As populist misogyny expands worldwide, this school-based research in Australia helps to name what is happening in Australian schools, which can be linked to a bigger picture.
As the Ipsos IWD report of 23,000 people across 29 countries recently demonstrated, there is a growing trend amongst young men globally towards traditional gender beliefs, which are closely connected to right-wing politics.
These global trends are significant. They should give us pause to take seriously their classroom manifestations.
Yet, while there is ample evidence of misogyny thriving in Australian classrooms, what happens in schools can be passed off as ‘an adolescent phase’ while what happens to women is habitually ignored, downplayed or silenced.
We research gender-related issues across Australia’s education pipeline. Through this work, we talk with women teachers in tertiary and pre-tertiary fields, and our research illuminates two key patterns.
First, we see links between misogynist behaviour amongst BYM in schools and in university – for instance, a newly emboldened disrespect for women, rejecting knowledge perceived to be ‘woke’, acting in groups to exercise domination, or rejecting intellectualism under a façade of ‘knowing better’.
Secondly, we see patterns of inattention, neglect and gaslighting as institutional responses to such incidents.
When misogyny persists across school and university classrooms, this challenges the notion of a passing ‘phase’ and should prompt us to question why our education institutions aren’t doing more to stop its flow?
Thinking with ‘pipelines’
While some commentators frame the upsurge misogyny in classrooms as an issue of behaviour management or need for greater focus on boys as an equity group, these are narrow conceptualisations that focus on individual behaviour change as a response to structural issues, or which skew the debate by positioning boys as victims of teaching that lacks discipline.
We think it is more useful to think and act structurally, and we do so by thinking with ‘pipelines’.
Much like pipes that carry water, schools and universities are complex sites of social formation where some knowledge flows freely while other knowledge is limited or denied.
Over time, the nature of the knowledge flowing through our institutions shapes the worlds that schools and universities create.
In Australia, schooling is characterised by decades of piecemeal or absent policy around gender equity, fuelled by political inertia.
A key moment came in the 90s when concerted national attempts to implement wide ranging resources to enhance gender equity and address GBV dissolved under the Howard Government’s staunch conservativism.
Rather than address harmful gender discourses or the socialisation processes in schooling that normalise adolescent male violence, the Howard years reframed boys as victims of girls’ success and of ‘overly feminised’ schools.
Women and feminism were thus framed as ‘problems’ and rather than schools being supported to equip everyone with the knowledge and skills required to challenge the drivers of GBV, a pipeline of pro-feminist knowledge was turned off before it really began.
Nowadays, gender literacy is either absent, sidelined or quarantined in curriculum siloes in Australian schooling, and this goes universities too.
In fact, pre-service teachers can now go through their entire degrees without learning anything about gender, and for academics who do teach diversity-related curriculum, they are increasingly experiencing backlash.
The academic women we have interviewed say that when it comes to teaching gender or other areas of equity and inclusion, doing so:
"… is not safe... We’re more divided politically than ever and […] the institution does not have my back."
The women teachers in schools we have interviewed likewise say:
"Students exhibit disrespectful behaviour towards me because I am female. They won’t follow instructions, they say things like make me a sandwich, you’re just a woman..."
And when women in either context complain about this treatment, they invariably report:
"Nothing is ever done. Complaints get swept under the rug."
What needs to happen
When teachers in universities and schools are not supported by their institutions to teach about gender, this is an expression of everyday sexism that creates the conditions for more extreme forms of GBV to thrive. Four things thus can and must happen:
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Name the issue. Rising misogyny in classrooms is not a ‘boy’ problem, passing phase, or issue of behaviour management. Misogyny is a known radicalisation pipeline, and education must interrupt its flow.
- Stop outsourcing the problem. Instead, invest in teachers.
- Recognise everyday sexism as an enabler. Hence, while many BYM may have been indoctrinated into popular misogyny by manosphere influence, our acceptance of everyday sexisms in schools and universities is a form of indoctrination that feeds these bigger issues.
- Demand political bravery. Decades of political inaction has blocked the flow of vital knowledge pertaining to gender justice, resulting in education systems ill-equipped to divert a flood of popular misogyny.
This article is based on the forthcoming article, Learning from women: When the manosphere goes to university.
