Higher Education Policy, 2009, 22, (1–2) r 2009 International Association of Universities 0952-8733/09 www.palgrave-journals.com/hep/

Introduction

Celebrations and Challenges: Gender in Higher Education Louise Morley and Miriam David Higher Education Policy (2009) 22, 1–2. doi:10.1057/hep.2008.31

It is the aim of this special issue of Higher Education Policy to celebrate the gains and identify the challenges for gender equity in higher education in the 21st century. These six papers have been selected to consider and deconstruct different aspects of the higher educational habitus through a gender-sensitive lens using feminist methodologies developed from second-wave feminism in the 20th century. They were originally presented at a symposium on the challenges for democracy and fairness in higher education at the annual conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education held in Brighton in December 2007, but they have been substantially modified to take account of the debates about the issues initiated at that symposium. It would be easy to rehearse yet another pessimistic repertoire of challenges for gender equity in the academy, especially given its diluted version from the stronger notions of gender equality as developed in the previous century. Gender and melancholy are often deeply connected (Butler, 2002), with a sense of loss, hurt and grief often underpinning studies of gender and power in higher education. Desire, as well as loss, needs to be considered. Indeed, writing on gender equality or equity means that we have to refer to something that does not yet exist. The tendency therefore is to critique, rather than to engage in futurology. Questions about the visions, missions and desired shape and practices within the 21st century global academy seem to be eclipsed by pressing concerns in the present. There are, however, some possibilities for the future of higher education. A major cause for celebration is the way in which women have become highly visible as students, or consumers of higher education. Globally, there are now more women than men in undergraduate higher education. A challenge that still remains, as Rosemary Deem indicates in this collection, is representation in academic leadership. Kathy Boursicot and Trudie Roberts are both qualified doctors now working in medical education. They have interrogated how the culture of a high status discipline, such as medicine, is still highly gendered even though quantitative representation of women is increasing at undergraduate level in the UK. Gender inequalities appear to have been globalized. Louise Morley and Rosemary Lugg demonstrate how, when poverty is intersected

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with gender in sub-Saharan Africa, participation rates of poor women are extremely low. Miriam David’s critical account of widening participation discourses and recent research also demonstrates how there are multiple and diverse higher educations, with social class or disadvantage still a central indicator for opportunity structures. There has been considerable concern about the under-achievement of working class boys in schools and this is now slowly filtering into higher education, with fears that whole sectors of young men are becoming disaffected and marginalized from higher education opportunities. Penny Burke explores these concerns in her research on masculinities in higher education. Valerie Hey and Carole Leathwood engage with the complexities of emotional labour and the cult of the personal in higher education. They note how there has been an affective turn in higher education policy in the UK, while simultaneously emotions are being suppressed in order to enhance academic productivity. These papers all suggest that there is both recognition and misrecognition of gender in the academy. Inclusion and exclusion both appear to produce dangers and opportunities. Women are simultaneously constructed as winners and losers. They are winners because they are gaining access, as students, in significant numbers, but losers because of their lack of entitlement to leadership and prestigious disciplines. Today, women are participating, in increasing numbers, in higher education, in a range of national locations. Yet, women’s academic identities are often forged in otherness, as strangers in opposition to (privileged) men’s belonging and entitlement. This means that gender in higher education is often encoded in a range of formal and informal signs, practices and networks. The gender debates are full of contradictions. Quantitative targets to let more women into higher education can fail, or be meaningless, while femaleness continues to be socially constructed as second-class citizenship. However, gains have been made, and it is important to keep auditing the successes while creatively envisioning the changes that are still required. We hope that these papers will enable us all to imagine a future of higher education that is creative, challenging and exciting for subsequent generations of women as both academics and students.

Reference Butler, J. (2002) ‘Melancholy Gender-Refused Identification’, in M. Dimen and V. Goldner (eds.) Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture, New York: Other Press, pp. 3–19.

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