Why Gender-Sensitive Education
Gender refers to the social constructs of ‘female’ and ‘male’ as they shape the expectations, assumptions, norms and roles conventionally associated with women and men. The term ‘gendered education’ has been used to refer to an educational approach where such societal norms are reinforced, contributing to the preservation of the perceived differences between men and women with regards to abilities, interests and prospects.
Since it is impossible to erase the multiplicity and complexity of gender issues in the educational context, in its training the PTLA method employed by Penso a Te APS aims at taking into account the obvious, but not always stated fact, that women – irrespective of their own efforts – are situated within power structures that they have not constructed.
Gendered Financial Education
The term GENDERED EDUCATION is thus used here to refer to an approach that recognizes the gendered human capital women bring along to promote critical awareness of the acquired societal norms and prejudices. Within the present approach, financial literacy education is situated as a political process for women to analyze the interaction of their individual agency with their own positioning in social, spatial and emotional hierarchies of power.
“Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong, it’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.”
G.D. Anderson, Australian feminist writer