Abstract:

Mainstreaming in education refers to the incorporation of socio-cultural contents included throughout the curriculum, contributing to form a model citizen that society demands, thereby through the teaching of values, ideas and judgments.

In particular mainstreaming considers that one of the topics necessary that all education should consider, is education for gender equality

Gender Mainstreaming is a trend, driven by both the United Nations and by the treaties of the European Commission as a major global strategy for promoting gender equality to promote structural impacts that break inequalities, incorporated in the design process planning, implementation and evaluation of public policies at all levels and different areas. We are interested in the educational field, and in particular the higher and postgraduate level.

To Oraisón (2000) with the term 'mainstreaming' in education, it refers to the location or space that is intended to occupy certain content within the curricular structure of each cycle or level. These contents are conceived as crossing longitudinal axis and horizontal in a study plan, so that around them the topics of different areas of formation are articulated.

If the main goal of gender mainstreaming is to influence public policy, speaking particularly of the educational context, then we must seek a transformation of culture promoted by the education sector in order to achieve social gender equality, as it is in the institutional level that social practices become regular and continuous. In turn presents a model of analysis, intervention and management that recognizes that women and men due to their biological differences and gender roles have needs, obstacles and different opportunities that must be identified and treated to correct the imbalance between sexes. Identifying this situation, it may propose activities that balance the participation of women in different areas.

This paper derived from a broader research at the Centre for Economics, Management and Social Research (CIECAS) of the National Polytechnic Institute – Mexico. This research aims to analyze and propose actions to promote gender mainstreaming in the curricula of postgraduate studies, particularly in the Master of Science in Methodology of Science. In this paper, we present the first part of the results regarding the analysis of the curriculum of the Master of Science object of study (we analyzed 23 subjects that make up the whole of curriculum) and an approach to institutional climate to identify the hidden curriculum concerning the gender perspective.

From the analysis of data we present some of the most important results, including the importance of breaking the distancing between the contents of subjects and what the students perceive in their daily life as well as the obstacles and opportunities that teachers can offer for this view of gender mainstreaming. Therefore, through our analysis, we believe that the school should have a critical and constructive attitude of the current values that allow graduate students evolve in their conceptions of the world to understand, analyze and transform reality according to social needs with an ethical consciousness.

This research proposes reflection and recognizes the importance of including actions and strategies to include gender mainstreaming in higher education and postgraduate level in the four main subsystems: institutional management, teaching, research and extension of culture.

Keywords:

Gender mainstreaming, education, curriculum, gender equality.