Male educators in pre-school education: recognition or anxiety?

Gender diversity matters greatly for the future of the education workforce, yet some parts of the educational system, notably preschool (for children up to the age of 6) and primary school (for 6–11 year-olds) phases, remain almost exclusively “female” professional niches. This is true for state- and privately-run establishments in nearly all parts of the world. Experience shows that even with targeted campaigns and policies, the number of male educators choosing to work with preschool children remains very modest. Russia has one of the lowest rates of male staff in pre-school education. According to the most recent international statistics, in 2018 the number of male preschool educators in Russia was less than one percent, while in Germany, for example, the corresponding figure was 4.5% and in France 8.9%. The countries with a similarly negligent share of male preschool educators were Italy (1.1%) and the Republic of Korea (0.7%). The proportion of male primary school teachers was similarly low in Russia (0.6%), while internationally the picture was mixed: from 35.6% in Japan and 25% in Canada to only 4.5% in Italy1.

For years this dramatic gender imbalance in the educational workforce worldwide was viewed as ‘natural’ and not worthy of research. The situation has begun to change in the last two decades as more researchers internationally, though not yet in Russia, have started examining various aspects of male participation in early childhood education and care

(ECEC)². The Russian academic community has been slow to join the debate, and Russian publications on the topic of males in ECEC are almost non-existent. For example, a search in the largest Russian academic electronic library “ eLIBRARY.RU ” using the keywords “male kindergarten teachers”, “male preschool teachers”, “male workers in ECEC” yielded no suitable results. This is in contrast to the global scientific discourse, where the pool of literature on this topic is constantly growing and branching out into several research areas.