Next steps for preservice education stakeholders

  • Implement multilevel, gender-transformative strategies to eliminate gender discrimination in educational settings.
  • Develop budgets and training plans to promote sustainability and use of these strategies.
  • Document and evaluate interventions, including on funding sources and needs, as well as other resources required to implement and sustain gender-transformative interventions.
  • Empower students, faculty, and staff—the groups that would most benefit—to advocate for equal opportunity, access, and gender equality in the academic setting. This is an important complement to institutional accountability mechanisms.
  • For institutional leadership, exert political will to create and maintain environments that support students and faculty with family responsibilities and that eliminate impunity for perpetrators of sexual harassment or other forms of discrimination.
  • For national, district, or municipal governments, mandate employers to offer maternity and/or parental leave or make funds available to assist students or faculty with children to use services that facilitate the integration of their academic/professional and personal lives.
  • Include outreach components and other strategies to anticipate possible resistance from the institutional and local communities. Gender inequalities are rooted in long-standing cultural beliefs and norms, and most social groups tend to be more comfortable with the status quo.
  • Implement national and international commitments to equal rights to an education and to an occupation of one’s choice, such as those outlined in consensus documents like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)4.

4 The CEDAW agreement was adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly and entered into force in 1981. Almost all countries have ratified CEDAW—187 out of 193 countries. Only six countries have not ratified CEDAW, including the United States, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, and two small Pacific Island nations (Palau and Tonga).

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