c e p s  Journal | Vol.7 | No2 | Year 2017 5
Editorial
Gender and Education 
The first feminists were more than aware of the fact that education is one 
of the crucial areas with potential for achieving gender equality and equity. Mary 
Astell demanded higher education institutions for women as early as in 1694. In the 
eighteenth century, two exceptional thinkers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de 
Gouges, claimed that women and men are born equal and yet do not have equal 
rights. They both believed that education would bring women greater equality. 
Inspired by Catherine Maculay’s Letters of Education (1790), Wollstonecraft advo-
cated changes to the education of girls, claiming that education should not differ 
for boys and girls. She argued for education of women that would equip them for 
cooperation with men and fought for the same model of education for both genders 
in families and schools, as she believed that women would be free if they were en-
lightened and able to provide for themselves independently of men. In her opinion, 
women were weak due to education that forced them, from their earliest years, to be 
passive, obedient and (only) beautiful. She recognised the reasons for the subordi-
nation of women as being rooted in the social environment and insufficient educa-
tion. Her claim for equal educational opportunities for girls and women, allowing 
women to participate equally in all spheres of social life, aligns her with those think-
ers who advocated a different social order, and therefore a different gender order. 
Maculay’s and Wollstonecraft’s ideas were undoubtedly revolutionary and had to 
wait for centuries to become our reality, but they were crucially important ideas 
that eventually became the basis for changes in social conditions allowing structural 
changes to take place in the various fields of our individual and social lives.
On the background of these and similar ideas, and despite the fact that gen-
der equality seemed to be a rather distant goal, we witnessed the rise of second-
wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that feminism was and is not just 
one unique phenomenon – there are many feminisms supported by different femi-
nist organisations and groups with specific attitudes and demands – led to debate 
on a wide range of topics, including inequality in education, demands for more 
gender-neutral schools, critiques of gender-stereotypical subjects, the inability of 
girls to make different professional choices, the unequal treatment of girls and boys 
in institutionalised contexts, and the effects of the hidden curriculum that privi-
leges boys at almost all levels. Among the important demands of the second-wave 
feminist movement – based on an awareness of the lack or almost complete absence 
of knowledge on women’s lives in history and in the present time in the official cur-
riculum – was a demand for special courses on women, in order to fill the gap in 
6 editorial
knowledge production, to raise awareness of the importance of women’s lives, and 
to overcome “man-made language”, male-centred knowledge production, etc. 
Five decades later, we can see that this is not an easy task. Gender equality 
and gender equity in education is still an important and highly debated issue, as 
there are still enormous differences and a wide range of inequalities in this field 
worldwide. On the one hand, there are millions of girls who are still illiterate in 
poor countries and, on the other, there are countries in which girls significantly 
outperform boys in school achievements. There are countries and regions that 
tackle the issue of gender (in)equalities in education and countries that do not 
care about them, countries that support the development of women and gender 
studies and countries in which these studies are on the margins and addressed 
only by women’s NGOs.  
The present issue of the CEPS Journal is the first edition of a scientific 
journal completely dedicated to the question of gender and education, and is an 
important element in the mosaic of scientific production on the theme in Cen-
tral-East Europe. Moreover, this issue brings six articles all dealing with specific 
gender-related issues in the field of education. 
The issue starts with the article “Mapping Women’s and Gender Studies 
in the Academic Field in Slovenia”, which maps the development of women’s and 
gender studies (WGS) in the academic field in Slovenia. In her paper, Milica Antić 
Gaber asks and answers the following questions: How, when and why has this 
happened? How has this been connected to the women’s and feminist movements 
and politics towards women’s issues and demands? What have the obstacles been 
in this process? Who were the agents and what were the factors that supported 
demands for the incorporation of WGS in academia? as well as many other ques-
tions. The mapping in this paper is primarily based on the primary sources of uni-
versity programmes and their curricula at faculties of the University of Ljubljana, 
as well as on interviews with important agents in the field.
In their article “The Anti-Gender Movement in Europe and the Education-
al Process in Public Schools”, Roman Kuhar and Aleš Zobec analyse the mass pro-
tests across Europe against marriage equality, reproductive rights, gender main-
streaming and sex education, which have centralised in the past few years around 
so-called “gender theory”. The authors point to the fact that many of these debates 
(and concrete actions) are targeted towards schools and the education process. It 
is believed that “gender theory” is already being taught in schools, and that this 
will have detrimental consequences for pupils. Taking this debate as the starting 
point, the authors first examine the roots of the term “gender theory” and point 
to its “empty signifier” nature. They then analyse the various types of anti-gender 
actions across Europe that interfere with the educational process in public schools. 
c e p s  Journal | Vol.7 | No2 | Year 2017 7
Finally, the authors consider the role of parents and their right to intervene (or 
not) in the educational process. 
In the first part of their paper “Gender in the Teaching Profession: Uni-
versity Students’ Views of Teaching as a Career”, Veronika Tašner, Mojca Žveglič 
Mihelič and Metka Mencin Čeplak discuss the fact that women prevail numeri-
cally in the teaching profession and examine the reasons behind this fact. In the 
second part of the article, which is based on a pilot study including 132 students, 
the authors attempt to address the context from which pre-service teachers’ de-
sired characteristics of their future employment arise. They single out the factors 
influencing the choice of teaching as a career, as well as students’ attitudes towards 
the reputation of female and male teachers. The collected data confirmed the the-
sis that the prevalent number of women in the teaching profession(s) is an effect of 
the harmonisation of the female respondents’ habitus and their perception of the 
field they are entering. 
“Students’ Gender-Related Choices and Achievement in Physics”, authored 
by Ivana Jugović, explores the role of motivation, gender roles and stereotypes in 
the explanation of students’ educational outcomes in a stereotypically male edu-
cational domain: physics. The research sample included 736 grammar school stu-
dents from Zagreb, Croatia. The variables that were explored were expectancy of 
success, self-concept of ability and subjective task values of physics, gender roles 
and stereotypes, educational outcomes (academic achievement in physics), inten-
tion to choose physics in the high school leaving exam, and intention to choose a 
technical sciences university course.
In their article “Gender Differences in Children’s Language: A Meta-Anal-
ysis of Slovenian Studies”, Ljubica Marjanovič-Umek and Urška Fekonja-Peklaj of-
fer readers the first meta-analysis of ten Slovenian studies published between 2004 
and 2016, which include in total 3,657 toddlers, children and adolescents, aged 
from 8 months to 15 years. The language outcome and gender differences measures 
referred to various aspects of language ability, including vocabulary, mean length 
of utterance, sentence complexity, language expression and comprehension, story-
telling ability and metalinguistic awareness.
 In the final article published in this focus edition, “Adolescent Boys, Embod-
ied Heteromasculinities, and Sexual Violence”, James W. Messerschmidt  summa-
rises several life-history case studies of adolescent boys who eventually engaged in 
various forms of sexual violence. The life stories reveal the interrelationship between 
in-school bullying, reflexivity, embodiment and the social construction of hetero-
masculinities in the commission of adolescent sexual violence. The author concludes 
with a discussion of the implications of the research for the evolving discussions on 
social scientific conceptualisations of reflexive embodiment and heteromasculinities. 
8 editorial
The Varia section of this edition of the CEPS Journal includes two articles. 
The article by Milan Kubiatko, Gregor Torkar and Lenka Rownanova entitled “The 
Teacher as One of the Factors Influencing Students’ Perception of Biology as a School 
Subject” aims to determine whether the teacher is one of the factors influencing stu-
dents’ perception of biology as a school subject. The article also aims to identify the 
influence of certain other factors, such as: students’ gender and place of residence, 
the number of biology teachers who have taught the students, and the teachers’ gen-
der. The sample consisted of 261 lower secondary school students (ISCED 2) in Slo-
vakia, aged 14 and 15 years. The findings confirm the impact of biology teachers on 
students’ perception of the subject, while the students’ gender and place of residence 
did not have any significant influence on their perception of the subject. 
The article entitled “To What Extent Do School Leaders in Slovenia Under-
stand Physical School Environments as a Learning Factor?” by Majda Cencič analy-
ses how school leaders assess the school environment as a factor of learning. A total 
of 150 school leaders in primary education in Slovenia were invited to complete an 
online questionnaire asking them about their views regarding the extent to which 
their school as a physical environment encouraged certain factors. The results show 
that, in their school environment, school leaders assess ecology, movement and re-
spect the highest, while feelings, imagination and space gain the lowest assessment. 
The results provide interesting information, especially for school policymakers and 
everyone involved in the planning, building or renewal of school premises. 
The present edition of the CEPS Journal ends with Nina Perger’s review of 
the book Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon. The book is presented as an attempt 
at social self-analysis, which is “an analysis of one’s own biographical trajectory in 
relation to social factors that influenced it”. Eribon’s work is inspired by Bourdieu’s 
social self-analysis, yet, as Perger stresses, the author takes his self-analysis a step 
further by taking “into the account the experiential and affective side of ruptur-
ing one’s habitus by wilful distancing from primary social environment and its 
di-visions of social world and thus entering the process of resubjectivation”. In the 
reviewer’s opinion, the book offers a valuable elaboration of Bourdieu’s self-analy-
sis, because, as Nina Perger concludes in her review, Eribon’s work “enables us a so-
ciologically important insight into how relationality between objective structures 
and everyday life on a subjective level is played out not through a relation of causal 
determination, but through a dynamic in which there is a space for creative inno-
vation that, at the same time, requires creative destruction of the unquestionable”. 
Veronika Tašner and Milica Antić Gaber