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This paper analyses the pedagogical pathways of a group of first-generation Iranian migrant doctors in the UK. It explores the complex system of class production and growing up as a classed subject in Iran, a process that ties young women’s educational aspirations to female independence on the one hand and to the modern feminine, heterosexual identity that sees women as part of the patriarchal family system on the other. By using Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and habitus [Bourdieu 1984.Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul] and Foucault’s theory of surveillance [Foucault 1984. “The Means of Correct Training.” InThe Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin Books, pp. 188-205], this paper analyses how migrant women’s trajectories of becoming highly educated are translated into their roles as mothers. Three major aspects of pedagogical trajectories are identified in the formation of classed selves: the first is the generational surveillance within families, particularly of girls by their mothers; the second is the normalisation of pathways and the importance of destined pathways that separate certain families, practices and choices in superior positions; the third is the moralising of educational choices, which distance being a doctor from classed consciousness, giving rise to an altruistic self as opposed to a selfish one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to understand the complexity of women outside ‘the centre’ of scholarship by exploring women’s silences in an Iranian University. Building on a framework of external and internal silencing and positioning theory, we analyse in-depth interviews with 15 women and five men from an Iranian University. Using inductive and deductive approaches to data analysis, we find that women’s silences are influenced by their positioning due to constraining forces stemming from the political and societal environment as well as their own perceptions of self. We find prevalent storylines rooted in the broader patriarchal Muslim society, sexist cultural norms and unjust laws in Iran that reify women’s oppressed position, exclusion, and silence within the academic workplace. Manifesting through socialization processes and stereotypical perceptions of gender roles, these prevalent storylines silence academic women and position them to be silent. We identify emerging emancipatory storylines that foster women’s positioning from being silenced to being heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the first five years of the Changing University Cultures (CHUCL) collective, which conducted equality and diversity projects in four English universities between 2015 and 2020. We explore how CHUCL has been used in the service of institutional polishing (Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 143) and airbrushing (Phipps, A. 2020b. "Reckoning Up: Sexual Harassment and Violence in the Neoliberal University." Gender & Education 32 (2), 230–233), how our reports have become non-performatives (Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 90), and how our findings have been weaponised in the service of institutional interests. We are two of three white middle-class women who constitute the CHUCL collective; we situate this retrospective within critical reflections on our positionality and an abolitionist theorisation of the institution. We conclude that we have often been the master's tools, and while we join the work of imagining alternatives, we must build capacity for survival within the master's house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of Equal Opportunity legislation, gender inequality persists in Australian universities. This is largely due to the shaping of universities by new market principles, discourses of individualisation that render the asymmetry of gender relations invisible, and privileging masculine epistemologies. Concurrently, industrial relations have been decentralised, and individual universities negotiate staff pay and working conditions through local Enterprise Bargaining (EB). Whilst EB mitigates the development of a national gender-equity framework for universities, trade unions operating through inequality regimes rarely prioritised gender equity even when they did lead national negotiations. Therefore, within a context of complex inequalities in higher education and trade unions, this paper explores how feminist pedagogies can facilitate equality bargaining and gender equality in academia. It also suggests that equality bargaining is especially important during (current) times of austerity when the removal of gender-equality support structures within trade unions generally occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we offer a critique of neoliberal power from the perspective of the gendered, sexualised, raced and classed politics of motherhood in English universities. By using dialogical auto-ethnographic methods to examine our own past experiences as full-time employed mother-academics, we demonstrate how feminist academic praxis can not only help make the gendered workings of neoliberal power more visible, but also enable us to nurture and sustain alternative ways of being and working in, against and outside the university. Far from desiring greater inclusion into a system which enshrines repressive logics of productivity and reproduces gendered subjectivities, inequalities, silences and exclusions, we aim to refuse and transgress it by bringing feminist critiques of knowledge, labour and neoliberalism to bear on how we understand our own experiences of motherhood in the academic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholarship has considered how pedagogical identities and emotions are implicated in the gender politics of belonging and othering in higher education. This paper examines how gendered and embodied pedagogy is mobilised in Greek medical schools to construct notions of the ideal academic and assert women’s position women in Academic Medicine. I employ thematic analysis to illustrate that formations of pedagogy and academic professionalism are bound up with emotions and embodied practices of relating, connecting, creating learning communities and promoting virtuous academic citizenship. Women’s gendered accounts of pedagogy and their boundary practices of identification demonstrate agency, intentionality and operate as highly political actions of legitimacy and resistance within the patriarchal realm of Greek higher education. I argue that gendered discourses of pedagogy in Greek medical schools become resources for resisting neo-liberal notions of academic work, individualism and women’s exclusion in the highly prestigious discipline of academic medicine in Greece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programmes for sexual violence prevention have focussed historically on university, school or college students rather than staff working at these institutions. The Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence project (USVreact), co-funded by the European Commission, worked across universities in Europe to address this gap in the provision and knowledge of programmes aimed at staff. Each institutional partner in the project designed a programme to enable staff to respond appropriately to disclosures of sexual violence. This paper focuses on one UK university to explore the use of and reception to education principles and feminist pedagogy with staff from across the institution. These diverse pedagogical approaches were significant to the design of the university's innovative programme. The findings demonstrate the importance of a process of sexual violence pedagogy, as opposed to training, and highlight its positive implications for the whole university community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines indirect discrimination in Australian universities that tends to obstruct and delay women's academic careers. The topic is defined and contextualised via a 1998 speech by the Australian Human Rights Commission's Sex Discrimination Commissioner, juxtaposed with a brief contemporaneous exemplar. The paper discusses the prevalence of women among casual and fixed-term academic workers, and the contrasting low numbers of women in senior academic positions. It is argued that the neo-liberal 'marketisation' of higher education, which still prevails, has fostered a number of indirectly discriminatory practices and conditions that substantially disadvantage women. A selection of studies of the problem are critiqued. It is argued that a broad statistical methodology is inadequate due to its tendency to 'homogenise' the academy and its component individuals, in the process giving scope for unjustified optimism among university policy-makers. A particulate approach is advocated, acknowledging the wide variation between and within universities, and the range of hidden difficulties individual women academics can face. It is concluded that despite apparent reforms over the past decade, the situation of women has improved little in practical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university. Using data from a 'composite ethnography' representing twelve years of research, I argue that institutional inaction on these issues reflects how they are 'reckoned up' in the context of gender and other structures. The impact of disclosure is projected in market terms: this produces institutional airbrushing which protects both the institution and those (usually privileged men) whose welfare is bound up with its success. Staff and students are differentiated by power/value relations, which interact with gender and intersecting categories. Survivors are often left with few alternatives to speaking out in the 'outrage economy' of the corporate media: however, this can support institutional airbrushing and bolster punitive technologies. I propose the method of Grounded Action Inquiry, implemented with attention to Lorde's work on anger, as a parrhesiastic practice of 'speaking in' to the neoliberal institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to the thinking on feminism's past and present entanglement with the university and strives to imagine its future. Through a close reading of the opening passage of Derrida's essay 'Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties', I trace 'a university responsibility' which does not lead to a subject conceived as self-identical. Drawing on the works of Hemmings, Scott and Wiegman, I argue that we must assume responsibility which will make us, feminism and the university tremble. This paper argues that envisioning feminist responsibilities as tremendous will allow us to conceive feminism as non-identical to itself and beyond the prerequisite of the sovereign (feminist) subject. Taking tremendous responsibilities will, as Hemmings proposes, help us create feminist narratives which will be potentially more politically transformative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical thinking is often understood as a set of tangible, transferrable and measurable skills and competencies. Yet, it is also an intensely affective experience that is complex, contingent and contextualised. Using interview, focus group and observation data conducted with 15 first-year undergraduate social science students at a UK research-intensive university, this paper explores how students negotiate the complex knowledge practices that constitute critical thinking, particularly the affects of being and becoming critical. The theoretical tools offered by Karen Barad and Sara Ahmed allow a conceptualisation of critical thinking as a complex phenomenon of socio-material and affective practices. This paper turns to Barad and Ahmed to explore the potential of their clashing theorisations for thinking through the affective territories of critical thinking. It will argue that acknowledging the way(s) critical thinking feels (as well as what it is and what it is for) opens up new imaginaries for feminist scholarship about criticality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the academic identity formation(s) of 10 Canadian female academics whose disciplinary knowledge is in the field of educational administration. We trace the ways in which discourses of gender, institutional power, and other cultural and social influences shaped their sense of themselves as academics in the highly patriarchal domain of the academy as an institution as well as within the discourse(s) of educational administration in faculties of education. In doing so, we discuss the ways in which these women's entry into academia transformed identity possibilities for themselves and others. We conclude that these women share a commitment to rigorous scholarship and to the values of equity and social justice. The way in which they engage with those values in their work and lives has been taken up in the particular institutional and personal circumstances of their academic lives and has been shaped by the effects of normative discourses of gender. The result, individually and cumulatively, has been transformative on the individuals, within the institutions in which they have worked, and on the scholarship of Canadian educational administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a dialogical encounter between northern-inspired theorisations of gender and Vietnam's historical and cultural differentiation identified through the presence of matriarchy in ancient societies and its popularity in folklore and contemporary politics. The article draws on interviews with 12 senior women from 8 universities in Northern and Southern Vietnam. Three main themes are explored: (1) the Vietnamese woman as ‘general of the interior’; (2) the ‘woman behind the throne’; and (3) ‘behind a woman is another woman’. These themes illustrate the distinctiveness of a historically produced Vietnamese gender order as reflected in current university women's experience. By providing insights into the complex dynamics of Vietnamese women's ‘informal power’, as evident in both spheres of home and university, the paper presents a discussion of forms of Vietnamese femininity that contributes to re-theorising Connell's concepts of ‘hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1983, the UK Open University (OU) offered its first women's/gender studies (WGS) course. Although a late entrant to the area, OU WGS courses were influential nationally and internationally for many feminists and WGS teachers and scholars. Not only did OU WGS courses have the largest WGS student cohort of any UK institution with over 8000 students in a 17-year period but also because the study guides and course books were sold commercially and used by many other institutions. The courses were produced and taught by a multidisciplinary team formed by the OU employing feminist scholars on secondment from other institutions to work as members of an interdisciplinary team of academics and media professionals. This paper looks at the challenges posed by the OU WGS courses as well as their legacy within the OU and beyond. It illustrates these with the voices of students reflecting on their experience of the courses up to 30 years later. It also argues that it is important to capture the lessons learned from second-wave WGS because these have something useful to say to third-wave feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports on the second phase of a multi-country study examining cross-cultural perspectives of gender and management in universities. The first phase of this research with eight countries found that the representation of women was consistently low, especially at Rector/Vice Chancellor level. In the second phase interviews were conducted with both male and female senior managers including current and former Rectors/Vice Chancellors. The focus of this paper is on the organisational barriers to women becoming and being managers in Turkish and New Zealand universities. Twenty-four interviews were conducted in Turkey and 26 in New Zealand. Rectors/Vice Chancellors and other senior academic colleagues were found to be crucial in supporting academics into senior management. Barriers discussed include time management and role conflict between work and non-work life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon conceptualisations of the sexualisation of space, this paper interrogates the ways in which heterosexual discourses are produced, enforced, legitimised and maintained as dominant within student accommodation. Analysis is derived from interviews with 17 gay male undergraduates attending a UK institution. I detail the micro-level processes, as framed by dictums of hegemonic heterosexual masculinities, by which participants' male flatmates reinscribed the heterosexual matrix in their living spaces. I then deconstruct how they safeguarded it through their verbal and physical regulation of alternate sexualities. Some participants contributed to the maintenance and validation of this heteronormativity in downplaying, justifying and not challenging flatmates' behaviour which could be coded as anti-gay. I therefore position student accommodation as a key site for the socio-spatial production of the heterosexual matrix and reinscription of heteronormativity, as construed through the workings of assertion, regulation and consent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an appreciation of the need to increase gender sensitivity and awareness among tertiary students in the field of science, engineering and technology (SET), there is a paucity of research that explores how students in this field construct gender. A greater understanding of such constructions can assist in transforming gender relations and creating a more gender-sensitive learning environment for SET students. This paper explores SET students' constructions of gender and the discourses they draw on when constructing female participation in SET. Focus group discussions were conducted with male and female students from an urban South African university. A discourse analysis identified various restrictive discourses that resist female participation in SET and value traditional gender roles for men and women, as well as more marginal voices that support gender equity. The paper concludes with recommendations for interventions aimed at challenging restrictive constructions of gender in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the factors that are at present reconstructing teacher education in Sweden and in other European countries, including professionalization, inherited traditions, feminization and globalization. The authors use as a basis for the paper: documentary analysis and nearly 60 qualitative semi-structured interviews with management and teaching staff from teacher education at one Swedish higher education institution, Umeå University. Five overall themes emerged from the study: gender; teacher education cultures; organizational changes; collaboration; and research. It is argued that women and men in teacher education are positioned differently with regard to change. Women teacher educators identify more with research and accountability imperatives while their male colleagues tend to focus more on classroom knowledge and skills. The paper considers possible explanations and makes tentative extrapolations to other European sites in varying political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study is an analysis of gender and power in British universities. It draws from a lifetime of experience of the difficulties encountered by those women who do reach senior decision-making positions in academic institutions, in the UK and overseas. It spans a period of forty years which begins with women as an unassimilated minority among student populations and moves to an analysis of their opportunities for shared control beneath the glass ceilings of the levels they attain as established academics. A survey of the incumbents of senior management roles in universities reveals few women. Fewer attain honorific positions. Suggesting that the observations made represent an improvement on the past, the paper presents two case studies of the implications of senior administrative work for academic women's professional lives. The first is of a small university weighted in favour of a narrow band of technological disciplines and the second a large mainstream university with many women staff. From here, commenting on external influences in Britain and elsewhere, the paper concludes by suggesting: ways in which women's leadership in academic institutions might be encouraged; the role of the professional bodies in monitoring and promoting this; and the learning required by women themselves to become effective as leaders for change once in position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deputy Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor positions have proliferated in response to the global, corporatised university landscape [Scott, G., S. Bell, H. Coates, and L. Grebennikov. 2010. “Australian Higher Education Leaders in Times of Change: The Role of Pro Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor.”Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 32(4): 401–418]. Senior leadership is the sphere where academic and management identities are negotiated and values around the role of the university are decided. This paper examines the changing and gendered nature of the senior leadership setting and its implications for diversity in and of university leadership. The analysis draws from a three-year empirical study funded by the Australian Research Council on leadership in Australian universities. It focuses on executive leaders in three universities – one which is research-intensive, the second, in a regional site, and the third, university of technology. The article argues that the university landscape and its management systems are being restructured in gendered ways. It utilises the notion of organisational gender subtexts to make explicit how gender works through structural and cultural reform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Similar to other European countries, the introduction of non-academic, especially managerial, criteria in higher education has shaped and altered Austrian universities since over a decade. This paper presents the results of a frame analysis of Austrian higher education debates from 1993 until 2010. It outlines how reforms in higher education were prepared and enhanced by a new policy discourse, with a special focus on the way gender equality is framed in reform debates. Our article describes three core frames: ‘from local to global’, ‘from ivory tower to business’ and ‘from civil servant to excellence’. We cluster these three frames around imaginations of space that are embedded in the normative foundations of academia, and discuss how this links up with arguments for gender equality. We furthermore propose to analytically separate two conceptions of the university: the ‘entrepreneurial’ and the ‘managerial’ university. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is little research on care in higher education, and yet for many of those who teach in higher education institutions, care is an important part of their work. Care in the compulsory education sector has traditionally been linked to the feminine, and this paper considers whether this is also the case in higher education. It investigates how care is conceptualised and gendered in the literature and in narratives of teaching staff from New Zealand universities. It finds that there is much more to care than traditional models offer, and shows how this complexity of care challenges gendered stereotypes. It concludes that a broader understanding of care can help break the link to the feminine and acknowledge the value of care in higher education and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many learners may be successful in mathematics but nevertheless see themselves as existing only on the margins of the practice, or as lacking stability in it - in this sense, they have what can be called a fragile identity. Although this kind of relationship with mathematics is not limited to girls and women, they do appear to express such fragile identities more often or more readily. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from undergraduates in three English universities, this paper presents an analysis of the way in which university mathematics is differentially experienced by men and women, and of the part this may play in women's ongoing narratives of self as mathematicians. It is suggested that some women resist traditional positionings in the mathematics world, drawing on local resources which enable a sense of agency as successful students and a refiguring of their relationships with mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the support networks that are available to British Indian women studying at a 'new' (post-1992) university in the South-East of England, UK. It will examine the support that women draw upon whilst at university and discuss the ways in which these support networks enable women to develop strategies for success. Thirty-two in-depth interviews were carried out with British Indian women who were studying for a Social Sciences or Education Studies degree in one university. All of the interviews were tape-recorded and the data transcribed. The findings suggest that British Indian women are able to use their support networks to enable them to succeed in higher education. The article will draw upon the work of Putnam to argue that within their communities at university, women engage in their support networks from which they develop 'bonding' and 'bridging' social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the portrayal of women university academics in American films from the 1940s. It applies analytical tools from a critical methodology to access the socio-cultural ideas and values attributed to the female professoriate during what is a period of great change for women in American society. This analysis reveals that the values associated with the professors are aligned with the themes of chastity, sanctuary, and sacrifice in ways which portray them as other in the profession and society. Not only does this analysis illustrate the consequences and conditions of being a woman professor during the 1940s, but it also highlights the implications of these values for today's female professoriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which masculinity played a role in the incorporation of an education college into a university in South Africa. I adopt the theoretical stance that masculinity is not a biological phenomenon that is peculiar to males but the socially constructed behaviour of masculine subjects that is contextually driven, and that the masculinity of institutions, and not only the masculinity of individuals, plays a role in shaping the outcomes of a change process. I go on to show: first that the discourse of power and control underpinned much of the behaviour of senior managers; second, the discourse of territoriality shows that the battle for asserting rights over space is linked to the masculine assertion of power. Finally I argue that masculinities survive and gain predominance, at the expense of other potentially beneficial social practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual harassment in the workplace is an overt form of sexism that reinscribes patriarchal power relations within the university. Despite the perception that many people are reporting their harassment in academia thanks to the MeToo movement, we found the problem largely unreported in our sample of faculty and staff at US universities. Little is known about what drives reporting and disclosure behaviors of faculty and staff within institutions of higher education (IHEs). The present study was designed to examine disclosing and reporting sexual harassment in academia, using a sample of (N = 88) faculty and staff from IHEs who experienced some form of unwanted sexual attention. Approximately 40% did not report or disclose to anyone, and among those who did disclose the harassment they overwhelmingly chose people outside the workplace. The most common reasons for not reporting included not interpreting the event as serious enough, concerns of not being taken seriously, and thinking that nothing would be done. Regression analysis showed that experiencing electronic harassment, but not other forms of harassment, predicted reporting and disclosure. This finding reveals the stereotypes behind 'the perfect victim' are alive and well, continuing to limit the ability of victims to come forward with claims of harassment.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As universities face unprecedented pressure to respond to sexual violence, this article critically analyses how they engage with intersectionality in their responses. Based on research in the Canadian province of Ontario, I demonstrate that universities' commitments to intersectionality often fail to translate into practice. This failure results in anti-violence measures that do not address how systems of oppression shape vulnerability and access to support, or how the university is implicated in and constituted through these systems. When commitments to intersectionality are accepted at face value, they enable the university to brand their anti-violence measures as progressive and inclusive without necessarily addressing how sexual violence is produced and sustained through existing institutional power arrangements. As such, rather than celebrating universities for merely referencing intersectionality, I conclude that these commitments must be used to hold them accountable to the transformative work required to eradicate sexual violence on campus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of sport in framing and communicating hegemonic masculinity among male undergraduates within one British university. The data were collected through questionnaires and one-to-one interviews with 24 male students who were asked to consider their relationship with laddish masculinities. The evidence indicates that sport was important in framing hegemonic masculinities within this milieu. While participants recognised the importance of sport in constructing masculinity, they were also critical of sportsmen's 'laddish' practices and attempted to distance themselves from these behaviours. Nevertheless, they remained complicit to the more general attributes of hegemonic masculinity - particularly notions of strength and independence. The article discusses the implications of this finding for how researchers might conceptualise hegemonic masculinity, and offers a suggestion on how they might harness these attributes to challenge the more negative practices associated with manhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discipline of women's and gender studies [WGS] often attracts criticism from the media, the public, and students. Few recent empirical studies focus on the experiences of faculty who teach WGS courses – particularly professors teaching in conservative areas. To address this gap in the literature, I conducted 30 interviews with faculty who teach courses related to women, gender, and/or sexuality at a Southern, public, liberal arts university in the United States. Participants noted the importance and rewards of teaching WGS. However, only half of participants reported integrating WGS content outside of gender-focused courses. This disparity between emphasising the importance of WGS and refraining from teaching gendered content outside of 'special topics' courses is likely due to professors aiming to avoid conflict and maintain credibility in the classroom and feeling sceptical of institutional support. My findings have broader implications that call for institutional change regarding support for professors and WGS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores female faculty members' pregnancy and pregnant embodiment in academia. Based on semi-structured interviews with 32 faculty mothers from 21 academic institutions in the U.S., I examine their experiences of working while pregnant and highlight the ways that the pregnant body disrupts the masculine disembodied ideal academic worker norm. Pregnancy can still be an anomaly in the university classroom where the division between work and family – mind and body – is the norm and where the 'ideal academic worker' model can influence who succeeds or fails. The ideal of the disembodied academic influenced the pregnant women's decisions about when to announce their pregnancy, how they managed their pregnant body, and how colleagues and students responded to their growing physique. The conclusion calls for more research on how the academic workplace responds to the embodied realities brought about by the changing sex composition of university faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In universities, being mobile and international has become ever more important for academics' career prospects. This article explores junior and other insecurely employed researchers' experiences of geographical mobility in relation to their personal life, career, employability and value as scholars. The aim is to discover the gendered strategies researchers use to combine mobility with intimate relations and personal life. Furthermore, what gendered ideas of mobility, employability and career success do researchers themselves construct? These aspects of mobility, particularly focused on gender, are analysed in three cases: Finland, Italy and the United Kingdom. These states are all (currently) members of the European Union and have implemented its internationalisation policies. The data consists of qualitative interviews gathered in 2009 and 2010. We suggest that the value and capital of academic labour are evaluated differently in the three different locations. Additionally, gender, age, academic age and life situation motivate different mobility strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender inequality in education has been well documented in the literature, in light of family and school socialization. We build on this literature and focus from a micro sociological perspective on the emergence of 'critical reflexivity' in the specific case of a group of university scholarship students in Lebanon. Through observations and in-depth interviews, we identify gender differentiated prior dispositions that influence university experiences of those students and their career plans and demonstrate that critical reflexivity involves a process of negotiation between two fields. Family control was associated with success in studies at the expense of the social aspects of university. Gendered norms also reflected on their choices of major. Furthermore, in examining cases of emergence of reflexivity, we find that prior socialization experiences, namely degree of social conservatism, experience of change as well as social heterogeneity, influence the development of 'critical reflexivity' as students encountered a new social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social inequality regarding gender and social class is a topic of long-term interest in social research. However, the intersections between the two variables in the reproduction of inequalities in the field of education require further investigation. The longitudinal research project 'Social Inequality in Higher Education' aims to shed light on these processes in Spain. In this article, we focus on the intersection of social class and gender in the transition from school-to-university, specifically on study choice. We show several gender differences, e.g. a male tendency to avoid displaying insecurity that may hamper their access to support, in particular in the intersection with lower social class. Thanks to our mixed-methods approach, combining focus groups and personal interviews from a longitudinal perspective, we are able to compare these methods regarding the gender and class differences they produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond the statistics, the underlying causes for women's absence as academics and leaders in higher education institutions (HEIs) in sub-Saharan African countries have not been sufficiently understood. Taking Ethiopia as an example, this study offers unique insights into the careers of female academic staff. The study employed exploratory sequential mixed method design using secondary analysis of nationwide data, institutional survey, and a follow-up qualitative in-depth interview with 13 female full-time academic staff purposively selected from three major public HEIs. The findings reveal that relative to men, the likelihood that women academics hold the rank of 'lecturer' decreases by 50% while the probability of assuming assistant professorship or above declines by 72%. Furthermore, it was found that women's entry into, and success in academia is impacted by complex set of factors ranging from hegemonic gender beliefs that trigger the use of double standards disfavoring women to deliberate exclusion during selection, employment, promotion, and appointment in leadership positions. Finally, the implications for policy and human resource management practices of HEIs are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in parents' roles in promoting students' academic success and career aspirations, especially in STEM areas, has grown as educators and world leaders set goals for expanding and diversifying the STEM workforce and extending science literacy across the globe. Responding to a call for research on fathers' roles, and considering the rise in immigrant populations in many regions of the world, the study reported here investigates the experiences of Latino immigrant fathers and their adolescent sons and daughters who participated in Steps to College through science bilingual family workshops. Findings, informed by figured worlds theory, illustrate the ways in which fathers and their children figured identities together that included engaging with science learning in pursuit of college and career pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to investigate the forms, significance and effects of feminist identity development among elite young women in a Chinese university environment. Based on fieldwork conducted over 11 months in a Chinese public university with a predominately male student body, this study explores the gendered experiences of eight female student leaders. It finds that there is a contradiction in the participants' identity construction process. On the one hand, these young Chinese women construct a collective identity which is both distant from an elite identity and conforms to several traditional or dominant discourses. On the other hand, they resort to individual efforts to realise their life aspirations rather than participating in collective feminist movements. Such ways of identity construction and the presence of such a significant contradiction can point to the new space and future direction for young women struggling to achieve gender equality in China. Drawing on psychological and sociological theories in feminist studies, this study suggests that participants are actively involving themselves in global feminisms to realise their individual dreams. The study makes an important contribution to feminist knowledge by providing a non-Western, non-English speaking perspective to feminist identity development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reorganisation of higher education according to the marketplace logic – and framed within the process of Europeanisation and globalisation – has run parallel to a significant rise in the number of women in senior management positions at Spanish universities. This would seem to be a step to more gender equality. However, the analysis of the situation used thus far, based on conventional indicators, may be harbouring a not-so-egalitarian reality. Our approach studies the gender distribution of vice-rectors according to assigned functions in all forty-eight Spanish public universities offering both graduate and postgraduate studies. It does so by creating a typology to exemplify gendered divisions of labour within those positions. The results confirm an uneven gender distribution: women, although mostly in charge of caregiving and housekeeping functions, are underrepresented across the board in areas where strategic power resides and the future of university is decided and where, eventually, gender norms could be changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is abundant scholarship discussing gendered discourse on care in early childhood and compulsory education, little exploration has been made to explore whether care might also be gendered in higher education. This article, based on data from a year-long narrative study, examines the conceptualisation of care and its effects on teaching and learning in the university context with a gender lens. It on the one hand reveals an implicit but persistent feminine ethic of care in the university context, and on the other hand delivers the hope of developing an ethic of care that values and de-genders care in universities with the demonstration of agency in the two sensitive students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how global pressures for competitiveness and gender equality have merged into a discourse of ‘inclusive excellence’ in the twenty-first century and shaped three recent German higher education programmes. After placing these programmes in the larger discourse about gender inequalities, we focus on how they adapt current global concerns about both being ‘the best’ and increasing ‘gender equality’ in locally specific ways, a process called vernacularisation. German equality advocates used ‘meeting international standards’ as leverage, drew on self-governance norms among universities, used formal gender plans as mechanisms to direct change, and set up competition to legitimate intervention. This specific incremental policy path for increasing women's status in German universities also mobilised the national funding agency and local gender equality officers as key actors, and placed particular emphasis on family friendliness as the expression of organisational commitment to gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the results obtained by two consecutive enquiries into the leadership styles and training needs of women and men leading higher education organisations. It compares the findings of the first stage of two studies, based on ad hoc questionnaires responded to by 136 women and 129 men. Results showed only subtle differences between the leadership styles deployed by the two groups. Both groups viewed organisations as social constructions; they preferred characteristics such as responsibility, ability to get on well with people, motivation capacity, communication and empathy, capacity to tackle difficult situations, and ethical issues. Consistent with this both groups identified similar training needs, which included the acquisition of abilities to deal with interpersonal conflicts and the construction of personal criteria to select the best strategy to face every situation. As no significant differences between male and female leaders were found, it is suggested that research into higher education organisations and their management training needs from a gender perspective should focus on the way both men and women managers tackle problems and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with gender, performance and embodiment in drama classes in a Swedish context. It presents a case study of how instructors at an academy of dramatic arts integrate theoretical knowledge on gender into their students’ creative and pedagogical practice, as well as an analysis of why this approach works. Visualisation of how the body is used on a concrete level offers a departure from traditional uses of theory as a way to challenge reality; instead the research describes how theory can be used in concrete didactic bodily movements, thus bringing the body, which is often overlooked in studies of pedagogy, into a discussion on knowledge acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on a study that explores university students' experiences of doing laboratory work in physics, this article outlines a proposed conceptual framework for extending the exploration of the gendered experience of learning. In this framework situated cognition and post-structural gender theory are merged together. By drawing on data that aim at exploring the gendered experience of learning in physics in the laboratory setting, a case is made for the proposed conceptual framework to facilitate an analysis of gender as an active process that relates the dynamics of this process to the emerging physicist identities of the students. In other words, this framework allows for an analysis of the gendered learning experiences in a context such as physics education that goes well beyond the usual 'women-friendly' teaching approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's and gender studies (WGS) classes and programmes have been developed on many university and college campuses around the world. Despite some success in the establishment of WGS in higher education, WGS has been the target of significant criticism. Detractors of WGS have charged that WGS is intellectually frivolous and that WGS teachers focus excessively on students' personal thoughts and experiences, are intolerant of differing opinions, present a narrow political ideology and, in many cases, cause distress to students. In contrast, WGS pedagogists have emphasized the importance of allowing students to express their thoughts and opinions and of developing open‐mindedness and scholarly, critical thinking. Further, they have asserted that WGS courses promote important educational goals, including increased awareness of sexism and other social inequities, more egalitarian attitudes toward women and other traditionally oppressed groups, and active community involvement to promote social equality. This review considers the empirical evidence for these competing opinions of the value and impact of WGS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the findings of survey data designed to explore the perceived impact of research selectivity (in the form of the Research Assessment Exercise [RAE]) on academic work in UK universities and examines their implications for women academics and gendered cultures in the light of recent writing on the position of women in UK academia. If at least part of women's disadvantage in the academic labour market is to be explained by their invisibility in predominantly 'masculinist' institutions, then it is possible that an institutional emphasis on research productivity combined with explicit, independent and standardised monitoring and evaluation of research output might render visible research contributions hitherto overlooked by male-dominated institutional hierarchies. However, the findings would indicate that whilst it might very well be in the short-term interests of some well-placed women (and men) 'to play the RAE game on alien terms and win', in the long term the RAE treadmill is unlikely to create either the institutional space or the cultural will to advantage a broad range of women academics as an occupational group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the experiences of a small, qualitative sample of 12 working-class women attending an Access course in a large, inner-city further education college. The risks and costs involved in making the transition to higher education were evident in the women's narratives, and both material and cultural factors inhibiting their access to higher education are examined. The desire to 'give something back' which motivated all these women's attempts to move into higher education is discussed. The women were either juggling extensive labour market commitments or childcare and domestic responsibilities with studying. In such circumstances, when any sort of social life is sacrificed, what becomes visible is time poverty, and, in particular, a lack of time for 'care of the self'. Six of the women were lone mothers and it is further argued that complexities of marital status intersect with, and compound, the consequences of class. Beck's thesis of individualisation is used as a backdrop to the women's stories in order to highlight the costs of individualisation for the working classes, but also to problematise the discrepancies and disjunctures between projects of the self and the women's experiences of returning to education. The article concludes with an exploration of the consequences of a policy of widening access and participation for working-class mature women and suggests that, while currently all the change and transformation are seen to be the responsibility of the individual applicant, universities, especially those in the pre-1992 sector, need to change if they are to provide positive experiences for non-traditional students like the women in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1995-97, a research team interviewed a cross-section of staff in two Australian public universities about the sacrifices they had to make to pursue their careers. This article discusses the responses of the staff who participated in this study. It uses Coser's concept of the 'greedy institution' to describe the hold which universities have over their staff and details the range of personal and professional sacrifices which staff made in order to be part of their university culture. Comparisons are drawn between male and female staff, academic and general staff, and the two universities which participated in this study. It is concluded that the overall impact of current economistic and neoliberal discourses are such as to minimise differences on each of these scores and produce a certain uniformity of response across site, gender and occupational status. The article suggests that this apparent uniformity is the product of a peak masculinist discourse used mainly by those in the more powerful positions in these institutions, which acts to disenfranchise all those who do not operate within its restricted and restrictive boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on a study which measured the impact of gender issues on the university campus. Review of related literature; Research methodology; Situational examples.