This paper examines the paradoxical effects of patriarchal gender norms on educational outcomes by asking how adherence to prescriptive masculinities may unintentionally create conditions for gender subversion in schooling. Drawing on two complementary ethnographic sub-studies in Nepal, the research investigates how patriarchal role conformity—particularly men’s alignment with breadwinner and migration-linked masculinities—reconfigures everyday educational decision-making within households.

The central research question guiding this study is: How do prescriptive masculinities unintentionally create spaces to challenge gendered patterns in education?

To address this, the paper explores three interrelated dimensions:

1. Masculine role conformity: How male household members inhabit socially prescribed masculine roles, particularly those tied to provision, migration, and authority.

2. Women’s negotiated agency: How women align with, negotiate, or subtly challenge prescribed feminine roles within patriarchal household structures.

3. Educational subversion: How adherence to patriarchal roles paradoxically enables women’s agency in educational decision-making, contributing to unintended reversals in gendered schooling trends.

Theoretically, the paper is grounded in feminist and masculinity studies, particularly Raewyn Connell’s framework on hegemonic and prescriptive masculinities, alongside feminist political economy and moral economy approaches to household decision-making. These perspectives allow for an analysis of patriarchy not as a fixed or uniformly oppressive system, but as a set of practices that can generate contradictory and unintended outcomes. By conceptualising patriarchy as a dynamic and relational process, the paper theorises how masculine conformity can simultaneously reproduce gender hierarchies and create openings for gendered educational change.

This study adopts a comparative, mixed-methods ethnographic design across two complementary field sites in Nepal: Mahendranagar/Bhimdatta among Freed Kamaiya families (conducted by Mohini Gupta) and Dharan among Gurkha families (conducted by Sanjay Sharma). These two sites were selected to capture variation in caste, class, labour histories, and migration trajectories, allowing for a comparative analysis of how masculinities and patriarchal household structures shape educational decision-making in distinct socio-historical contexts. The primary empirical material consists of a structured household survey of 100 households across the two sites, designed to capture demographic characteristics, educational participation, gendered division of labour, migration histories, and household decision-making practices related to schooling. The survey provides a systematic basis for identifying patterns in gendered educational outcomes and household role configurations. In addition, the study draws on in-depth qualitative data from approximately 30 households across the two sub-studies. These include semi-structured interviews with male and female household members, as well as extended participant observation. This ethnographic engagement enables close analysis of everyday practices, negotiations, and moral discourses surrounding masculinity, femininity, education, and provision. Participant observation is used to document how gender roles are enacted and contested in daily life, and how educational decisions are embedded within broader household economies and kinship relations. The analytical strategy is comparative and interpretive. Data from the two sites are analysed both within and across cases to identify shared patterns and site-specific dynamics. This approach allows the study to theorise how prescriptive masculinities operate differently across historical labour regimes (bonded labour versus military and transnational migration) while producing comparable paradoxical effects on women’s educational agency. Ethical protocols were followed in both sites, including informed consent, anonymisation, and sensitivity to the vulnerabilities of formerly bonded labour communities and military families. The collaborative nature of the research also enables reflexive comparison and cross-validation of findings across researchers and sites.

This paper shows that patriarchal household structures do not operate only as mechanisms of constraint but can also generate unintended spaces of subversion. Across both field sites, prescriptive masculinities—organised around male provision, sociality, and mobility—paradoxically create conditions that enable greater educational participation and agency for women and girls. Rather than simply reproducing gender inequality, these dynamics produce a patriarchal paradox in which adherence to gendered roles leads to outcomes that partially destabilise gendered educational hierarchies. In both Gurkha and Freed Kamaiya households, fathers are characterised by physical or metaphorical absence. Among Gurkha families, men’s labour migration and military service result in physical absence from everyday household life, reducing their educational role largely to financial provision. In Kamaiya households, men’s engagement in precarious labour and social drinking produces a metaphorical absence, marked by limited awareness of and participation in children’s schooling. In both cases, masculine identities centred on provision distance men from the everyday labour of education. This distancing shifts educational responsibility onto mothers. Across both sites, mothers emerge as the primary managers and advocates of children’s education, with schooling becoming socially constructed as part of women’s domestic and moral labour. While this reinforces gendered responsibility, it also expands women’s authority in educational decision-making. Sons are more likely to disengage from schooling, shaped by substance use, early entry into wage labour, and military-oriented masculine aspirations. Daughters, in contrast, often experience greater opportunities to remain in education. With fewer immediate labour expectations, and with mothers’ active support, girls are encouraged to pursue continued schooling. Overall, the findings theorise a form of paradoxical patriarchy, in which prescriptive masculinities unintentionally enable gender subversion within the educational ecosystem. Women’s educational agency thus emerges through, rather than outside of, patriarchal structures, complicating linear assumptions about patriarchy and empowerment.

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