Gendering and Diversifying the Research Pipeline: A Quantitative Feminist Geographical Approach to Gender in Higher Education

Abstract

Women and gender minorities are underrepresented in positions of leadership and seniority in academia. Research on gender in higher education (HE) has varied in scale and methodological approach from large-scale global surveys to small-scale projects with interviews and focus groups, with a noticeable gap in the attention given to early career researchers and doctoral students, and the ways in which their experiences can vary significantly from discipline to discipline, institution to institution, and “department-like unit” to “department-like unit.” Drawing on gender theory to link gender to power and gendered organizations, we connect this theoretical perspective to research on gender in HE. This article proposes a new agenda to develop our understanding of gender in HE by drawing together quantitative and feminist geography to focus on the issue at different “palatial” scales within HE. We propose expanding the definition of gender often used in quantitative research and to consider intersectionality, using open source data to provide novel and reproducible insights into the dynamics of gender in HE, and using quantitative geography methods to develop a multiscalar understanding of these dynamics.