Gender, identity and vocational guidance

Abstract

Many of my students in initial teacher training today enroll in courses on gender, difference and learning with a healthy dose of scepticism. How is it, they ask, when there has been a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sex since 1991, when there is no longer a marriage bar on the employment of married women in the civil service, when the numbers of female and male students in higher education is more or less equal, when women have steadily increased their participation in the workforce and when girls are 'doing well' I at school, that the question of gender difference is still on our agenda? What about the boys and men, they ask? What is happening to them? Practising teachers also ask these questions and our common sense answers would include a recognition of considerable advancement in the position of women in our society as well as a (possibly worrisome) feeling that boys and men have' gender problems' too. For example, bullying is predominantly the response of disaffected boys (Borg, 1995). On the other hand girls and young women appear reluCtant to take up some of the opportunities now available (in terms of access openings) to them. Many of us are confounded by the amount of seemingly contradictory 'stories' being told by educators, sociologists, psychologists to name but a few. Guidance teachers live in the middle of this turbulent history in which young people make choices we adults cannot easily understand. We are meant to support their entry into work and into adulthood on the basis of our own understandings and identities and yet in doing so we find that we are often replicating the same divisions of labour or identity construction which we have now become so much more critical of. 'What is to be done?' remains \l relevant question but perhaps needs postponing until we can answer the rather more difficult 'Who are you?' posed to the fourteen year old Norwegian girl, Sophie of Sophie's World (Gaarsten, 1996) chosen to represent the modern search for meaning.