This presentation draws on findings from the Gender Matters research project, which investigates how gender is understood, experienced, and represented in Australian secondary schools. In contrast to earlier policy eras where gender equity had been a focus for national educational policy, current policy is fragmented, devolved and reactive, ranging from overt resistance on some issues to disinterest and neglect in others. It intersects with international research and global trends:  rising conservative backlash to gender equity, increasing homophobia and transphobia, and the mobilisation of state policy to repress social progress and focus interventions on schools. Our research identified compelling countermovements within schools where young people and their teachers insisted on expansive notions of gender justice and described reconfigurations of gender that move beyond conventional gender binaries.

Our study took place in two jurisdictions with markedly different policy contexts. In NSW, an agenda hostile to gender diversity dominated the political arena through the research period, impacting school practices and policies, including their willingness to participate in research; and in the progressive jurisdiction of the ACT, gender inclusion was prioritised in policy and practice and research was welcomed.  

Through focus groups, interviews, and arts-based responses, the research revealed significant divides on gender justice, with young people demonstrating robust and wide-ranging commitments to gender justice. The spectrum of responses from teachers spanned those expressing ambivalence about contemporary gender perspectives through to teachers and school leaders working in partnership with students to create inclusive spaces and address systemic gender inequities. 

The analysis is informed by feminist poststructuralist, queer, and new materialist perspectives. From feminist poststructuralism, our research explores how gender is produced through discourse, institutional practices, and regimes of truth. Queer theory interrogates how cisnormative and heterosexist assumptions are maintained through everyday school norms, as well as how young people exceed, resist, or rework those norms. New materialist perspectives allow attention to the material and affective dimensions of schooling—how bodies, spaces, objects, and atmospheres shape what becomes possible (or precarious) in the enactment of inclusion. Across these frameworks, gender justice is approached as a practical and ethical horizon concerned with the conditions under which young people can live, learn, and belong, and where teachers support them.

Our findings indicate an urgent need for sustained and coherent commitments to gender justice in schools. 

While the research is situated in Australia, it resonates globally as neofascist gender normativities threaten to reach across borders and extend into our institutions. 

Our research argues that education systems must address gender equity, resist cultural backlash, and foster inclusive, democratic school environments where all young people can thrive and be themselves.

The research was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme. 

Our qualitative research undertaken across three years of data collection incorporated focus groups with recent school leavers who were current university students, focus groups with young people in the final two years of secondary school, interviews with teachers, principals and policymakers, and an arts-based component where young people created digital and filmic responses. Our research engaged over 100 participants, comprising recent school leavers in NSW (n=49), current students (n=31), teachers, and school leaders (n=21) in ACT senior colleges; and 4 current students from a NSW independent single sex school.

Our findings have implications for international debates about gender, schooling, and democratic education under conditions of policy volatility. Young people in our research articulated robust, wide-ranging commitments to gender justice, with nuanced understandings of gender diversity, recognition, safety, and belonging. Our participants framed gender justice as central to everyday school life and to the ethical obligations of schooling. This finding indicates young people’s capacities to act as knowledgeable partners in progressing inclusive practices in schools and highlights the limits of approaches that treat students as passive recipients of policy. Teachers in the research expressed a broad spectrum of professional orientations towards gender diversity. Although some teachers expressed ambivalence, others—particularly where inclusion was institutionally supported—worked in active partnership with students to build more inclusive school cultures and to address systemic gender inequities. Teachers’ capacities to act for gender justice is shaped by institutional conditions, resourcing, and the presence or absence of coherent system-level commitments. The research also identifies the persistence of misogynistic, cisnormative, and heterosexist assumptions that continue to organise what counts as normal, safe, or appropriate. Even where inclusion is formally endorsed, these assumptions can be reproduced through everyday routines, spatial arrangements, disciplinary practices, and curricular silences. The paper concludes that sustainable gender justice in schooling requires coherent, long-term system responsibility—including clear policy obligations, resourcing, professional learning, and protective institutional infrastructures—rather than devolving responsibility to individual schools or relying on local leadership. Internationally, the findings contribute an analytic vocabulary for comparing how hostile versus enabling policy climates shape the governability of gender in schools and the uneven conditions under which young people and educators pursue gender justice.

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