Critical Approaches to Gender in Higher Education

Abstract

Throughout most of its history, higher education has been the exclusive domain of men. Women and other historically underrepresented groups, such as persons with disabilities, racialized people, and gender and sexual minorities, have made inroads into academia only in the last century. Still, higher education structures—built around affluent, able-bodied, heterosexual cisgender men—continue to create barriers for participants who do not fall within those narrow identity dimensions. Even though women and gender-diverse individuals have made immense progress in carving out their place in the academy—women constitute the majority of college students in many countries—challenges remain in reaching parity. Women’s concentration in lower faculty and management positions and overrepresentation in fields with limited financial rewards, such as arts and humanities—as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields continue to be chilly to women—is quite troubling. Trans individuals and people with nonbinary gender identities also face massive obstacles to participation and advancement in academia. Obstacles to participation are further compounded for people with intersectional marginalized identities. Top leadership at universities remains dominated by mostly cisgender male, white, and affluent individuals, while inclusion of the full spectrum of gender identities in data collection has only begun recently and remains scarce and uneven across institutions. The sole focus on cisgender women when considering gender in higher education has (rightly) become obsolete. However, since cisgender women outnumber men in most areas of higher education, arguments are made that systemic barriers for women are no longer an issue in higher education. A majority of contemporary feminist scholars push back on this argument while continuing to expand the notion of gender itself to be more inclusive and paying particular attention to intersectionalities of gender identities. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in some Western universities have contributed to making the academy more democratic and inclusive of historically marginalized identities, however a critical examination of gender in higher education indicates that much remains to be done. Since the author received her doctorate in the United States and is employed at a university in Canada, this bibliographic collection is skewed in favor of resources originating from and focusing on gender and higher education in the United States; however, the author has taken care to include influential cross-national works available in the English language. For the purpose of this collection, the term “critical” is firmly grounded in critical race theory and critical feminist perspectives (again with origins in primarily North American scholarship) that posit that higher education structures are inherently racist and gendered, to underscore higher education’s contested relationship with gender and resistance to gender equality. Hence, works included in this bibliography provide a critical examination of the historical and current challenges for an in-depth understanding of the origins and status of gender disparity in higher education.