Write an article on “A New Look at Women's Learning” Why Women's Learning?

Women's potentially distinctive characteristics as learners have been a topic of interest to scholars, educators, and women themselves for centuries. Noted Western (male) philosophers, ranging from Plato to Rousseau, questioned whether women could learn at all, or could at least engage in the kind of rational thought typically associated with "higher' learning. Women were described as the gender of "fruitful wombs and barren brains". Even within the last century, women's ability to learn has been questioned, or at least subordinated to their reproductive and affective capacities. A popular obstetrics textbook in the early twentieth century stated that "A woman has a head too small for intellect but just big enough for love". Such views prompted Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a prominent feminist in the late 1800s, to argue "the brain is not an organ of sex".

Our ideas about women as learners have come a long way, reinforced by women's success in formal education. While at one time women were excluded from higher education, they now constitute more than half of all bachelor's degree recipients. Girls and women tend to earn higher grades than boys and men (Howe and Strauss, 2000). "Women's ways of knowing". Popularly characterized as collaborative and empathetic, have been promoted as more effective and appropriate ways of learning in the workplace and in formal education than the competitive, individualistic modes of knowing traditionally associated with men. Increasingly we have come to acknowledge the previously invisible yet significant informal learning that takes place in the traditionally female activities of motherhood and household management.