Gender and Education 1

Development of “The Field”

An important characteristic of gender research is the sometimes concurrent, overlapping, and contested rather than solely progressive nature of the topical and theoretical investments the body of work reflects. Particular topics of inquiry, such as sexism, marginalization, sex differences, and inequities or progress in educational access, structure, and practice (e.g., Solomon, 1985) significant to early research recur across the historical landscape and thus endure in scholarship as well. For instance, scholars chart girls’ and women’s struggles and successes around the globe to access forms of education (L. Cooper, 2013; A. Fuller, Turbin, & Johnston, 2013; Hatoss & Huijser, 2010; Rezai-Rashti, 2015; Tamim, 2013) or professional opportunities (e.g., Advancing Women in Leadership Journal; NASPA Journal About Women in Higher Education; McNae & Vali, 2015) in male-dominated educational contexts. Alongside these key foci on access, equity, or lived experience, others analyze gendered processes (rather than, or in addition to, individuals or groups) such as discourses, relations, and practices that shape such experiences, education research, and practice (e.g., Davies, 1997; Edwards, 1990; Johannesburg, 1994; Reay, 2002; Thorne, 1993). Indeed, scholars have traced across decades and fields the ideal of the educated subject and the institution as constitutively gendered and/or patriarchal (e.g., Dzuback, 2003; J. R. Martin, 1985; Rich, 1979).

Such inquiries reflect varied theoretical traditions that have been deeply contested in the evolution of feminist, women’s, and gender scholarship (e.g., Alcoff, 1988; Butler, 1994; Braidotti & Butler, 1994; Clegg, 2006; Rasmussen, 2009) and capture another key characteristic of the field. The varied frameworks that have been used for theorizing and studying women’s and gender issues in education include biological essentialism; Black feminist theory; social constructionism; social reproduction; and standpoint, queer, affect, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and materialist theories, among others. These approaches are sometimes directly at odds, offering conflicting views of the gendered subject with different agendas and aims. Concerns have developed regarding research that displaces women’s experiences and the enlightenment subject of “woman” in the service of a theoretical approach that deconstructs the category and furthers gendered discursive investigations even though She has not yet achieved full equity (e.g., Alcoff, 1988; Anyon, 1994; Clegg, 2006). Other research draws out productive tensions regarding intersectional and contextually nuanced analyses for gendered knowledge (e.g., Ali, Mirza, Phoenix, & Ringrose, 2010), the boy turn (Reed, 1999; Weaver-Hightower, 2003), divergent intellectual and political projects that animate philosophically diverse concepts of gender (Butler, 1994; Braidotti & Butler, 1994), and questions regarding the enduring salience of gender, among others. For example, postcolonial theorizing (e.g., McClintock, Mufti, & Shohat, 1997; Mohanty, 1997, 2004; Narayan, 1997; Narayan & Harding, 2000; Spivak, 1988) underscores the insufficiencies of gender as a sole analytic and displaces the Western subject—including the Western feminist/gender theorist—to interrogate the legacies of colonialism and foreground the epistemologies, representations, and experiences of women in postcolonial contexts, including Indigenous women in the United States (e.g., Mihesuah, 1998, 2003).

To add to this complexity, approaches to the study of gender may reflect empirical endeavors with little overt focus on theory, mobilize poststructural conceptions of subjectivity and epistemology (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000), or apply new materialist conceptions of ontology with gendered implications to education research and practice that rely on conceptions of gender dislodged from bodies, gendered material assemblages, or postgender theorizing (e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010; L. Cooper, 2013; Taylor & Hughes, 2016). Often interdisciplinary endeavors, gendered inquiries invite and nourish research in a range of sites. In the wake of claims that we have arrived in a postracial, postgender, postfeminist era, the robust heterogeneous brew of inquiries and theoretical investments evident across the research landscape reflects productive tensions in a significant, generative site of scholarship.

Turns and Transformations

The conceptual turn to the term “gender” as socially constructed, malleable, and thus subject to change expanded during the 1980s and 1990s, accompanied by the broadening of gendered and intersectional scholarship. Such analyses appeared in education journals, feminist journals and, later in the 1980s, in new journals focused explicitly on gender and education. Gender & Society (1987), and NWSA Journal (1988; now Feminist Formations) produced articles or special issues on education early in their circulation. Gender & Society published 46 articles related to education between 1987 and 2015, while Signs: The Journal of Women, Culture and Society published over 50 between 1979 and 2015. In addition, disciplinary journals (e.g., Psychology of Women Quarterly [1976]; Gender & History [1989]) included educational analyses. Several journals developed as dedicated sites for exploring intersections between gender and education, such as Feminist Teacher (1984) and the U.K. journal Gender and Education (1989), and, later, journals with educational emphases, such as Advancing Women in Leadership (1997). The Gender and Education editors recognized the need to create spaces focused on “gender as a category of analysis in education that furthers feminist knowledge, theory, consciousness, action, and debate” (“Editorial,” 1989, p. 3).

One significant critique instrumental for shaping gendered research reflected in these interdisciplinary journals centered on the unidimensional conception of gendered analytics that failed to take into account the ways gender varies in salience and the intersectionality of social positioning and identities (see Crenshaw, 1989), for example, how race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to position people in different networks of power that profoundly shape experience, identities, and roles (e.g., Lorde, 1984). As noted in our overview, scholars critiqued and moved from the “add and stir” approach of adding women of color to existing frameworks to theorizing how intersectionality shapes epistemology, experience, and educational positioning and how racialized/gendered ideologies are structured into the very fibers of educational institutions, pedagogies, interactions, relations, and policies. For example, Fordham (1993) analyzed how African American women resist the White, middle-class constructions of womanhood that shape educational positioning and achievement, while L. Grant’s (1994) analysis of African American girls’ roles in elementary schools revealed the social rather than academic dimensions of their racialized positioning in class as “helpers, enforcers, and go-betweens.” During these years, C. A. Grant and Sleeter (1986) published “Race, Class, and Gender in Education Research: An Argument for Integrative Analysis” in RER; and in its first year of publication, Gender and Education released a special issue on race, gender, and education (1989).

Varied scholars traced and responded to the absence of socioeconomic class analysis in explicitly gendered research and theory, including Bettie’s (1993) ethnography of Mexican American and White females in a California school, as well as the work of hooks (2000), Luttrell (1997), Walkerdine (1990), Weis (1988), and Weis and Fine (1993), which advanced intersectional analysis and knowledge. Gender and Education published more than 60 articles focused on or incorporating class as an analytic axis, including over 30 focused on working-class issues, and many on masculinities. The expansive conceptualizing of such intersections during this period also shifted beyond interrogating binaries and static conceptions of identity to theorizing dynamic gendered multiplicities formed in context and in relation. For example, Bhachu’s (1991) analysis of Sikh women suggested they formulated identities “continuously in a process of negotiation with a number of economic and political forces that shift over time and space” (p. 45). Lomawaima (1994) highlighted the power of such intersecting forces in her study of one vocational boarding school that the federal government established for Native Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which, in turn, shaped life opportunities but also fueled resistance. Racist assimilation initiatives forced diverse tribal members to receive vocational training and to provide gender-specific curriculum to teach young men to farm and young women to perform household duties, in part to serve as domestics for Whites.

In addition to exploring gendered aspects of the experiences of gay and lesbian educational subjects (e.g., Garber, 1994; Mac an Ghaill, 1991), scholarship troubled gay/lesbian categories that rely on a stable sexual subject (e.g., Talburt, 2000), explored how homophobia functions as a “weapon” of sexism (Pharr, 1997), considered relations and tensions between gender and sexuality, and traced schools as profoundly heteronormative spaces that establish and police gender and sexuality norms. International turns were visible as well, highlighting the significance of context and culture for shaping gendered meanings and experiences; Gender and Education published analyses of education in varied European nations, and later, expanded international theorizing in the Global South exploring policies, equal opportunity, technologies, rurality (e.g., Volume 26, 2014), and higher education (Volume 27, 2015). Analyses focused on enduring effects of colonial power for policies affecting women appeared in the journal in the 1990s (e.g., Gordon, 1994) and expanded with postcolonial and postcolonial feminist theorizing in the 2000s. Scholars from sovereign nations have critiqued colonialist educational legacies to expand knowledge on Native American women (e.g., Mihesuah, 1997, 2003). In addition, some analyzed intersectional gendered educational processes and practices as well as including “women/girls” as categories of sex/gender analysis or positioning, such as the gendered dynamics of sexuality education (Fine, 1988), prom (Best, 2000), cheerleading (Adams & Bettis, 2003), and, later, beauty pageants on predominantly Black and White college campuses (Tice, 2012).

Widespread attention to the social and schooling disadvantages that girls continue to face emerged in a series of popular and academic publications in the 1980s and 1990s (LaFrance, 1991). Interest surged in the repercussions of sexist socialization for girls’ self-esteem and psychological and physical health (Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994), girls’ anger (L. M. Brown, 1999, 2003), and their sexuality (Fine, 1988; Tolman, 2002). Reports from the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation—How Schools Shortchange Girls (1992) and Hostile Hallways (1993)—and M. Sadker and Sadker’s (1994) Failing at Fairness, among others, focused directly on education. They detailed bias in standardized tests, curriculum and classroom practices, and a hostile climate that supported sexual harassment and “shortchanged” girls—which was a new focus in scholarship on girls (Larkin, 1994)—and that tied directly to equitable conditions for learning that would later become a policy focus under Title IX. Other reports attend to girls’ agency, resilience, and promise, such as Ginorio and Huston’s (2001) report on Latinas in school and collections such as Geographies of Girlhood (Bettis & Adams, 2005). M. Sadker and Sadker (1994) tracked classroom interactions in which teachers provided more resources to boys than girls, such as time and challenging developmental feedback. Similarly, the body as a gendered educational project became a site of study evidenced through, for example, K. Martin’s (1998) ethnographic analysis of schooling practices that shaped preschool children’s bodies in conventional gendered ways with sobering long-term implications, such as restricting girls’ voices and movements, while allowing boys more freedom to move and shout.

At the same time—underscoring the production of vastly different gendered projects occurring simultaneously—Thorne’s (1993) classic analysis of children’s gender play shifted attention from girls’ disadvantages and gender socialization processes to consider gender as dynamic, relational, and formed through girls’ and boys’ agential interactions. In this sense, gender is not a set of characteristics one possesses. Curricular analyses reflected these shifts as well. Earlier analyses counted textual representations of women/girls (e.g., Tetreault, 1986; Trecker, 1971; Wolf, 1975), suggesting the cumulative power of these messages, textbook after textbook, alongside other social stereotypes to foster limited imaginaries for girls and women’s futures. Later work continued this pattern (e.g., Love, 1993) and also shifted to the gendering of processes, such as E. Martin’s (1991) analysis of medical textbooks that infuse even at the cellular reproductive level gendered constructions of women’s eggs as passive and men’s sperm as active. In the same period, some work disrupted the conception of the female subject as “acted upon” by educational forces, posing an alternative subject who acted, resisted, and extended interpretations of textual messages that she encountered. For example, work on fairy tales (Westland, 1993, p. 237) challenged previous understandings of curricular and classroom stereotyping as inevitably “harmfully reinforcing restrictive images of girlhood and womanhood,” to suggest that girls can be “resistant readers,” active interpreters, rather than passively absorbing stereotypical messages. Between 1990 and 2015, Gender and Education published more than a dozen articles analyzing texts, reflecting different theoretical traditions.

Scholarship that attends to gender has long considered the machinations of masculinity as a consequential construct for shaping social and educational processes and people’s lives. For example, publications in the Journal of Education (1890s) discussed the value of “masculine teaching” and the dangers of women’s overrepresentation as teachers during children’s formative years. Echoing late-19th-century arguments about vocational education as a key site to engage boys (Kliebard, 1999), articles surfaced in early issues of the journal focused on concerns about school structures that favored girls, the effects of coeducation on learning proper gender roles, and boys’ performance in school. As early as 1900, educators referred to concerns about boys’ disengagement and the feminization of teaching as “the boy problem” (Graves, 1998; Rury, 1991; Tyack & Hansot, 1990). Articles in 1934 reported concerns about “mental deficiency [as] commoner in boys than in girls,” about girls surpassing boys in academics because of teachers’ overuse of texts and insufficient hands-on curricula such as machine work, and about female teachers’ giving higher grades to girls than boys. The 1990s trend in gender scholarship that Weaver-Hightower (2003) catchily coined “the boy turn,” it turns out, was not without historical precedent.

The 1990s reflected increased analytic attention to men/boys as units of analysis in gendered scholarship that reflected competing perspectives and investments, and inspired fierce debates. Varied social, economic, and educational forces (see Weaver-Hightower, 2003) ⁵ prompted a wave of attention to a perceived “crisis in masculinity” (Lingard, 2003) and resistance to feminist claims of enduring inequities facing girls/women. Characterized by a degree of media fervor and framed by some as a “war” against boys (Sommers, 2000), the turn led parents, popular figures, and scholars to detail troubling issues facing boys and men that merited social visibility and redress (R. W. Connell, 2000). Research responded to perceptions and concerns regarding patterns of women’s advancement, economic displacement of male workers, boys’ increasing disaffection with school, and their underachievement, attrition rates, violence and drug use, suspensions, placements in special education, struggles with writing and reading, and anti-intellectualism.

Other profeminist and critical scholars propelled the boy turn (Weaver-Hightower, 2003) through expanding gender research and conceptions of masculinity(ies). Like other important shifts in theorizing gender as co-constituted with other social locations that shape positioning and experiences, scholars questioned undifferentiated groupings of “boys” as essentialist and argued for the importance of analyzing key differences among boys’/men’s social positioning on the basis of race, class, nationality, and sexuality (e.g., Baldridge, Hill, & Davis, 2011; J. E. Davis, 2010, 2013; Joe & Davis, 2010). R. W. Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) concept of hegemonic masculinities has nourished education research in separating masculinity from men and stretching beyond unitary uses to consider its variegated, shifting, hierarchical, and relational nature produced and performed in diverse contexts. In this sense, masculinity is neither biological, held, nor static, but constantly formed and re-formed in relation to other femininities and masculinities with different degrees of power. Gender nonconforming men, gay men, and men of color have different access to the forms of masculinity that carry the most symbolic and cultural capital.

In reviewing Gender and Education, we found that more than 100 articles mobilized the concept of “masculinity” as a central focus, and one-fourth of those explored hegemonic masculinity to animate educational dynamics. Engagements with this concept diversify and expand. For example, scholars consider how it governs school cultures (e.g., Farrell, Larsson, & Redelius, 2012; Robinson, 1992; A. Skelton, 1993; C. Skelton, 1994)—sometimes at odds with the messages of the formal curriculum—(Mirembe & Davies, 2001), how individuals “take up” or negotiate masculinities in varied contexts (E. Anderson, 2011; Benjamin, 2001; Davies, 1997; D. Francis, 2014; Heward, 1994), and how acts such as alcohol use (Dempster, 2011) and sexual harassment and abuse (Robinson, 2005; C. Skelton, 1994) mark hegemonic masculinity and cement peer relations. Other examples are works that critique and reconfigure the concept’s limits and manifestations (Hanh Thi Do & Brenna, 2015; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2012), as well as 18 articles attending to the pressing educational dynamics of violence or bullying.

Yet scholarship reveals lasting critiques of the turn as well. While feminist scholarship has always invited analyses of males, boys, and masculinity—one reason the editors of Gender and Education chose the broad name for the journal (“Editorial,” 1989, p. 3)—scholars questioned both the claims that scholarship and schools neglected males and the forces animating those claims. Some feminist scholars read the shift as a backlash against women’s successes, an erasure of women’s concerns, a false equalizing of the gender issues different people face, and a cooptation of a feminist politic and field dedicated to dismantling male dominance. Some question its longevity as a theoretical line of flight. Contemporary scholarship that focuses on men/masculinity generally rejects sweeping classifications of boys’ and men’s condition and expressions of masculinities to consider how race, class, gender, and sexualities shape educational processes—and which boys and which men in which contexts enjoy privilege or face systematic disadvantages in the machinations of schooling (e.g., Ferguson, 2000).

In the same generative period, feminist scholars reconsidered core theories, research methodologies, and practice. The work of gendered scholarship has often critiqued previous masculinist theories (e.g., Weiler, 2001), teaching approaches (e.g., Feminist Teacher), research methodologies (e.g., Fonow & Cook, 1991; Lather, 1991; Lather & Smithies, 1997; Reinharz, 1992), and concepts, and the knowledge that such approaches have produced. In 1982, for instance, Gilligan critiqued the gendered assumptions underlying Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and expanded it to include women. Arnot (1982), working within the tradition of “new” British sociology, extended intersectional attention to class, gender, and education to critique and expand social reproduction theory, while McRobbie (1990) brought similar critiques to bear on British cultural studies scholarship on male adolescents (e.g., Hebdige, 1979; Willis, 1977) to underscore gendered gaps in analyses of adolescent cultures. Similarly, Holland and Eisenhart (1992) traced through ethnography the power of romance culture as a gendered reproductive force to shape and limit women’s aspirations on two U.S. college campuses.

A key shift emerged during this period to revisit and disrupt long-accepted premises governing the pursuit of knowledge that remain active trajectories of research today. The research approaches that feminist methodologists introduced at that time were transformative for unsettling dominant beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the techniques deemed most appropriate for wresting that knowledge from social and physical terrain. Scholars and activists raised questions regarding researchers’ common distancing stances or claims to “objectivity,” asking whether these were possible or even desirable components of inquiry in openly ideological research (see Lather, 1986) exploring gendered phenomena in the lives of marginalized people. They considered how the actual conduct of research—from its guiding assumptions to ethics of practice, to interactions with participants, to the processes of data gathering, analysis, and representation—is a political and power-laden process that merits scrutiny and care to align with feminist goals. Rather than adhering to an “objective” research ethos, researchers embraced the knowledge creation process as necessarily and productively reflexive, political, relational, and emotional (e.g., Fonow & Cook, 1991). They developed collaborative approaches to gathering data and conducting analysis “with” rather than “on” people, and new forms for representing the complexities, challenges, and embodied labor involved in conducting research—particularly with vulnerable subjects. Genre conventions in research typically dictate the production of technical writing in tidy texts that conceal the embodied figures creating the knowledge; in contrast, feminist scholars experimented with fragmented texts, poetic representations, and autobiographical components in their work to trouble and expand what science could look like (e.g., Lather & Smithies, 1997; Richardson, 1997, 2000). It was antithetical to feminist goals, some insisted, to reproduce systems of domination through objectifying and authoritarian research practice. Although scholars undertaking gender research may use any number of methodologies (e.g., Reinharz, 1992) to pursue their inquiries, feminist methodologists emphasized that all research approaches, like other aspects of education, are embedded in relations of power with consequences for the knowledge that is produced and disseminated. Continuing to think critically about research practice, to unsettle conventions, and to imagine new approaches, remains central to the field today.

Feminists also took up key issues in teacher labor, teaching approaches, and philosophies of teaching as sites of intersectional theorizing and potential empowerment (e.g., Omolade, 1987). If schools reproduce power relations by embodying authoritative stances and treating students as passive recipients of knowledge, then teaching, like research, is an act of power and a potential instrument of justice. The journal Feminist Teacher explored reflexive and liberating pedagogies, and many other writings (e.g., Lather, 1991) explored forms of resistance. Scholars advocated for the importance of incorporating attention to gender politics into teacher education (M. Sadker & Sadker, 1994; D. M. Sadker, Sadker, & Zittleman, 2009; Sikes, 1991). For Noddings (1984, 1992; Noddings, Katz, & Strike, 1999), educational practices should be relational, based in an ethic of care. Grumet (1988) theorized the pedagogical possibilities of mediating spaces that rely, similarly, on the premise that relationships are a necessary precondition for knowing, noting the complex positioning of female teachers who must negotiate children’s transition from the (feminine) home to (masculine) public spaces. Philosopher Jane Roland Martin (1985) constructed a new educational paradigm based on reconsidering the long history of educational thought on women’s education. Referencing Rich’s classic statement on claiming one’s education, Martin redefined the educational realm to bring it into alignment with feminist critique that was transforming education in the last decades of the 20th century.

Ongoing Sites of Research

Sociologist Barbara Bank’s (2007) two-volume set of essays, Gender and Education, addresses key areas in the field of education that point to the breadth and texture of contemporary scholarship. The essays reflect efforts, like this one, to take stock and assess trends in gendered theories, issues, and developments. Gendered scholarship is frequently theoretical and may be oriented to critique and praxis, seeking spaces where gendered subjects can cultivate agency and resistance, challenge dominant discourses and institutional barriers, and consider new conditions of possibility for educational lives. In 1992, Soerensen expressed the need to expand theorizing beyond patriarchal critiques that characterized earlier scholarship, suggesting that we must leave “essential thinking and absolute strategies in order to open up a field of research to plurality and a constructive uncertainty” (p. 201). Yet such plurality met with some resistance (e.g., Anyon, 1994), unleashing generative tensions and dialogue.

Scholarship in recent decades reflects scholars’ simultaneous mobilization of diverse theoretical and methodological tools to explore gendered dynamics in a range of sites, as well as to explore the expansive reach of gendered analysis to encompass varied locations, practices, policies, and processes that thicken our understanding of gendered operations in education. For example, articles in Gender and Education reference womanist theorizing, feminist theories, masculinity theories, poststructuralist theories (concentrated in the 1990s, though ongoing), and materialist theories, and they make multiple references to Foucault, Bourdieu, and Butler. Additional references address sex role theory; gender egalitarianism; antiviolence, critical, and feminist pedagogies; grounded theory; Cartesian corporeal agency; psychoanalytic theories; leadership theories; and gender reproduction. Dillard (2006) places African American women’s narratives, the commitment to research as responsibility, and spirituality at the center of her theorizing in an approach she terms endarkened feminist epistemology. Thomas (2011) brings geographical and psychoanalytic theory to bear on critiques of the trend of “banal” and celebratory multiculturalism visible in schools through analyzing how gender and racialized violence is constituted through schooling spaces and heteronormative relationships. Furthermore, new materialities (e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010; Taylor & Hughes, 2016), spatiality (Tamboukou, 1999), postcoloniality (Hughes, 2002), methodologies (Hughes & Lury, 2013), and affect (Åberg & Hedlin, 2015) offer new points of departure, while previous theoretical engagements persist.

Such scholarship also revisits topics from new vantage points. For instance, educators have scrutinized the practice of organizing, sorting, and grouping people by sex to foster gender equity as variously promising or worrisome acts at different points in time: coeducation (late 19th century); single-sex schools, classrooms, or groups (Reay, 1990; M. Sadker & Sadker, 1994); separate spaces for pregnant and mothering teens (Luttrell, 2003; Pillow, 2004); and single-race/sex classrooms or schools (e.g., Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, 2010). Recognizing that, as Susan Franzosa (1993) noted, “more than girls’ presence is required to accomplish equality of educational opportunity (p. 334),” widespread concerns about sex discrimination in the schools rekindled interest in forging single-sex schooling spaces and groupings for females during the 1980s and 1990s (Morse, 1998). The surge of interest both appealed and alarmed. A series of studies of single-sex schooling in Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States found promising results from such arrangements, in one case suggesting that context-specific initiatives with skilled teachers could provide “an antidote to a tradition of bias” (Heyward, 1995). Yet Thorne (1993) suggested that schools’ marking of sex/gender are forms of “social control” (p. 34), questioning, as have others, why we see “sex” as a sensible, persuasive way to group human beings rather than, for example, height, age, or musical aptitude. In this view, such practices can homogenize and highlight one constructed axis of identity or classification over others, reflect powerful and selective assumptions of difference, reify such assumptions through school structures, and release schools from their responsibility to create equal opportunities for all students in shared spaces.

Recent work (e.g., Cohen, 2012; Jackson, 2010) animates the theoretical and practical implications of sorting and grouping human beings by the designation of biological sex, whether through schools, sports teams, separate bathrooms, or sexual education curriculum, given the fluidity of contemporary gender expressions and decades of conceptual work that troubles gender/sex binaries. Cohen’s (2012) work disrupts the single-sex schooling binary by describing how their “girl-only program” grappled with the potentially exclusionary connotations of their mission for intersex, gender-nonconforming, and transgender youth. Allowing student self-identification as the basis for joining the program opened spaces for gender-nonconforming students and transgender youth to participate. Contemporary debates about college dormitories and public school restrooms reflect the historical structure of schooling at odds with more fluid conceptions of gender and of transgender students’ needs, identities, and expressions. The 2016 U.S. legal mandate to allow transgender students access to restrooms provides an example of important new areas of policy, theorizing, and research that trouble long taken-for-granted norms.

Such structural separations have also been proposed in the interests of providing focused curriculum, support, and safety. Advocates have created spaces for pregnant and mothering teens, students in special education, “at-risk” students in alternative schools, and sexual minority and gender nonconforming students; and they have created single-sex classrooms/schools for students of color, among others. While policy guidelines require that many arrangements remain “choices” rather than mandates, debates circulate around how to best support the needs of students who struggle with safety issues or race- and gender-based stereotypes that can shape performance. Indeed, the major theme of early research on transgender issues in education focused on how to make campuses more inclusive to serve the educational needs of transgender students (Beemyn, 2003; Lees, 1998; McKinney, 2005). Advocates addressed the importance of providing resources across the curriculum and adopting nondiscrimination policies in research that was driven largely by personal narratives and institutional case studies.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, scholarship on transgender issues in education shifted from central concerns regarding access, visibility, and resources in higher education to including studies about the importance of inclusive curricula and pedagogy in primary and secondary schools, and about teacher preparation and medical education (Barozzi & Ojeda, 2014; Rands, 2009; Ryan, Patraw, & Bednar, 2013; Vanderleest & Galper, 2009). Rands argues that responsible teaching should be centered on the concept of gender-complex education, a variant of critical pedagogy described as a basic and pervasive part of all students’ education (Rands, 2009, 2013). Articles inform teachers, administrators, school psychologists, and guidance counselors of best practices to support transgender students and document school districts’ collective efforts to provide respectful and safe school environments for those who are transitioning (Bowers, Lewandowski, Savage, & Woitaszewski, 2015; Gonzalez & McNulty, 2010; Luecke, 2011). Other research analyzes state and local policies that protect sexual minorities from employment discrimination, noting that LGBT educators remain particularly vulnerable to the threat of dismissal on prejudicial grounds (C. Connell, 2012). Theorizing of transgender issues in interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Transgender Studies Quarterly) also can inform educational theory and practice.

Another fertile area of study crosses topics and theoretical traditions that continue earlier patterns of intersectional theorizing, take up the body as a site of study, or have implications for embodiment: sexuality education, eating disorders/problems, pregnant and mothering teens, sports, social activities such as prom and beauty pageants, and important markers of religiosity and piety, such as veiling for Muslim students (e.g., Scott, 2010b), that also function as cultural signifiers in a range of complex gendered and racialized discourses (e.g., Cronin, 2014; Zine, 2006). Such issues can become political sites in which deeply held and conflicting social values become situated. For example, debates about comprehensive versus abstinence education in the late 1990s and 2000s reflected fundamental differences about when and how sexuality should be expressed, what forms it should take, and who should serve as its primary educational vehicles. Fine (1988) raised critical questions about the content, silences, and politics of sexuality curriculum for young women’s lives that remain relevant today (Fine & McClelland, 2006, 2007), while others have extended or nuanced her analyses (Allen, 2004; Kendall, 2012; Pillow, 2004; Tolman, 2002) or critiqued a curriculum of abstinence, anatomy, disease, and danger to explore a broader range of racial, social, democratic, and sexuality issues that shape youths’ lives (Ashcraft, 2006; Garcia, 2012; Harrison, 2000; Kendall, 2012; Mayo, 2007, 2008, 2011), including the context in which programs are situated (Castro-Vazquez, 2000).

As gender scholars have noted, such curricular initiatives are significant precisely because of their embodied implications for the lived and educational experiences of youth. The reach of Title IX to such embodied experiences casts light on their gendered undercurrents. For example, despite the explicit protection for pregnant and mothering teens in public schools outlined in Title IX, Pillow’s ethnographic analysis of high school dynamics demonstrated that even as rates of teen pregnancy declined, a degree of racialized urgency animated the “teen pregnancy” crisis as a national problem. Pillow (like Luttrell, 2003) suggests that the pregnant or mothering student is often conceptualized literally and figuratively as an “unfit subject,” whose needs for larger chairs or schedule adjustments are at odds with daily schooling practices. Furthermore, Pillow found that school workers are often unaware that Title IX protects the rights of pregnant students to an equal education, are openly disapproving or unprepared to contend with their embodied realities, marginalize or exclude them, or consider them as poor role models. Similar exclusion and readmission struggles in African contexts and in Portugal have been examined as well (Bagele, 2002; Chilisa, 2002; Unterhalter, 2013). And those who pursue their education in alternative schooling spaces, as Luttrell (2003) found in her study of pregnant youth in a separate school, struggle to construct their identities within the larger stigmatizing discourses in which they are situated. Despite the complexities of mothering in school (and as academics; see Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012), some have described the role as a significant touchstone and propelling mechanism for educational engagement and return (Luttrell, 1997).

Recent analyses utilize theoretical tools from geography, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism to demonstrate other embodied aspects of schooling such as the complexity of gendered violence in context (de Lange & Mitchell, 2014; Thomas, 2011). Although analyses of the threat of bullying, sexual harassment, and violence for women, sexual minorities, and other vulnerable populations have long noted the consequences for their educational experiences, a number of highly visible incidents of sexual abuse, bullying, and gun violence in schools and on university campuses have renewed attention to this key area of gendered education. For some, a culture that supports hegemonic masculinities is particularly incendiary in this regard, as it cultivates and reproduces rigid ideas of masculinity and femininity that are reinforced through relations of power in schooling practices (e.g., Cannella & Perez, 2012; Conroy, 2013; Dowler, Cuomo, & Laliberte, 2014; J. Klein, 2012; Meyer, 2009). Katz’s (2006, 2013) analyses of representations of cultural violence underscored the tendency of news media to avoid naming the sex of the primary perpetrators—male—a practice that obscured the gendered dimensions of an entrenched cultural practice. Katz’s and Foubert’s (e.g., 2010) targeted educational programs to combat sexual violence are grounded in gendered analyses of rape and bystander awareness to fuel action and intervention. The power of contextually grounded and theoretical analyses in contemporary gendered scholarship is particularly clear in Thomas’s (2011) study of racial and gendered dynamics in a California school site, which traced the family influences, group identifications, social geographies, and psychological investments that fueled school tensions. In Nabozny v. Podlesny (1996), Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District (1998), and Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), courts ruled it the responsibility of schools to protect students from harm. The Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (also called the Campus SAVE Act, 2013), as well as new applications of Title IX, reflect renewed attention to and policies for addressing an enduring gendered issue with renewed visibility.

Gendered analysis has extended to educational institutions as sites of violence for particular groups. In a post-9/11 climate, scholars have noted the Islamophobia facing Muslim students, as well as their identity negotiations in diverse schooling spaces (e.g., Cronin, 2014; Fine & Sirin, 2008; Mir, 2014). Carceral analyses of schooling have likened the structure of schools to prisons, noted racial and gendered disparities in school discipline patterns since the 1970s (e.g., Skiba, Michael, Nardo, & Peterson, 2002), and analyzed racialized and gendered educational processes that contribute to profoundly unequal educational outcomes (e.g., Ferguson, 2000) and what critical scholars call “the school-to-prison pipeline.” For those incarcerated in the prison-industrial complex (A. Davis, 1979), researchers have also turned to informal education within prisons to consider women’s experiences (Sweeney, 2012) and the intersectional contours of women’s reading practices in prisons (Sweeney, 2010).

The carceral aspects of schooling and the privatization of prisons that some scholars detail echo recent turns to analysis of neoliberalism visible in gendered scholarship. This term neoliberalism is often used in critical ways to refer to a series of economic changes and ideologies that extend or transfer control of particular economic resources from the public to the private sector. In terms of gender scholarship, some analyses have considered the gendered implications of this economic and discursive shift that infuses institutional practices, educational discourses, and the very affects and desires of students and school workers that inhabit those spaces. In this analytic focus, the current audit and testing culture, managerialism, and accountability shaping K–12 schooling and institutions of higher education as increasingly privatized entities are processes gendered masculine (e.g., Arnot & Mac an Ghaill, 2006) with an array of implications for educational practice and a primarily female teaching force.

Neoliberalism has prompted an array of gendered critiques because of its dominant, pervasive, and fundamental effects on educational institutions, priorities, practices, labor, and learning that some argue undermine the democratic, public mission of education (Henry, 2001). Berg and Seeber (2016) mobilize Thornton’s striking point regarding the effects of corporatization on the increasing speed of academic processes and the implications for embodied faculty labor and feminist work. Suggesting that “academics are now valued as neoliberal subjects” caught up in increasing production demands, feminists, too, “are expected to serve the new knowledge economy rather than critique it. The homologous relation between feminism and critique means that the contraction of a critical space has also necessarily led to the contraction of feminism within the academy” (Thornton, 2012, as cited in Berg & Seeber, 2016, p. 63). Agendas initiated in the 1960s and 1970s thus remain “unfinished” (Glazer-Raymo, 2008). For example, women of color remain underrepresented in K–12 teaching, higher education, and administration and knowledge about community college faculty remains limited (e.g., Turner, 2008; Twombly, 1993; Twombly & Townsend, 2007). Similarly, while all women remain underrepresented in educational leadership—an enduring focus of feminist efforts—for some faculty who hold such positions, administrative duties within a culture of escalating demands may also have the unfortunate contradictory effect of propelling gender imbalance in producing research knowledge because women’s time is consumed elsewhere (e.g., Sannino & Vainio, 2015).

Scholarship has pointed out the limits and illusion of “choice” that is visible in neoliberal discourse: Access to education and employment do not necessarily enable “freedom” when they entangle women within an exploitative global consumerism in which one must purchase commodities to “become somebody.” One may feel “free” to choose any major, educational institution, or occupation, to decorate one’s body as one wishes, or to experiment with new gendered performances, but people do not in fact have equal structural conditions in which they can access the same mentoring and structural resources and symbolic, cultural, and linguistic capital that enable actualizing such empowering visions (Thomas, 2011) both within and outside of education (e.g., Mullen, 2010). Affect is integrated into such market processes as well, as individual choices may feel empowering—shopping for example—while such choices entangle “choosing” subjects in hegemony. In her work on affective labor in post-Fordism, McRobbie (2010) describes young women’s flocking to contemporary popular culture as empowering for creating new forms of identity even as she and others are quick to clarify that despite the construction of endless choices through individual consumerism and competition that neoliberalism normalizes, new forms of power (and agency, e.g., Taylor, 2011) are emerging.

The concept of “choice” as one aspect of contemporary educational practices is also visible in another active research area: gender and STEM. How and why individuals “choose” to enter the sciences, what barriers they face—and what factors help them succeed—has been a particularly robust area of inquiry in the wake of nationalist efforts to attract and retain students in STEM and advance the scientific and technological workforce (e.g., Bystydzienski & Bird, 2006). This focus has encompassed a range of cognitive, pedagogical, cultural, and contextual analyses in K–12 schooling, higher education, and industry (e.g., see Cultural Studies of Science Education). For example, using “gender” as a search subject uncovered 281 articles published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, the Journal of Engineering Education, the Journal of Science Teacher Education, and School Science and Mathematics between 1939 and 2016. Most articles in the early decades incorporated sex as a factor of analysis in investigations that assumed sex differences regarding knowledge or achievement. In the 1980s, scholars turned to more nuanced understandings of gender, analyzing gender roles, equity issues, and utilizing feminist theory with increasing frequency. For instance, 86 articles published between 2000 and 2016 addressed gender (rather than sex) differences, an additional 23 addressed gender roles, and 29 incorporated gender theory; only 12 articles during this period focused on sex as a factor of analysis. Topics included teachers and teaching, curriculum, classroom dynamics, student preparation, mentoring, tracking, climate issues, and forms of discrimination in educational theory and practice. Despite the claim and sense of science as a male domain, students’ preparation in school and teaching strategies shape who studies science, as does self-efficacy (Harding, 1998). Yet others suggest STEM is a thoroughly gendered domain that has only recently created space for women as knowers.

Conclusion

There remain persistent absences and “unfinished agendas” (Glazer-Raymo, 2008) in gender and education scholarship and opportunities for theorizing. As Bank (2011) states in her introduction to Gender and Higher Education, for those who view gender as a foundational aspect of educational processes,

It always comes as a surprise to discover how many books concerned generally with institutions of higher education, or, more specifically, with college degree programs, declining academic standards, faculty development, student services, academic management, institutional financing, governing policies, and other education-related matters either pay no attention to gender or devote a single chapter [to the given area of focus]. (p. 1)

She argues the same is true of notable education journals and professional conferences as well. This pattern underscores the gendered politics of knowledge production that persists as AERA begins its second century of research in education. The question remains for scholars interested in gender as an axis of analysis in diverse contexts: How, and with what nuances, is gender salient?

A recent special issue of Educational Researcher (2016, Volume 45, Number 2), celebrating the AERA centennial and offering reviews of 100 years of AERA presidential addresses, reflects this pattern. While the authors acknowledge the vast scope of the review task and recognize that the presidential addresses inevitably are “a partial lens on the field” (Cochran-Smith, 2016, p. 92), the reviews offer little focused attention on gender. In the 14 articles in which AERA past presidents reflect on education research on diversity and equity in how people learn, educational policy, school reform, research on teaching, teacher education, and curriculum, and more, none focus on gender, although 7 of the 14 mention gender in passing as an element in the complex synthesis of educational phenomena in past eras. In five of these essays, the references to gender are restricted to a brief mention of gender bias in Maxine Greene’s biography; passing references to women’s studies as part of new directions in study or the emergence of gender studies; two references to studies that account for gender as one variable of analysis; and a passing reference to “women’s equality protests” in a paragraph offering historical context.

Cochran-Smith’s and Cuban’s essays incorporate a bit more attention to gender. Cochran-Smith (2016) notes other scholars’ critiques of early male authorities in teacher education and their views of women’s “limited intellectual capacity” (p. 93). She also notes the role of women in the early years of AERA and mentions Bess Goodykoontz, the first woman president of AERA (1939), whose experience as a teacher likely shaped her views of these male administrators’ mandates. Similarly, Cuban notes the number of women who served as AERA presidents, gaps between researchers’ social-justice agendas and their limited effects on schooling practices, and Penelope Peterson’s “highly personal” 1997 address that reminds researchers and readers of (inevitably gendered) lived experiences.

Contemporary scholarship reflects the simultaneous production of diverse research trajectories building from historical foundations and productive tensions, debates, and disjunctures. As gender is a dynamic, fluid, malleable concept, and as new conceptions of gender and new understandings of the place of gender in society emerge, scholarship shifts and responds. There is a quest for new frameworks that evidence gender, that nourish the conception of gender analytics so scholars can see “anew.” As is evident in this overview, the field encompasses far more than a straightforward reporting of women’s and girls’ gradual “progress” over time in accessing education. The field has become increasingly complex and theoretical as new educational sites and processes emerge that lend themselves to new analyses. As future trajectories unfold, the spirit of Rich’s early critiques remain salient: Gender has been a central force in organizing social relations and educational processes, with an array of implications for lived experience that merit sustained scrutiny.