Conclusion

23^rd April 2018

I like to think of Aotearoa as a fairly tolerant, progressive country. We have embraced equality through legalising gay marriage. That being said why is the general public perspective still negative when it comes to embracing men in early childhood education.

Most people are very accepting and welcoming of men working in the industry but there are still a portion who stereotype and discriminate. I first hand experienced discrimination and I am very lucky to only have encountered this one time in three years throughout multiple centres.  

There is still a lot of work to be done in changing public view and it starts from within the education sector. The education reform, currently up for review, gives the government an amazing opportunity to address the shortage of men working in the sector by making it priority. Increasing salaries and placing priority on equality recruitment would make the job a lot more appealing for men to enter the profession.

The numbers don’t lie, there is substantial evidence from many researchers that the number of male teachers in early childhood is severely lacking. This is disappointing as all tamariki deserve a male and female culture while learning.

Through my investigation I have found that this historical trend of male teachers in ECE is slowly increasing. With a peak of 2.3% of the workforce being men in 2006. This is still a tiny figure and is significantly lower as of today. More public education is needed if we are to break the stereotypes and labelling that comes with having men in early childhood education. We need to shift society’s view to embrace men in teaching young children as a positive and crucial element of the environment. If the stigma can be removed the opportunity of enticing men who would otherwise be discouraged by fear of discrimination and being labelled feminine would be huge. Teaching as a profession needs to stand up and back our men working in early childhood education, hold hands with unions like NZEI who campaign for more males and make a stand. Organisations like TeachNZ and Ministry of Education, at a government level can play a part in removing the thinly veiled discrimination identified by Dr Sarah Farquhar and her colleagues by including more male focused advertising in their recruitment campaigns with the hope of evening out the vast gender imbalance in the sector. If nothing positive is changed, we will not see an improvement in this area!

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