Equality in gaining entry to school and any form of education is still elusive, but getting into an educational program does not ensure that women get the same education as do men. In most instances, girls often attend schools that are inferior to those boys attend. They often are not given the opportunity to learn the same subjects boys do: girls are taught less science and mathematics; they are channeled into clerical, teacher-training and nursing programs and systematically kept from technologically oriented programs. In some instances, they can receive the same "liberal arts" education as boys but, as in Great Britain, girls' schools simply do not have the laboratory facilities to orient them toward the sciences nor the computers that will orient them to the contemporary labour market. ⁶

This curricular differentiation is even stronger in non-formal education programs oriented toward adults. Women have been channeled in much of the Third World into health, nutrition, and child-care programs; they have not been provided with programs that deal with farming technologies and vocational training. ⁷

As education has expanded and been faced with fiscal crisis, the trend has been to attempt to achieve greater efficiency in education. Often this has meant greater rather than less institutional and curricular differentiation. The issue of achieving gender equality in education has increasingly meant not only getting women into educational programs, but getting women into high quality programs that will provide them with the full gamut of educational experiences available to men.

ACHIEVING EQUALITY IN THE 1980S

While there is good reason to be pessimistic about the progress made over the past decades in achieving equality of education for women, there is much that can be done to reach this goal that has been so elusive. Educational facilities at all levels must be made available to women, and women need to be given education qualitatively the same as that given men. The experience of the past decades has also taught us that it is not enough to make education available to females; it has to be made accessible, given the ways in which women's lives are structured. Education is planned and delivered with the male student in mind; it is not planned with women in mind.

Gender continues to
predict strongly
whether a child will
go to school and how
much schooling she or
he will receive
almost everywhere.

The provision of child care, health services, housekeeping, and like in many parts of the world are key to maintaining women in educational programs. In places like Upper Volta, for example, women simply have no time to attend literacy classes--the choice for them is education or their family's survival. Not surprisingly, they choose not to attend class. In the United States and Western Europe women do not complete their secondary and higher education because of the demands of family. ⁹ Rare is the secondary school anywhere in the world that contains a child-care center; few colleges and universities provide them. We are beginning to understand that if we want to make education accessible to women, we will need to plan for their needs, which are not necessarily those of men.

Not only will it be necessary to remove barriers to women obtaining an education by designing educational programs around women's daily lives and their roles (however limited they currently are), but reforms in economic and social structures will also become a precondition for women obtaining educational equality. Women will go to school only insofar as they see that education will benefit them and their daughters and, in many instances, raise them out of poverty. Parental decision-making that leads father and mothers to send their son but not their daughter to school, or to support their sons in school longer that their daughters, stems directly from their assessment of the value of an education for males versus females. ¹⁰ Too often this value is conceived in purely economic terms.