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This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys' private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these accounts, as there are also female teachers in the study who appear to successfully circumnavigate these issues. However, this apparent wherewithal of some female teachers speaks to the internalisations of gender oppression as much as it does to the teachers' agency. This paper illuminates these gender oppressions, which are made possible because they remain hidden and unchallenged. The findings of this study raise thorny issues for school-based leadership, but also for educational policy-makers, because gender oppression is seemingly inextricable from the social practices that elite private boys' schools both advocate and rely on for positional advantage in schooling markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost 20 years ago the Australian government released Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997). It was adopted by all states but almost immediately disappeared from sight after a conservative change of government. This was followed by the dismantling of gender equity units in each state, and a turn to boys' education that eclipsed the more complex strategies and theoretical underpinnings of the Framework. This paper takes up the Gender Equity Framework (1997) as a case of policy emergence, mutation and dissipation. In particular, it attends to feminist temporality, and its affective force, to begin to trouble conventional accounts of these policy shifts. Close readings of sections of the policy document and of interviews with policy actors working at that time are analysed through the notion of kairos – timeliness, or political actions that open opportunities, breaks and ruptures – in order to provide new insights into the policy moment of gender equity in Australian schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]