In the discourse of seeing gender equality as a major achievement, modernity provides a strong normative background for ignoring and delegitimizing inequalities in modern societies. Currently a simultaneity of change and consolidation of existing inequalities in gender relations are assumed. Angelika Wetterer has tried to explain this phenomenon by describing it as a paradoxical situation. She has observed a big gap between how people act in regard to gender roles and equality in everyday life and what people really think and say about it. In a common sense, people think that gender equality, equal rights and equal partnerships are already a social norm although they do not live up to them. Wetterer (2003) refers to this as a "rhetorical modernisation“ (cf. 2003). There is a discrepancy between a rhetoric of gender equality, that produces equality between women and men, and social practice in which  inequality between gender groups in action and in the action-guiding knowledge remains constant (see Rendtorff 2005; Friebertshäuser 2012).

In contrast to other disciplines, debates about gender issues do have a long tradition in the educational modernity, even if not always thematised as such (cf. Klinger & Findenig 2014). Educational thinking and acting have a special responsibility for the continuation of hierarchical (gender) differences: Families and educational institutions are intermediaries, and so they are decisively involved in the maintenance and / or modification of gender images (cf. Rendtorff 2005). Therefore, we have chosen to focus on the question how the transfer of gender-sensitive and -reflecting education can succeed in educational practice in early childhood.

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