The stories are stunning in their familiarity. One woman relates that she was told by her high school math teacher not to worry about her grade because "Women don't need to be good at math since they are going to get married and become housewives." Another woman told of a teacher who announced to the senior high school math class that he didn't like girls and he particularly didn't like teaching them math. This vignette I want to quote at length:

My grade 11 math teacher was also the coach of the boys hockey team. He openly favoured the guys in the class and he saw them as his buddies. My female classmates and I felt excluded and were very intimidated to ask questions or seek help. I felt as though I was interrupting their locker room talk. We were all called by our last names. It was not very encouraging to be asked "What do you want, Lawrence?" when I needed help with a math problem. The guys used to laugh if girls got a question wrong. The teacher certainly did not discourage their behaviour. (Student journal, quoted with permission).

It is not enough to say that women are part of the educational scene unless we also look to see what our newly achieved access to education has gained us. Women's economic marginality has not diminished and the feminization of poverty continues to be an indicator of women's degenerating economic status. The average annual net income of university educated women is - equal only to the average annual net income of grade eight educated men. In an era of increasing single income families headed by women, the economic constraint for women and their children is chronic. Most significantly, women are, in all significant respects, absent from the realm of economic decision- making.

In my context in a Faculty of Education, but certainly not peculiar to it, women students experience women's exclusion both routinely and vividly. One young student teacher described it poignantly:

When we get out to the schools [for practice teaching] you can see it right away. We get assigned to our classrooms and the principal takes us down. He drops me off at the door of my room and then I watch him and the male student walk down the hall together, chatting, [the principal's] hand on [the male student's] shoulder. And you just know, he is already on the inside and I am not. Another student's story is this:

No one ever told me how to get from where I was to where I might have wanted to go. I was in science but I dropped out. It's like there was information there about how to prepare for a career and what were the important things I needed to know but no one ever told me. And by the time I figured it out it was too late. I had already chosen the wrong courses and missed other important things I should have done. The boys in the class seemed to know what to do. It's like they already had the information.

Whether this vital information is parleyed to boys and men overtly or whether it is acquired by virtue of the models readily available to them, boys and men have the opportunity to acquire knowledge they cannot possibly miss. A young woman professor recently told me that she was potentially up for tenure in a year but hadn't been aware of the kinds of things she should have been doing all along to make her candidacy acceptable. "And now," she lamented, "it's already too late. I wish someone had just said to me at the beginning, Here is what you need to do if you want to go on." And she articulates the effect of closure on desire: "I don't think I want to go on in the academy anyway."

None of this is to deny that the presence of large numbers of women on university campuses, in professions, and in employment outside the home has had an effect on how the work is done and how programs are rationalized and organized. Over the past twenty years-since the beginning of the second wave of the feminist movement - women's concerns have been expressed relentlessly. And if no one else is hearing us, at least we are beginning to hear one another, to support one another, to acknowledge that our stories are not made up but the result of a social organization that has never taken women's aspirations seriously.