The institutionalization of gender and its impact on educational policy

To incorporate gender issues into public policy, most nations have established women in development (WID) units in their governmental bureaucracies at some point in the last 20 years. An examination of 48 WID units in developing countries indicates that in most cases these multisectoral organizations consider education among their activities. Within education the focus is more on non-formal education for adult women than on formal education. By concentrating on literacy programs combined with income generation, health and nutrition activities or on vocational education, WID units implicitly subscribe to a definition of gender issues as those concerning mostly poor women. It is argued that limited contestation by these units of the ideological function of schooling, revealed in the scarce attention given to teacher gaining and curriculum/textbook revision-added to their limited funding and infrequent contact with feminist non-governmental organizations (NGOs)-makes these WID units relatively ineffectual in altering the reproductive functions of the formal educational system.