Gender Empowerment through Politics In Classrooms

Ensuring the future of democracy requires empowering all social group to engage, yet the gender gap in political leadership, political ambition and political self-efficacy is the most persistent and most difficult to tackle across Western democracies. The situation when looking across the intersect of gender, social class and ethnicity becomes even more grave.

These differences have been shown to begin in the school and classroom dynamics has been cited as the likely socialisation process that leads to these different outcomes.

G-EPIC, a multinational consortium of universities and civil society organisations, has been brought together with the aim of fostering social innovation and testing interventions to reduce gender inequality in politics.

The 7 partners in 6 countries (Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Spain and United Kingdom) will begin by establishing the state of play through classroom observations and reanalysis of existing quantitative data to understand how inequalities in attitudes and dispositions towards political engagement are learnt.

G-EPIC will then create experiments in schools and pilot design-based interventions co-developed with civil-society, teachers and students.

These experiments and interventions will be rigorously evaluated in comparisons with control groups and will lead to the development of the Gender Empowerment in Classroom intervention that will be disseminated and delivered in schools across Europe creating the possibility for real change and the reduction of the gender gap in political leadership.

In addition, G-EPIC will also carry out a holistic evaluation of the national context and the local and European policy framework to design strategies, regulations and policies that are conducive to a more equitable gender political involvement, particularly of girls with a disadvantaged background.