Article Gender, education and the transition to democracy: research, theory and policy in

Education has been a key terrain of struggle in the transition to democracy in South Africa in the last two decades. Much of the debate and the majority of analyses of education in this transition have been primarily concerned with the ways in which apartheid definitions of race marked formal education provision and mobilised extensive opposition. However, the racism of the apartheid education system was gendered in striking and significant ways. In seeking to redress these inequities, the government elected in 1994 noted: Within the education system there are worrying disparities between girls and boys, and many girls and women suffer unfair discrimination and ill-treatment... In many schools and other education institutions, including the most senior, social relations among students, and between staffand students, exhibit sexism and male chauvinism. Sexual harassment of girls and women students and women teachers, as well as acts of violence against women, are common.... (South Africa 1995:46) As part of its policy of redress, the new government committed itself to establishing a Gender Equity Task Team (GETT) within the Ministry of Education to advise on gender imbalances in enrolment, dropout, subject choice, career paths and performance, and the desirability of single sex schools. This Task Team was appointed in late-1996 and reported in 1997. GETT began its work in the context of considerable formal support for gender equity in education in the national Ministry of Education, provincial ministries and in a number of national women's organisations, particularly the ANC Women's League, and the National Women's Coalition, a federation of a broad front of national and regional women's organisations across the spectrum of political positions from right to left. But the research bas