About

The Gender and Education Association (GEA) is a volunteer-led international intersectional feminist charity.
Since 1997, our community of educators, researchers, activists, leaders, artists, and more have been working to challenge and eradicate gender stereotyping, sexism, and gender inequality within and through education.
UK charity number: 1159145

GEA seeks to: 

  • Produce, promote and disseminate feminist and other critical scholarship on gender and education.
  • Raise awareness about international, national and local policies and practices relating to gender and education.
  • Inform and ‘educate’ policy makers by campaigning for educational change, lobbying for gender equality and responding to national and international issues.
  • Create networks to encourage and generate the exchange of information and ideas between teachers, managers, academics and policy makers.
  • Embed within teaching and learning practices a commitment to achieving gender equality.
  • Update educators with the knowledge required to develop reflective and critical pedagogies that promote social justice.

We welcome anyone with interests in gender and education, both formal and informal forms of education.

The language of identity

We recognise the criticisms of umbrella terms for underrepresented and marginalised groups and that identity categories drawn from standardised sources (census questions, for example) do not fully reflect the diversity of possible identities. Terms like BIPoC, PoC, BAME, BME, and politically Black, can serve to homogenise the experiences of racism and prejudice in ways that hide, ignore, misrepresent, silence the disproportionate ways discrimination, oppression, prejudice, and violence specifically impacts on individual communities.

Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPoC) Chavez Clarke’s article explores the increased use of BIPoC https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bipoc-meaning-where-does-it-come-from-2020-04-02/ and writes “People are using the term to acknowledge that not all people of color face equal levels of injustice. They say BIPOC is significant in recognizing that Black and Indigenous people are severely impacted by systemic racial injustices.” BIPoC as an abbreviation is not without criticism as well. Read “’BIPOC’ Isn’t Doing What You Think It’s Doing” https://www.newsweek.com/bipoc-isnt-doing-what-you-think-its-doing-opinion-1582494

People of Colour (PoC) was first in print in the 1700s, though the phrase has been in more popular use over the last few decades. Watch Loretta Ross discussing the origins of the phrase Women of Colour: https://youtu.be/82vl34mi4Iw. Listen to the Code Switch podcast episode titled: “Is It Time To Say R.I.P. To ‘POC’?” https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/918418825/is-it-time-to-say-r-i-p-to-p-o-c

Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) or Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) are phrases that originated in the UK and are often used in UK race/ethnicity research and in equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) work in UK organisations/institutions. However, the terms have come under criticism (see examples):

Politically Black is a phrase that originated in the UK in the 1970s and is still used by some trade unions (see, for example: “UCU uses the term ‘Black’ in a political sense” www.ucu.org.uk/article/8334/Black-History-Month). Listen to author Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race) and politician Diane Abbot, the first black woman elected to UK Parliament, discuss the history of Political Blackness  https://www.aboutracepodcast.com/4-political-blackness and read Kemi Alemoru’s article on Political Blackness https://gal-dem.com/bookmark-this-for-the-next-time-somebody-asks-you-what-political-blackness-is/