The Politics of Gender-Essentialist Reproduction Knowledge: Trajectories of Sex Education Curricula in German-Speaking Countries from 1970 to 2020

Sex education curricula are institutionalised bodies of knowledge containing state-selected information on reproduction and sexuality. Given the drastic changes in gender roles and reproductive life courses throughout the past decades, sex education curricula are valuable documents for identifying notions of gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Thereby, they also enable exploring how policymakers have responded to these changes by adapting curricula over time. I argue that the content of sex education curricula should be viewed through the lens of gender-essentialism. Against this background, the paper examines, first, the development of reproduction knowledge over time, and seconds, examines the role of different political parties. To answer these questions, I introduce a novel dataset containing sex education curricula in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The dataset spans from 1970 until 2020, covering times marked by significant changes in the dynamics of gender and reproduction. I apply computational text analysis methods to describe changes reproduction knowledge provided in the curricula over time and across countries and regions. The paper builds on party politics literature. Previous research on sex education is largely inconclusive as to the dynamics of change, especially when it comes to the influence of different political parties, and the unit of analysis in sex education research is moreover often vaguely defined, making the generalizability of the findings unclear. Therefore, I base my expectations on previous findings in related fields. I argue and provide preliminary evidence suggesting that, more left-leaning parties’ strength increase the likelihood of introducing more gender-essentialist reproduction knowledge, whereas Christian-democratic and right-wing parties support more gender-essentialist sex education curricula. Overall, the paper contributes novel empirical insights based on a new database on sex education curricula, along with important findings on the associations between partisan politics and curricula content. Thereby, it adds to the literature on the way politics distinctly shape educational content. The also underlines the value of the “curriculum as policy”, especially given their current underutilisation in research. Lastly, the paper enhances our understanding of how changing perceptions of reproduction are inscribed in curricula through the provision of more or less gender-essentialist reproduction knowledge in schools.