| |
|
| |
Male
Enrollment Figures Challenge Gender Equity in Cuba
By Patricia Grogg
Inter Press Service
|
| |
|
| |
HAVANA, Mar 24 (IPS) - The educational challenge in Cuba is
no longer increasing enrollment of females, who outnumber and
outperform males in school, but ensuring gender equity. |
| |
|
| |
Thanks to a government policy that has worked in favour of
girls and women, they dominate the student bodies at universities
in Cuba. By 1996, women accounted for 60 percent of university
students, according to official statistics.
|
| |
|
| |
''In pre-university education, girls are much more disciplined
and better organised than boys, who they outperform, and they
have an easier time making it into university,'' said high
school computer science teacher Daniel Bittencourt.
|
| |
|
| |
The first nine years of school education are compulsory in
Cuba. Students who are interested and qualified go on to prep
school and university.
|
| |
|
| |
A scrutiny of grades over three years for 166 students at
the institute where Bittencourt teaches showed that 29 girls
figured in the top 50 -- with the greatest chance of qualifying
for university. Sixteen girls figured among the top 30 students.
|
| |
|
| |
Other teachers said that universities in the 1980s had adopted
measures to guarantee gender equity in medical schools because
there were more numbers of women doctors than male doctors
graduating.
|
| |
|
| |
Nevertheless, in the 1995-96 school year, women accounted
for 71 percent of the students registered in medical sciences,
while a large number of the doctors currently working in Central
America and Africa are women.
|
| |
|
| |
In Bittencourt's view, these data are the natural result of
a policy of universal and free education for all Cubans, which
began by reducing illiteracy in the country to 3.8 percent
in just one year (1961), in the wake of the 1959 revolution.
|
| |
|
| |
Fifty-five percent of those who learned how to read and write
in that first year were women, who were able to begin bringing
about changes in a patriarchal society according to which
marriage and motherhood were their natural roles in life.
|
| |
|
| |
In the 1960s, new schools trained some 150,000 rural women
to become promoters of social change in their communities.
|
| |
|
| |
''A number of studies have found that the educational level
of mothers' acts as a variable directly associated with the
educational levels of their children, which indicates the
importance of special attention being granted to the education
of women,'' states an official report.
|
| |
|
| |
Milene Burgos, who began working as a lawyer two years ago,
feels it ''very necessary'' to start focusing on keeping boys
in school, because ''Cuba is still a sexist society,'' and
there are still many families who see education for their
sons as a means of ''bringing in the bread'' rather than to
excel in their chosen professional field.
|
| |
|
| |
''Among my group of friends, which included boys and girls
from different schools, all the girls continued on to graduate
from the university. But only one of the boys did, while the
rest got jobs. It seems to me that the boys were not interested
in studying,'' said Burgos.
|
| |
|
| |
Burgos finished prep school in 1993, one of the worst years
of Cuba's decade-long economic crisis, before going on to
study law at the University of Havana, where women are a majority
in the classrooms but not in leadership positions on student
bodies.
|
| |
|
| |
Yet at primary and secondary school, most student leaders
are girls, which in the view of the Ministry of Education
''contributes to developing important skills in communication,
participation and negotiation for their personal and social
lives.''
|
| |
|
| |
A report drafted by the Ministry for the Apr 26-28 World Education
Forum in Dakar states that boys should have equal access to
student leadership roles, precisely due to its importance
in developing potential and in personal realisation.
|
| |
|
| |
The document stresses the need to give both girls and boys
a gender perspective, with the aim of achieving the greatest
possible equity, while recognising that boys have some problems
that must be addressed.
|
| |
|
| |
At the Dakar conference, organised under the auspices of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
(UNESCO), delegates from 180 countries will assess the progress
made in the 10 years that have passed since the 1990 World
Conference on Education For All held in Jomtien, Thailand.
|
| |
|
| |
According to the Ministry of Education, in the nineties, more
young women have been incorporated into agricultural specialties
in vocational and technical education, in which women now
account for 43 percent of the student body at the national
level.
|
| |
|
| |
Some 4,000 women are now registered in vocation-technical schools
to become skilled workers. |
| |
|
| |
An
estimated 8,300 women are also enrolled in adult education classes,
and trying to finish primary school (up to grade six), while
9,000 are working on graduating from middle school (grade nine).
As many as 10,000 of these women are homemakers. |
| |
|
| |
This
and other results of a critical assessment by Cuba of its achievements
and strategies for the future were reviewed at a meeting in
the Dominican Republic, Feb 10-12. |
| |
|
| |
This article
is free of copyright restrictions and can be reproduced provided
that Inter Press Service is credited. |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
