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General versus girl-targeted interventions: a false dichotomy? A response to Evans and Yuan

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Abstract

This paper provides a review of Evans and Yuan’s 2019 paper on ‘What We Learn about Girls’ Education from Interventions that Don’t Focus on Girls.’ Their thought-provoking paper raises an important point that even where interventions are not directly aimed at addressing gender issues, evaluations of these programmes should report gender-disaggregated findings (including where results are similar for both girls and boys). They go further than this to suggest ‘…specifically targeting girls may not be necessary to help those girls succeed. If policymakers want to help girls learn, they can make schools better for all children’ (p4). Rose and Yorke’s review suggests that this conclusion is not warranted based on the information provided in the paper. They raise five points from which they conclude that, if anything, a combination of girl-targeted and general interventions is needed. Importantly, a conclusion to be drawn is that the scope of girl-targeted interventions that have been evaluated to date is narrow, and do not sufficiently address gender-related structural barriers in education, notably ones that affect marginalised girls (for example according to poverty, where they live, whether they have a disability etc) in different ways.

Author
Rose, Pauline
Yorke, Louise
Year of publication
2019
Imprint
Cambridge ( REAL Centre, University of Cambridge, 2019, p.15)
Notes
Note
Source database
curatED
Language