Encountering Resistance To Gender Equity Policy in Educational Organization

Abstract

I became interested in researching the phenomenon of resistance to employment policy that attempted to increase gender equity in educational organizations because it came up over and over...at social gatherings, a cash register in a store while I was Christmas shopping, in my graduate courses, and in my work at the Faculty of Education at The University of Western Ontario with both colleagues and students. I found that students in the Social Foundations course that I teach could generally see the fairness of gender equity in the classroom--at least in terms of calling on girls more often, assessing their work fairly, ensuring that they developed an interest in highly valued courses such as Math and Science, meeting the learning needs of boys in language and so on. However, when we talked about gender equity employment policy, the men were often openly hostile and the women resistant to what they perceived as "needless" efforts on their behalf. I found that rational argumentation and statistical evidence, which strongly demonstrated sex-based discrimination in educational organizations, while compelling in some ways, was simply not enough to persuade students or colleagues that there was a need for policy to rework the gendered distribution of labour in educational organizations. 

During my doctoral studies, I began to research the history of employment equity policy in Ontario's educational organizations. One compelling argument offered in support of employment equity policy was that schooling cannot demonstrate equity in pedagogical practices if it does not also do so in its patterns of governance. That is, educators cannot tell students to "do as I say" if the roles students see replicated in schools simply mirror the inequities of the larger social context. Therefore, advocates, such as the Federation of Women Teachers' Association, argued that, since Ontario, like many other Canadian provinces, has taken up gender fairness in classroom practices in its official educational policy for over thirty years, its employment policy must reflect the Ministry of Education's pedagogical goals. However, as various iterations of policy were put in place--each more prescriptive than the last--there was clear evidence that gender equity in employment practices in educational organizations was resisted at an organizational level. 

As I developed my research proposal, I realized that it was the phenomenon of resistance to gender equity that I wanted to understand more clearly. When I told a colleague of mine what I was thinking about doing, she responded with guarded optimism and then added: "I just read an article by someone who tried to research resistance and she came to the conclusion that it was impossible." There have been many times when I was tempted to come to the same conclusion during this long process...particularly as the policy context I was researching kept slipping away from me. I suppose one could say that I was experiencing the phenomenon I was researching.