School, work and social change: revisiting the gender equity debate

DDU . SUPPLIED IN PRINT FORM.The emergence of a global economy has led to dramatic changes in young people's lives. This paper examines some of these changes in Australia, and discusses their implications for schools and gender policy. Over the past 30 years, the teenage labour market has collapsed, forcing young people to reconstruct completely the processes whereby they negotiate their transitions from school to work. At the school level, the gender gap in education has been inverted to the extent that, on some achievement measures, girls now out-perform boys. Approximately 80 per cent of each cohort of Australian girls completes high school, compared with 70 per cent of their male peers. Media sources are quick to express moral panic about boys' educational failure, and a call for 'equity for boys' has replaced the earlier focus on girls' issues in policy reform agendas. Some argue that a feminised teaching force is responsible for this inversion, but USââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬ÂAustralian comparisons suggest that a more powerful explanation can be achieved by examining the interdependency between young people's choices, wider social changes and the nature of the youth labour market.