Gendered Differences in Education for Sustainable Development

Are girls more sustainability conscious than boys? Studies of how environmental education outcomes differ across genders have long indicated that girls demonstrate greater knowledge, more pro-environmental behavior, stronger preferences for the preservation of nature, and more positive environmental attitudes than boys. Given those prior results, this paper tackles the question of whether Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)—which combines social, environmental, and economic elements—yields the same gender differences as environmental education. The authors were particularly motivated to undertake this study because some research has suggested that ESD may actually prevent gender gaps in education. The authors of this study differentiate between the terms sex (that is, the biological term used to differentiate between men and women, or boys and girls) and gender (which is defined as socially constructed and may influence identities and differences between sexes); the latter term is the focus of their study.

To assess the potentially gendered aspects of ESD with regard to sustainability consciousness, the researchers posed three questions: (1) Do differences exist between boys and girls with respect to sustainability consciousness? (2) Does the effect of gender on sustainability consciousness change between grades six, nine, and twelve? and (3) How do ESD-certified schools impact gender differences? The authors designed the study so that each of the three lines of inquiry helped illuminate the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainability consciousness.

To address the research questions, researchers engaged a sample of 2,413 students in grades six (ages 12–13), nine (ages 15–16), and twelve (ages 18–19) from schools across Sweden. They examined 26 ESD-certified and 25 noncertified schools of different sizes from both rural and urban areas all over the country. For the purposes of this study, researchers chose to focus solely on two identified sexes—boy and girl—to directly compare the two groups. The study did not include gender nonbinary categories for methodological reasons, as part of the study relied on methodology that required the researchers to separate participants by sex into two groups in order to understand gender effects.

Each student in the study responded to a 50-item, Likerttype survey, which addressed knowledge, action, and behavior aspects of the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability consciousness.

Researchers arrived at several key insights through analyzing the results of this questionnaire. Most notably, they found that the gap between girls' and boys' sustainability consciousness widens as students age, with girls becoming proportionally more sustainability conscious over time.

Girls consistently received higher mean scores in each category of the survey, with the exception of sixth graders in the economic dimension of sustainability consciousness. Girls also scored higher if they attended ESD-certified schools, whereas there was no measurable difference between boys who did and did not attend ESDcertified schools. Finally, and perhaps most critically for this study, students who attended ESD-certified schools exhibited greater gender differences than students in non-ESD schools.

These results led the researchers to wonder whether the purportedly inclusivity-focused structure of ESD cannot mediate or negate whatever normative social forces are at play with respect to gender, at least in Sweden. The authors suggest that more transformative pedagogical approaches may provide a potential solution to this disparity and an avenue for future research on the gendered impacts of ESD.