people in this way—as they are often construed as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘at risk’ by ethics committees, and matters of sex, gender, and sexuality are often positioned as ‘high risk’ topics—it can be an empowering and potentially transformative process for those young people involved. Rawlings’ paper provides empirical insights into how CLR can work with young people in co-researching school cultures of gender and sexuality and offers a valuable example of how this work might be done in schools.

Leanne Higham’s paper, ‘Attending to slow violence: From Pride to Stand Out’ (2024) explores how affect was at work in the move from Pride Club to Stand Out at a Melbourne secondary school. Giving attention to a situation that played out over several weeks during her ethnographic fieldwork, she examines the foundation of Pride Club, an anti-violent effort to create a safe space for queer students—as well as its transformation into Stand Out Club, a nonviolent response to Pride Club’s swift demise. In Victoria, education policy compels public schools to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex, gender and sexualities, yet in practice, exclusion slipped back in. Higham examines how slow violence was unintentionally enacted through ‘freezing out’ racial and cultural difference at Pride Club, and how an ethical response to the emergent needs of queer students’ lives was mobilised through becoming Stand Out. This paper provides insights into the nuances of slow violence and nonviolence that are not always immediately obvious. Higham calls for theoretical and ethical nuance in how we both understand and address matters such as gender and sexuality in schools and offers the concepts of slow violence and nonviolence as possible ways forward.

In ‘School uniforms that hurt, an Australian perspective on gendered mattering’, Melissa Wolfe (2024) examines the limiting affects of gendered school uniforms. Wolfe deploys the methodology of the filmed ‘intra-view’ to trace how the ubiquitous practices of school uniforms reinforce (cis)gender binaries and reproduce patriarchal power. Wolfe adopts a feminist new materialist approach for a close analysis of how Jane—a cisgendered female student at a selective science-focused secondary school—experiences the material-affective force of the school uniform and how it impacts her sense of belonging and comfort in school. School uniform policies are often presented as benign and equity-oriented, but Wolfe suggests how this is much more complex. Despite the availability of what might be considered ‘gender-neutral’ uniform options, for Jane wearing pants would elicit shame and stigma and is, therefore, unthinkable. Bodies, students and uniforms are entangled. The uniform is a productive force, a ‘thinking-feeling-making’ of schooling and of academic success that is never neutral but, rather, provisional and contingent depending on compliance and the gendered normativity of student bodies.

In ‘‘Everyone would freak out, like they’ve never seen a boy before’: young people’s experiences of single-sex secondary schooling in NSW’ (Gannon, 2024b), Susanne Gannon considers the logics underpinning schooling that is segregated on the basis of gender. Exploring micronarratives provided by recent school-leavers from a range of non-elite single-sex secondary schools across multiple sectors in NSW, Gannon explores the affective intensities that emerged in their accounts of how these experiences were shaped not only by gender, but also by complex configurations of difference, including class, ethnicity, ability, location, and a range of other factors. Adopting an affective lens for this work, Gannon traces subtle yet affectively potent intensities throughout participants’ micronarratives, in so doing elevating the complexities of their lived experiences and certain gender-related issues into view. These micronarratives provide a rich and vibrant sense of how young people within single-sex schools are actively involved in negotiating their gendered and sexed identities through their interactions with others, and through their encounters with various powerful regimes of normativity. In terms of educational policy decisions about how schools can best be organised, the paper suggests a rethink of the traditions and rationales for such segregation.

In ‘Deconstructing gendered approaches in ‘single sex’ flexi schools: Two Australian case studies’ Martin Mills and Glenda McGregor (2024) bring a critical gender lens to their research on alternative education provision for marginalised young people. Flexi-schools promote relational pedagogies and seek cultural and curricular justice for students who have become disengaged in conventional schooling for a wide range of complex and interwoven reasons. Students are repositioned as young people with potential, and they are supported towards developing goals and achieving success. Yet, gendered discourses evident amongst teachers and school executive suggests that despite their care for and commitments to young people, in different ways and with different effects, both schools draw on hegemonic and limiting discourses of masculinities and femininities. School structures, philosophies and practices tend to reinforce and deepen binaries of genders, with less attention to problematising gendered norms.

In ‘Girls do this, guys do that: How first-in-family students negotiating working-class gendered subjectivities during a time of social change,’ Sarah McDonald and Garth Stahl (2024) investigate the experiences of segregated educational choice in the university sector. They follow students from their final year of high school into their first two years of university, conducting interviews at six monthly intervals. Despite extensive investments in widening participation policies and interventions in Australian universities, McDonald and Stahl argue that the interplay of gender with other dimensions or target groups in the widening participation space is poorly understood, narrowly focused, and promotes neoliberal subjectivities that privilege individual choice and blame when things go wrong. They find that young people’s aspirations are highly influenced by gendered stereotypes and norms that remain quite limiting, particularly for young people from working class backgrounds. For these students, aspiration is mediated by what seems possible lonely within gendered limits, leading to self-exclusion from courses, careers and possible futures.

In ‘‘Teaching up’ at school and at home: Young people’s contemporary gender perspectives’, Erika Smith and Kerry Robinson (2024) explore how gender and gender identities are understood by young people and their generation (Gen Z) as diverse, expansive, and multiple. Engaging with young people’s critical reflections on their experiences with gender during secondary schooling, Smith and Robinson provide insights that challenge perspectives of young people’s gendered subjectivities as passive and vulnerable, highlighting how young people are agentic subjects who are actively choosing different ways to ‘do’ gender beyond the gender binary. Smith and Robinson lift into view crucial agentive work on the part of the young people, including through ‘teaching up’; an educative role some young people saw themselves as fulfilling towards those people from earlier generations whom they considered to have out of date ideas and understandings of gender, such as their teachers, and parents—for whom such notions were not always readily supported or accepted.

Current gender justice initiatives involving boys and men do not provide insight into how and why different groups of men might hold certain views or consider classed masculinities. Claire Charles, George Variyan and Lucinda McKnight respond to this research gap by drawing on interview data with former elite private boys who graduated between the 1970s and 2000s in ‘The curriculum of privilege: elite private boys’ school alumni’s engagements with gender justice’ (Charles et al., 2024). Their paper uses the term ‘curriculum of privilege’ to refer to the complex ecologies through which these men configure their masculinities, including experiences in their former schools and beyond, such as family life, interpersonal relationships, work, and popular culture. The findings highlight the contradictions between what men say about gender justice and their lived practices or behaviours engage with gender justice. The authors conclude with the important reminder that the graduates of elite private boys’ schools play an important role in setting ‘the tone for how a society operates’. As such, they suggest education practitioners encourage boys to read contemporary books on feminism or books written by women, encourage boys to consider traditionally feminised professions or explore and evaluate their feelings about traditionally feminised professions. For practitioners outside schools who are engaging with men in working towards gender justice, they stress the importance of awareness of generational differences and class position when designing gender justice programs to ensure that they are informed by more than media stereotypes.

(In)Conclusion

Gender still matters in schools, even if it is not given the same visibility in policy it had in previous policy eras. Bringing these papers together draws attention to some of the complexities of understanding how gender continues to shape educational experiences, and to some of the issues involved in researching and working with gender and young people in schools. Perhaps due to the volatility of gender in the present moment, educational policy and practice has tended to shy away from such issues. Binary approaches are no longer adequate in these times, but policy is perhaps not yet able to work with these complexities. The papers in this special issue offer some insights into how we might engage with the complexity of gender and sexuality in schooling, and why this might be necessary. Collectively, while these papers do not provide a new template for broad gender equity policy interventions, they do indicate that gender-related issues remain as crucial as they ever have been, and that consequently critical work is still warranted in this area in policy, praxis and research.