Ei-iE

Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, teacher unionists were in an optimistic mood. Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the US-based National Education Association, rose to address a global gathering of teacher leaders in Stockholm as Education International was born.

“Today we assert our interdependence,” Futrell said, “we affirm our solidarity. We have brought to life a brand new organisation. And having given birth we now become its guardians...Our decision demonstrates our understanding that we must remember now and forever that when the issue is the liberation and the education of the children of the world, that we stand together.”

Behind the scenes of that sincere and visible unity of the moment, Futrell and other women unionists faced a starkly different reality. In one of the EI-precursor teacher union federations, Futrell recalled later, women were not only instructed not to speak, expulsion from future meetings was threatened if they did.

Since that founding Congress in 1993, EI has played a critical role in advancing the rights of women educators, leading change in country after country. Now, in our 30th year, it’s important not only to recall the progress between then and now, but to examine the tools that got us here and the persistence required to keep moving forward.

In my own path to becoming the first woman federal secretary of my national teachers’ union in Australia, AEU, and president of Education International, the barriers and blind alleys were the familiar ones to women educators of my era. As a maths teacher I was introduced to the unwritten rules of preference for male teachers for positions of responsibility. When a certain position came open that I was unmistakably qualified for, the interviewer asked me first whether I planned to have a baby. The message was clear and common for the times: ‘We're not going to waste our time giving you a position if you're going to go off and have a baby.’

Through the decades, EI has used resolutions, policies, and structures to foster and promote gender equality in education unions and in education policymaking national, regionally, and internationally. But one of the main tools to promote women’s participation in the education union movement has been a trail we ourselves blazed through the formation of women’s networks.

Former EI deputy general secretary Jan Eastman recalled in an interview that women’s networks in EI unions became places to develop strategies and deploy tactics to raise the profile of women members and leaders. “The networks were a way of empowering women in their own workplace and their own living place,” Eastman said. “The network could be a place that welcomed all members, and it was not going be a structure that defined membership to just a few. Then we had to connect the network to the union in a way where it worked in each place.”

Connecting the roles of women to the political and policy missions of our unions grows more vital every year. Hundreds of millions of the most vulnerable children, young people, and adults remain excluded from education. Millions more don’t have learning opportunities because of inadequate environments, untrained teachers, and a lack of educational resources.

Girls are disproportionately affected – they have historically been the last in their families to be allowed access to schools, the first to be forced to leave schools in times of crisis, and the hardest to get back to school when that option is again available. All at a time when this overwhelmingly female profession of ours is facing a shortfall of nearly 70 million teachers worldwide.

It's critical for activists and leaders to elevate our campaigns for quality education to include the special mission and opportunity women educators have to lead the profession and their unions. Women in our profession are uniquely situated to raise issues of access to education for girls, especially those girls at risk of child labour, gender-based violence, early marriage, or in migrant and refugee status.

We must all be mentors and fierce advocates for opportunity. I recall my mentors vividly: women who shaped my career, changed my life, and joined us together to change our union.

Much has changed in 30 years in the structures of our unions and our workplaces and much is left to do.

We have learned that systems matter. Heroic individual acts to smash sexism must be matched by mobilisation to root out discrimination in systemic policies and laws, and toxic customs.

Still, we cannot forget that grit matters. Qualities of resilience must be developed in our girls and young women. Earlier this year, at an EI conference, a woman rose to make a point in context: “Everyone talks about empowerment,” she told her audience, “but actually we women leaders have plenty of power - we just need some certain men to stop the active disempowerment!”