Gender and Hitsa: A Policy Suggestion

Background

The aim of this strategy is to focus on the possibilities and strategies around implementation of a gender perspective in the activities of Hitsa. Therefore, the document will only give a brief background on the topic in order to justify the strategy and situate the policy.

Even though Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) at a glance can be considered to be a solely technical issue, they in fact encapsulate much more. As ICTs exist within societies carrying varying power relations, connected to economics, gender, ethnicity, class etc., they are not neutral. In the global context, the Global North has thus far benefited more from ICTs than the Global South as an example, especially rural communities in the Global South (Gurumurthy, 2004). In this strategy it is specifically emphasised that ICTs are not gender neutral (Gurumurthy, 2004). This of course means different things in different contexts; in some places men have more access to jobs connected to ICT, in some women get less access to education connected to ICTs, to name two examples.

To get a hint about the issues at hand in Estonia, one can turn to the Estonian Lifelong Learning Strategy 2020. In the strategy, gender equality is held up as one of the aims. It is stated that one obstacle to gender equality is that people in Estonia choose education based on what is perceived as male and female, and therefore a very segregated labour market is upheld (Ministry of Education, 2014). Estonia does in fact have the highest gender wage gap and highest gender segregation in the work life, meaning that people end up in occupations based on their gender (Anspal, 2015). Based on this, one of the strategies in the Estonian Lifelong Learning Strategy is to provide information which avoids the pitfalls of gendered expectations (Ministry of Education, 2014).

As Hitsa is an systemwide institution providing teacher training and professional development, the topic of gender equality is specifically relevant for two reasons. The first one is the fact that gender equality is of high priority internationally, and as we can see also nationally in Estonia. The second reason is that teachers play an immensely important role in “transmitting values, knowledge and developing human potential” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 3).

If gender is addressed within the field of ICTs and the work of Hitsa and its educators/trainers, there is therefore the opportunity for ICT to contribute to more gender equality. Concretely, this means discussing equal access to ICT for men and women and that through ICT ideas around gender can be shifted. Therefore, it is of interest for Hitsa to have a gender section in its main strategy, from both and ICT and teacher-training perspective.

Strategic Objectives

The goals of the gender strategy are as follows:

Overall Objective: Hitsa’s trainings contribute to making ICT in education equally accessible to people, regardless of gender

1. Hitsa’s trainings are inclusive to people of all genders

2. Hitsa’s trainings give tools to participants of how to make ICT accessible to all genders

3. Hitsa’s trainings give tools to participants of how to use ICT to break down gendered expectations

Courses of Action

1. Hitsa’s trainings are inclusive to people of all genders

2. Hitsa’s trainers are provided with training in norm-critical approaches to education

3. Hitsa’s trainers use the ‘Checklist for Inclusive Education’

4. The training materials are guided by the ‘Checklist for Inclusive Education’

5. Include a section in the trainings connected to gender, so that all trainers include this aspect

6. Hitsa’s trainings give tools to participants of how to make ICT accessible to all genders

8. Hitsa’s trainings and trainers actively encourage participating teachers to be aware of gender norms and equally encourage all children in the classroom to engage with ICTs

10. Hitsa’s trainings give tools to participants of how to use ICT to break down gendered expectations

11. Be aware of what purposes you encourage the students to use ICT for - do you do it equally and without stereotypical ideas about what they should like because of their gender?

Tools

1. Checklist for educators

• What images are shown? Count the amount of men and women in the images, and also take note of what situations they are presented in.

• Representation and portrayal in the training

• How are men and women presented and represented in the content of the material?

• Do you use both ‘he’ and ‘she’ in examples, or use gender neutral expression when we don’t know? For example ‘they’ or ‘everybody’ instead of ‘guys’

• Do you use concepts that anyone can relate to, regardless of gender?

• Do you use stories that break stereotypes?

• Are there strategies for how to make everyone participate?

• How is the conversation space divided and shared with considerations to gender? You can also factor in aspects such as age, class, professional identity and ethnicity here. Can you track the participation in some way?