I) Pergamon tnt. J. Educational Development. Vol 17,No.2. pp. 205-214.1997 I1:l 1997ElsevierScienceLtd All rights reserved. Printedin Great Britain 0738-0593197 S17.00 +0.00 PH: S0738-Q593(96)OOO48-X GENDER SENSITIVE EDUCATIONAL STRATEGIES AND THEIR IMPLEMENTATION NELLY P.STROMQUIST University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0031, U.S.A. Abstract - It has been the pattern of national governments at the end of world conferences on women, to endorse a body of recommendations for policy making and implementation in many areas. This study is a content analysis and comparison of those recommendations relating to education that emerged from the 1985 Nairobi meeting and the recent meeting in Beijing in 1995. It also reviews related key UN and national reports. As most governments failed to implement many of the Nairobi recommendations, the Beijing document was obligated to restate more than two-thirds of them. The study identifies some economic and political conditions that seem to facilitate state success in addressing gender sensitive educational policies. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd INTRODUCTION International women's conferences organized by the United Nations are a consequence of the mobilization of feminist groups in both industri- alized and developing countries. So far, four such meetings have taken place (Mexico, 1975;Copen- hagen, 1980;Nairobi, 1985;and, recently, Beijing, 1995)and they have been attended by large num- bers of government officials and feminists. These international conferences are important terrains for the identification of strategies and policies to improve the condition of women in a wide range of social, political, economic and cultural dimensions. The fact that two simultane- ous meetings take place at each conference-the meeting of government officials and the gather- ing of women's NGOs----ensures that the interests of women activists shape governmental deci- sions; further, the holding of public conferences- which receive much attention from the press, albeit not always for the central reasons-leads governments to endorse principles and positions that they would have been less likely to approve in the relative privacy of their nation-state. The agreements governments sign by the end of these IO-day conferences represent a formal, if not legally binding, commitment to act in a given direction. Hence, it is of particular importance to understand what governments identify as areas for action. It is of even greater importance to determine the extent to which these commitments to act become translated into actual interventions. The Forward-Looking Strategies, a 372- paragraph document, was agreed consensually by the 157countries attending the Nairobi meeting (see Table I), which marked the end of the UN Decade on Women (1976-1985). A few months later, on 13 December 1985, it was adopted with- out vote by the 40th session of the UN General Assembly. The purpose of this paper is to exam- ine the educational priorities identified in the FLS document and to assess the degree to which these priorities were implemented by national govern- ments. The paper then reviews the educational priorities proposed in the Platform for Action- the 1995 agreement adopted in Beijing- following 10years of implementation of the FLS. Finally, the paper tries to provide an understand- ing of the dynamics associated with acceptance and implementation of gender sensitive educa- tional strategies and raises a number of questions for future research. THE EDUCATIONAL GOALS AND MEASURES IN THE FORWARD LOOKING STRATEGIES The FLS produced rich and varied recommen- dations regarding education for women. Curricu- lum was targeted for the removal of sexual stereotypes and the training of boys in the respon- sibilities of shared parenting and household care. Recommendations were made for hiring more women as teachers, and teachers were targeted for training to eliminate sex stereotypes on the cur- riculum. The FLS was especially enlightened in 205