7 Gender Matters: Gender Equity, Equality and Gender Justice

Susanne Gannon^[1]

Abstract

This chapter examines recent school leavers’ understandings, experiences and advocacy for gender equity. As part of the Gender Matters ARC project, Western Sydney University students with diverse backgrounds and schooling experiences shared their views on how gender impacts schooling and society. Participants emphasised fluidity and freedom in gender identity and expression, advocating for respect and inclusivity to foster a more equitable society. They identified ongoing gender injustices including gender pay gaps, gendered stereotypes and experiences of violence. Their perspectives highlight challenges and evolving views on gender equity in education, suggesting how policy might evolve to support gender justice.

Keywords

Gender equity, Gender equality, Gender justice, Gender identity, Gender fluidity, Gender diversity, Binary gender, Gender stereotypes, Sexual harassment, Student voice, Single sex schools, Religious schools, Secondary schools, Social Justice in Schools

Introduction

This chapter presents findings from our Gender Matters: Changing Gender Equity Policies and Practices in Secondary Schools ARC-funded research^[2] where recent school leavers and current senior school students shared their experiences, feelings and thoughts about how gender shapes educational experiences. The chapter briefly touches on how educational policy has endeavoured to respond to gender-related issues and changing theories of gender. My aim in this chapter is to report back empirically to our community about shifting concepts of gender and their relation to equity, equality and justice as they were understood by university student participants.

We undertook one phase of our research with Western Sydney University students aged 18-24, who had attended the spectrum of New South Wales (NSW) schools: public schools, Catholic schools, independent faith-based schools; single sex schools, coeducational schools; selective and non-selective schools. Perspectives and policies pertaining to gender varied enormously across their schools and contributed to disparate experiences and observations of how gender had impacted their education. At the time of our research, a push in NSW to shut down gender-inclusive practices and policies in schools was led by conservative state politicians which meant we could not work with current students and teachers in this state (Smith & Robinson, 2024). Discussion of any aspect of gender was perceived by NSW schools as volatile and risky. In contrast, in a later phase of our research, we worked with current school students (aged 16-18) and teachers in the openly progressive jurisdiction of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) where gender inclusion and diversity were overt, supported by ACT Wellbeing Framework for public schools, and more openly discussed (Gannon, Robinson, Smith & Adams, 2025).

Gender Equity in education policy

This research began with a historical interest in ‘gender equity’ as this had been the focus of state and federal educational policy several decades earlier (Gannon, 2016). Gender policy rose to prominence with a comprehensive interest in girls’ education through the 1980s and early 1990s, emerging from research evidence that girls’ opportunities and outcomes were impacted by limiting ideas and practices, and supported by a broad feminist commitment to social justice. Over time, policies that were initially focused on girls’ education were incorporated into the broader national policy Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian schools (1997) that endeavoured to address the needs of both girls and boys (Gannon, 2016, 2024b, 2025a; Gannon & Robinson, 2021). Emerging insights about gendered identities, gender as socially constructed, and the multiplicities of social factors impacting on genders can be glimpsed here and there in some of this early work.

In this era, however, gender was always understood as either male or female, aligning with sex assigned at birth, and associated with attributes that were seen as either masculine or feminine (Gannon, Higham & Smith, 2024). This binary classification of gender was intolerant of difference, ambivalence and ambiguity^[3]. It tended to homogenise and impose categories, assumptions and attributes within which many people did not recognise themselves. Nor did the emphasis on binary gender allow the nuance required for more dynamic and intersectional understandings of how gender is imbricated with race, class, ability, sexuality and more. Yet, the gender equity policy framework drew attention to patterns of injustice that manifest in ways that were detrimental to women and girls, including stereotypical views about school subjects and domains of knowledge; limits to career and leadership opportunities; sexist behaviours and more.

This policy approach to gender equity also provided scope for educators to begin to look at how behaviours that were attached to the performance of dominant forms of masculinity might be detrimental to men and boys, as well as women and girls, including increased violence and school disengagement. Ample research evidence was generated on the breadth of gender-related issues impacting on educational experiences and outcomes. As the policy landscape shifted in response to a perception that boys had been neglected, policy attention turned to boys and narrowed to boys’ literacy and (dis)engagement (Gannon, 2025a).

This policy oscillation was unhelpful as it set up boys and girls as competing victims of educational injustice, where progress for one group was seen to disadvantage the other. It disregarded the many differences amongst boys and girls and ignored other gender related issues and fractures. By the mid-2000s, centrally developed gender equity policies were largely abandoned in the school sector (Gannon, 2016, 2025a; Gannon et al., 2024). Throughout this earlier policy era, serious issues of injustice were the focus of policy attention and intervention, some of which continue to the present; positioning boys and girls, and men and women as competing victims is a dead end for gender justice. Regardless of how policy attention shifted, what stayed intact was the binary framing of gender.

Gender Matters research

Our participants had not been born when Gender Equity policies were prominent in Australian education. They were not yet at school in the dying days of the boys’ education focus of the mid-2000s. That is not to say that their teachers and schools were unaware of ways in which gender impacts young people in school, nor that issues of concern raised in early policy had been resolved. For our participants, their secondary schooling coincided with the divisive Marriage Equality postal vote. For some participants, this had provided their first opportunity to vote. The research coincided with a range of incidents of public concern around gender-related violence, including the rape of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House and the collation of testimonies of sexual assault by Chanel Contos. There was clearly a rising tide of activism around violence against women and girls that emerged in some of the focus groups.

Our university participants comprised 47 recent school leavers, aged 18-24. They were enrolled in courses across the university including: Engineering, Science, Policing, Law, Criminology, Anthropology, Planning, Nursing, Social Sciences, Psychology, Communications, Arts, Computer Science, Human Resources Management and Marketing, Languages, Business, Medical Science and Teaching. Amongst our participants, 33 identified as female, 11 identified as male, and 3 as non-binary. More than 50% spoke a language other than English. They referenced a range of religions reflecting the breadth of faiths in the community, including Muslim, Catholic/Christian, Hindu, and many participants described themselves as non-religious. Almost all participants had attended secondary schools in western Sydney. Thirty-two participants had attended government schools including selective, semi-selective, single-sex, as well as comprehensive and coeducational schools. We conducted 13 focus groups and five interviews between late 2019 and 2021. Most focus groups and interviews were held face to face on campus, except when COVID-19 restrictions were in place when they were held on Zoom.

Our primary research aim was to understand whether and how gender was salient to the educational experiences of young people in secondary schools so we could determine what policy responses might be warranted or possible in the present. In public education, current policy guidelines for inclusion of gender and sexuality diversity are limited and uneven (Ullman, Manlik & Ferfolja, 2024). The increased fragmentation of schooling systems, with a drift of students into non-government schools, has also contributed to a very different educational context than previous policy eras.

We have written elsewhere about a phenomenon we called ‘teaching up’ (Smith & Robinson, 2024) where our participants – regardless of their backgrounds and school contexts – talked about how they were actively educating parents and teachers about new understandings of gender. In other publications, we have examined school leavers’ experiences of single sex schooling (Gannon, 2024a) and explored the concept of gender justice through the accounts of students and teachers in Australian Capital Territory schools (Gannon, 2025b). In this chapter, in order to identify further patterns and insights, I return to participant responses to two early questions in our focus group protocol: What does gender equity mean to you? and How has it changed over time? Many of their answers to these questions provided details of their schools’ often inadequate responses to changing understandings of gender.

Gender: In your words, on your terms, and with respect 

We did not provide a definition or explanation of what we understood by gender. Rather we invited participants to define and explain gender and gender equity in their own terms. Student voice was a guiding principle of our research, so we aimed to refrain from imposing our perspectives on them.

Gender fluidity and freedom to choose how to define one’s own gender beyond the binary emerged in many focus groups, particularly as participants described how perceptions of gender have changed over time. They did not necessarily reference their own gender identity or gender expression, but described how they understood society more broadly in the present, and their views on how it could be. Charlotte (21, coed religious school³) explained how ideas of gender were changing over time: “Where it was very, men are here, women are there, but now it kind of is a bit more fluid, to some people and some rules.” Samantha (22, coed government school) referred to qualitative research they had drawn on in a university assignment: “now in society, there’s what, 33 identifiable genders.” When pressed for a citation, Samantha elaborated that this was from published research on how Queensland (QLD) university students had self-defined their gender. Samantha concluded that “it’s not just male and female anymore, which is everchanging. So this concept of gender equity is always going to be changing because gender’s always changing. It’s a very fluid notion now.” It is worth noting that a categorical approach that moves from a binary count (of two) to any other count of possible gender descriptors (such as 33) is very different from the expansiveness of a ‘fluid notion’ of gender. New taxonomies of gender can create more problems, as gender diverse participant Jesse (18, coed government school) pointed out ironically: “Some poor soul had the job of giving them all symbols.”

Focus groups identified “freedom” as an important element of gender equity. That is, people’s freedom to choose how and when to define themselves, and to have that choice respected by others. As Charlotte described it: “these days, there’s so much more choice and freedom… how I think, personally, and I know how my friends and things think. That it’s a lot more choice and we don’t put those labels on it as much.” The point is not to impose new labels or develop new taxonomies but to allow movement away from labels, and therefore from entrapment in classificatory systems.

This commitment to freedom and self-definition impacted how students defined “gender equity”. Alain (23, coed government school) explained: “gender equity for me is more about being yourself. It’s more about being proud of who you are, regardless of gender. If you’re female, male, bisexual, a member of the LGBTQ. I think for me, gender equity is more about allowing people to accept you for who you are, to have respect and inclusivity.” Alain’s answer bundles gender and sexuality diversities together into the spectrum of changing views and possibilities. Pride and acceptance resonate with respect – all are essential elements of a re-conceived notion of gender equity. Zoe (24, single sex Catholic school) explained: “my understanding of gender equality, equity, is that whatever gender you present yourself is respected. Who you are is respected.” Zoe’s description suggests both gender as expressive or performative (as “you present yourself”) and gender as identity (as “who you are”). While our participants insisted on respect as a necessary component of gender equity, their responses also suggested that gender may be receding from view as an overarching way of dividing and separating people. Yasmin (20, single sex government school) explained: “being treated with the same level of respect for all genders, because you recognise that before gender, before anything else, we are all humans”. Zoe felt that categorising people according to gender is ”really limiting to us as people”. To reach “a place of equity” for all, Zoe suggested, society needs to “let go of some of those ideas and limitations that we’ve put on ourselves around gender.” For Yasmin and Zoe, letting go – or detaching – from gender and therefore from the constraints that have historically and culturally been attached to gender, may be a step towards a more equitable society.

Changing social values regarding genders and sexualities could elicit acceptance, or more intentional and active inclusion. For example, Rhada (22, single sex government school) explained: “These days people are more accepting of gender, of individuals who have different genders, different sexual preferences.” For Esime (18, coed government school), gender equity means “accommodating to different genders or to different individuals’ idea of their gender.” However, acceptance or accommodation are benign but relatively passive responses. In contrast, inclusion refers to proactive and united actions that create conditions that are amenable to people’s diversities.

Victoria (19, coed government school) provided one of the few examples of a school that was dynamic, responsive and intentionally gender inclusive. There had been an increase in gender diverse students over recent years. The situation was “evolving” and “still changing” but by the time Victoria had reached the senior years, younger years “had a lot of students who didn’t identify as male or female so the school was very inclusive of them.” The school created a non-binary bathroom, new protocols for school camps so students who did not feel comfortable in cabins allocated for boys or girls could bunk with teachers, and relaxed uniform rules so students could wear the non-gendered sports uniform rather than a boys’ or girls’ uniform. The school was overt in its response to this cohort of students: “We had a lot of year group talks about what gender is, and why people identify as different genders.” This proactive and inclusive approach meant that, to Zoe’s knowledge, there had been “no bullying” of these students.

Not too sure if I can speak

Participants from single sex schools provided intriguing perspectives on gender-related issues (Gannon, 2024a). Rather than understanding gender as a dimension of social life, including and extending beyond school, several students began their answers by opting out of the question. Alain (23, single sex and coed government schools) suggested that “at a boys’ school you don’t really need a gender policy”. Similarly, Lakshmi (21, single sex government school) explained “I’m not too sure if I could speak on gender equity being that we were single sex.” There is no sense in these responses that young people in secondary schools are situated in, and being prepared for, a complex and interrelated social world beyond the school gate. In both examples, gender is understood as entailing a binary system. If one category in the binary is stable (as in a school that selects ostensibly for one assumed gender category), then the opposite category can be disregarded. Sometimes, in single sex schools, this led to serious educational gaps in knowledge. For example, Noah said they had “basically no sex ed” at his Catholic single-sex school which he ascribed to the school’s distance from the “real world” (Gannon, 2024a). Although initially Lakshmi had seen gender equity as not necessarily relevant, her account went on to describe how her single sex school was saturated with empowering gendered messaging targeted at young women: “our motto, that we would read out before we started each assembly, was ‘strong independently minded young women’. We would say together every single assembly. Every time our principal would address us, she would be like you are strong independent minded young women. As awkward as it sounds every time she said it, what I notice … [amongst] my high school friends… these are very strong independently minded young women.” While on the one hand, Lakshmi’s school experience was very affirming for girls, it was also entirely reliant on retaining the binary system of gender that positioned men and women as differentially treated in the wider world. That is, where gender is understood as the overriding difference – above all else – that structures society.

Around a third of our participants had attended religious schools, including Catholic, and various other Christian and Muslim schools. Some participants described views and practices on gender through stances that they understood as based on religion. For example, Jackson (22, coed Christian school) described how a friend had been treated: “it was a traditional, conservative, Christian school so my friend who was also a homosexual… constantly, like had people being like oh, you know, we’re going to be praying for you to be cured of your homosexuality.” At that school, he stressed “there are boundaries and whatever you believe, you can’t cross those boundaries.”

Though some students described themselves as no longer religious, several participants described how they negotiated or reconciled ideas that were different from those promoted by religions that were still important to them. Jude (24, coed government school) encounters views in her current social circle that she feels are becoming out of date: “Maybe it’s because I am a Christian. I have met a lot of Christians who, you know, think that men are the breadwinners and the girls shouldn’t do anything, but I have this thing where like, girls should be able to do what they want.” Rosa (21, coed government school) describes herself as Pentecostal Christian. She affirms that, “for me, I’ve never really judged anybody by how they identify themselves. Because for us Christians, we’re called to, like love people, no matter who or what they decide they are. But like, I know, you guys will, like think it’s wrong. Like, for me, it’s always just been like male and female.” At this distance, it isn’t clear whether Rosa’s aside to “you guys” is addressed to other students, the facilitator, or the whole focus group. She is alert to the possibility that what she says may be out of step with the group, although in this group she is the first person who jumps in to answer the question. Clearly, she finds solace in what she understands as the core value of her religion: love. Even within Rosa’s comment there is an implication that people have freedom “to decide who they are”. Rosa further explains “everyone still has, like their fair say, their fair feelings like, however they feel, if they’re not male or female, if they’re in the in between or out, like exterior, that’s like how I see it.” Interestingly, Rosa says that her parents who grew up in the Philippines are more accustomed to gender and sexuality diversity than she is. These complexities are difficult to explain and, like many people, Rosa is navigating the changes that she sees around her while sticking with what she calls “my values and my beliefs.”

Equity/ equality (and feminism) what’s not here yet?

Borrowing the language of an earlier era of policy, we asked participants to offer explanations of what ‘gender equity’ meant to them. In many of the focus groups, students endeavoured to differentiate between ‘equality’ and ‘equity’, or they chose to talk about equality. Talking about equity or equality tended to move attention back to binary systems and structures that continued to disadvantage women in familiar and well-documented ways.

Some participants drew on ideas they had encountered in their university studies. Several referenced the ubiquitous equity/equality image of levelling the field as people of different heights stand on boxes by a sports field (Gannon & Woodrow, 2024). “Equality” for Jaala (20, independent partially single sex-school) evokes the persistent “gender pay gap”, and Lakshmi describes it as “not being restricted because of your gender, equal opportunities, making sure that one gender is not prioritised over the other.” Jackson (22, coed Christian school) explained that gender equity entailed “two ways of looking at it… equality of opportunity or equality of outcome, and I think the problem is the two things are slightly mutually exclusive and neither of them work alone.” In Jackson’s school, in a passive sense “there was equality of opportunity in that there was no discouragement, there was no policies in place giving for or against” but “clearly not equality of outcome” as subjects and pathways remained stereotypically gendered. Persistent gendered stereotypes about domains of knowledge were mentioned by numerous students. Samantha (22, coed Catholic school) said that her school claimed to have “a really big gender equity programme” in that “you were sort of given the equal opportunity, but they were really quite forceful in their opinion of what choices you’d be making”. This was particularly apparent in STEM subjects, which were coded male, and arts subjects that were coded female, so that students were actively encouraged or discouraged from those subjects according to ascribed gender. Samantha summed up that “in a really warped sense there was equality because both of them were questioned either way, but it was a lot of stereotyping.” Repercussions into the future can be serious. Although she felt that her school had discouraged girls from pursuing STEM, Samantha was currently enrolled in an undergraduate STEM degree. Would she have had a smoother transition and greater confidence if she had felt equally accepted and capable in senior STEM subjects in her school?

Many participant accounts suggested that there were double standards or varying opportunities according to ascribed gender in many facets of schooling beyond curriculum. They mentioned leadership opportunities, access to university engagement pathways, excursions, and uneven implementation of school rules. Jayne (18, coed government school) felt that complaints about equity were “brushed aside” and female students who questioned the status quo risked “getting a bad rep” or “stayed in the shadows.” In Jayne’s view, in terms of equity her school had “failed utterly and completely.” Penny (21, coed Christian school) felt there were “a lot more rules girls had to follow than the guys. So the girls could get in trouble more often than the guys.” These rules were around appearance: hair, jewellery, nail polish, shoes, skirt length, clothing protocols for mufti days and more. Perhaps these suggest the spectre of provocation, of female bodies being sexualised or perceived as disruptive by their presence in educational spaces in very different ways to the bodies of boys.

Awareness of vulnerability to the gaze of others was remarked on by some students who identified as female. Jude (24, coed government school) talked about how she feels travelling through the suburbs at night as a woman: “I normally pack track pants and a hoodie to make myself look ugly or something on the way home so, to keep me safe on the train from men.” She expressed her frustration “how come guys don’t get to do this, like, this is unfair” and “I don’t think clothes encourage a guy, but they always use it as an excuse.” Leah (20, coed Catholic school) described her current work in a “traditional” law firm: “all of the girls in my law firm have slowly been disappearing. At the moment, I’m the only girl, and they hired another male paralegal. It’s just interesting for me to see the range of jobs that he’s given compared to me, which do not match my capabilities at all.” Beyond examples from their schooling, Jude and Leah’s examples demonstrate how their adult lives beyond school are shaped by the gendered views of others. In these examples, school had not prepared them for the gendered dimensions of work and leisure.

While the issues canvassed in this section seem relevant to the ongoing concerns of feminists, and questions of gender equity would seem to be of perennial feminist interest, few participants mentioned feminism. The research team understood feminism as inherently dynamic, both in public discourse and in our own research where we have taken up feminist theories as agile, layered, expansive, political, and oriented towards intersectional justice and inclusion (Gannon & Davies, 2012; Osgood & Robinson, 2019). However, our participants had very different perspectives on feminism. Of those who did mention feminism in their discussions of what gender equity might entail, views were split between feminism as conducive or obstructive to gender justice. Camila (19, coed Catholic school) saw feminist and queer activism as aligned in their focus on expanding gender justice: “the separation of the genders has become much hazier and much more different, because of the rise of feminism or the LGBTIAQIA+ community.” Noah (21, single-sex Catholic school) explained that in previous times “there was a huge disparity, that would be where a large feminist movement was, essentially, what needed to be done to push things up” however now, Noah feels there is “a negative stigma sometimes, just the word feminism, and that’s why I try to stay away from that.” The public meaning and reception of feminism is slippery and shifts according to context. Although he agrees with some aspects of feminism, Noah would not claim the term, “if I go and say, I’m a feminist, then it could be taken to the other maybe extreme because it depends on the context from who you’re talking to and how they understand.” The riskiness of context was highlighted by Alys (18, coed government school) who remembered a session on feminism in a senior class which was disparaged by her male peers: “I went out for lunch and some of my friends who were guys on the table near me, they called me up. I was like hey, and they were outraged by the feminism thing… they were very mad about it, and they’re like have you ever been disadvantaged because of your gender?” When she explained that she had been excluded from a sport, they said, “that doesn’t count, like this is ridiculous and they were really mad about it.” She thought that this reaction was disproportionate, inconsistent with values that she knew these peers experienced in their homes, and just “so weird.” In these examples, feminism evokes a vague sort of threat that can be turned back on individuals. Samantha described a recent debate in one of her university subjects that “pursuing feminisms is to reject equality in modern society.” She did not elaborate on the argument that was presented but noted that students went through “a lot of data, research and journal analysis” to ensure it was “solid.” Their argument may have evoked the TERF (or trans-exclusionary radical feminism) wars that have been particularly divisive in United Kingdom and that conservative groups in Australia have tried to mobilise. Across these responses, there seemed to be a pervasive sense that, despite persistent injustices relating to a range of gender-related issues, feminism is ambiguous, dangerous or obsolete. On what basis then can movements towards gender equity proceed? While individual rights, freedoms and self-definition are important, a collective commitment is also required for social change.

Gender Justice?

Throughout this chapter, I have avoided defining gender, rather I have traced the varied and disparate ways that our participants explained their understandings of gender and gender equity, particularly in relation to their secondary schooling. My focus has been on one small component of the research, and I have endeavoured to privilege the voices of our participants. Their accounts incorporate current progressive discourses of gender that prioritise gender and sexuality diversity inclusion in all facets of social life; and they include recognition of persistent structural inequalities based on binary gender. There is a clear trend in our research that young people feel it is no longer adequate or appropriate to ascribe gender externally, but that human dignity and freedom should allow people to define their gender as they prefer, in their own terms, and with respect from others. This orientation towards autonomy and self-definition was held by many participants, irrespective of whether they identified as gender or sexuality diverse. We might understand this as part of the movement towards individual freedoms in social life that has been attached to neoliberal subjectivity, where society and collective responsibility for social justice or equity recede, however our participants were also vocal about the ongoing need for justice. However for these young people, existing frameworks for activism and political intervention, including what they perceive to be old-school feminism, do not seem to be useful.

How might we think through this impasse? I have been working recently with an expansive concept of gender justice. The scope of gender injustice is broad, encompassing the breadth of ways that people might be limited, excluded or disparaged by perceptions of gender (Gannon, 2025b). It includes stereotypes and generalisations that are applied to broad categories of people, attributions that might be labelled as feminine or masculine that are used to restrict people’s opportunities, and targeted oppression or violence against certain groups of people prompted by gender. It includes limitations that are imposed from broader society and culture, those that are internalised, and those that are enacted against others. We need such a broad scope because of the breadth of experiences that young people shared through our research (Gannon, 2025b). Gender justice sees feminist, queer and trans theories and activisms as entangled in a loose alliance, oriented towards justice and inclusion. It allows for policy redirection and collective action as well as individual freedoms. As a discursive frame for talking about what might change in schools, it is accessible and potentially useful for reviewing school policies and practices. It does not set groups of people against each other, and it might have scope to open up contextually nuanced local conversations in schools about what might change and how change might be pursued.

In their recent work, Judith Butler, a philosopher whose work has been seminal in feminist and queer theory and a significant influence on the researchers in this project, reconsiders the intelligibility, utility and discursive weaponisation of the concept of gender. In Who’s afraid of gender? (Butler, 2024), this pioneer of gender performativity and queer subjectivity maps the multiplicity of ways that gender is evoked by disparate, often toxic, actors in public discourse. These include “gender as a monolith, frightening in its power and reach” (2024, 4), as a “phantasm with destructive powers, one way of collecting and escalating multitudes of modern panics” (2024, 5), as “overdetermined, absorbing wildly different ideas of what threatens the world from social history and political discourse” (2024, 8). Rather than the old binaries or taxonomies, we might think of gender as “a spectrum or mosaic, a living complexity worthy of affirmation” (2024, 34). Butler suggests there is yet “much to be understood about gender as a structural problem in society, as an identity, as a field of study, as an enigmatic and highly invested term that circulates in ways that inspire some and terrify others” (2024, 36). In the USA, where Butler resides, gender has become an ideological battlefield in schools and education policy, wielded by conservative political actors as part of their campaign to (re)impose authoritarian patriarchal limitations on young people and their futures. Attempts to emulate these tactics have been evident in Australia as well (Smith & Robinson, 2024). None of our participants seemed to support these views. However their understandings of gender and gender equity offer some challenges.

While individual rights are part of the call to gender equity, they are insufficient to challenge injustices and secure liveable futures for all. We need coalitions across our differences within which we can generate “compelling countervisions” that “affirm the rights and freedoms of embodied life” (2024, 8). Some of our work in this research aims to work collectively towards these potentialities (Pasley, Gannon & Osgood, 2025). What might schools, universities, workplaces, all sorts of social spaces in which we live our lives look like and feel like if an expansive and inclusive notion of gender justice for all guided our practices? Some of the young people from our Western Sydney University community offered glimpses into possible futures and the work we might do for gender inclusivity in individual, social, and cultural lives. We leave the last word to Lily (19, single-sex Catholic school):

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for funding this research. This research was supported by the Australian Government through the ARC’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project DP0901012116) awarded to Susanne Gannon and Kerry Robinson. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the ARC.

Thanks for Western Library’s invitation to present the Thought Leadership lecture which prompted this chapter.

SDG Alignment

This research intersects across the “social” SDGs and also pushes the UN SDG 2030 agenda to be more aware and inclusive of gender diversity and embrace the concept of gender justice.

SDG 4 – Quality Education

SDG 5 – Gender Equality

SDG 10 – Reduced Inequalities

Target 10.2

By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status

SDG 16 – Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Target 16.b – Promote and enforce non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development

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Ullman, J., Manlik, K. & Ferfolja, T. (2024). Supporting the inclusion of gender and sexuality diversity in schools: Auditing Australian education departmental policies. The Australian Educational Researcher. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00679-9

How to Cite this Chapter

Gannon, S. (2025). Gender Matters: Gender Equity, Equality and Gender Justice. In Boddington, E., Chandran, B., Dollin, J., Har, J. W., Hayes, K., Kofod, C., Salisbury, F., & Walton, L. (Eds.). Sustainable development without borders: Western Sydney University to the World  (2025 ed.). Sydney: Western Sydney University. Available from https://doi.org/10.61588/TESB2263

Attribution

Gender Matters: Gender Equity, Equality and Gender Justice by Prof Susanne Gannon is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/