Male and Female Gender in Teaching: Between the Will to Progress and the Wish to Teach Well--A Comparative Study of Portugal and Brazil

This paper introduces the results of a situational analysis that correlates the desire to teach with the wish to progress in the teaching career. This paper is based on reference literature, official data, as well as surveys, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews that we carried out with teachers. This study is based on the research findings on the male teacher figure working in public primary education in Portugal and Brazil. It envisages ascertaining the reasons and consequences of the professional choice to work in an area normally associated with women. Our findings - which are still partial - have highlighted the contingency of gender issues throughout the individual training process of the researched teachers, either arising from the school culture or from the culture underpinning their training. In this sense, the representations show "areas" occupied by both genders socially: men - either by pressure or privilege -- tend to occupy the most prestigious positions in education; women, on the other hand, have assumed the added value of educating better or more widely. However, today still, in our Western societies, men continue to enjoy a dominant position, although the picture is changing in certain areas of knowledge and work. Thus, the challenge of this research was to understand - from a gender perspective - some of the problems related to personal, social and professional training of teaching staff who are currently working in our schools. The objective is to obtain a differentiated narrative for the formation of teachers, including gender issues.