Prelims

Introduction

The twenty-first century has witnessed major global changes in economies, higher education, political systems, and social structures. A key transformation is the involvement of groups other than traditional upper and middle class men in universities and other higher education: groups such as women, disadvantaged, poor and working-class men, racialized, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups, those with physical or invisible disabilities and diverse sexualities, as students, faculty or academics, and staff. Globalization is the term most commonly associated with these international transformations, although there are significant differences between countries, particularly those of the global south as compared with the global north (Connell, 2007). The question of whether these various and varied changes lead to greater equities, equalities, or inequalities between groups or social classes is a question that is taxing many social researchers, as well as politicians (Burke, David, & Moreau, 2019; David, 2018; David, Burke, & Moreau, 2019).

The worldwide changes for both students and academics in higher education have been enormous (David, 2016a, p. 50; David & Amey, 2020). In the United Kingdom alone, there are more than 2 million students in higher education, making for a massive increase in participation, such that females are in the ascendance. The worldwide increases have been fivefold, making higher education a major component of global economies. Women account for a majority of students in most countries, and this is part of an increase of around 500% in enrollments over less than 40 years (1970–2009). UNESCO commented that

…the capacity of the world's education systems more than doubled—from 647 million students in 1970 to 1,397 million in 2009 …[and] from 33 to 164 million in higher education.

(UNESCO, 2012, p. 9)

They went on to say that

…female enrollment at the tertiary level has grown almost twice as fast as that of men over the last four decades. The colleges, schools, and universities to which students now go vary greatly, as do the students themselves.

There are, however, major methodological and theoretical issues to be resolved over how to interpret these developments. On the one hand, the statistical approach to assessment or evaluation of changing forms of participation in higher education, now known as metrics, has been increasing and used as a policy tool internationally. On the other hand, this methodological approach has been critiqued by feminists as “misogyny masquerading as metrics” (David, 2016a). All theoretical approaches involve personal and political values, relating to views about the family, gender, political, and social structures of society. Very often, however, the underlying values are occluded or relate to the traditional social and political order. Taking a feminist perspective foregrounds women as integral to the analysis (David, 2018). This could lead to the question of whether it is possible to single out the impact of these various changes on how well girls or women do in relation to access to, involvement, or participation in higher education and subsequent family and employment, including employment in higher education. How important is an intersectional analysis to this: in other words, are issues of social class, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnicity (BAME) and/or race, religion, gender, family, and sexualities interlinked in this analysis? Intersectionality as a methodological approach was first proposed by the Black American feminist legal scholar, Kimberley Crenshaw, over 30 years ago, about various forms of stratification and their intersections and social and cultural effects (Crenshaw, 1989/2017).

Taking a feminist methodological approach to studies in higher education draws on the political project of feminism. This arose out of the civil, social, and human rights movements of the last third of the twentieth century (especially initially in France and the United States) and was closely linked with the growth of student participation in higher education. One aspect of this ongoing feminist project has been to try to transform women's lives toward gender and social equality into the twenty-first century. As I argued:

…this is fundamentally an educational and pedagogical project: to understand how the current gender, sexual and social structures have come about and to develop the knowledge and wisdom to further that understanding and to transform such relations in the direction of what has become known, in the twenty-first century, as gender and social justice. It has been a project increasingly in universities, as higher education has expanded, with changing socio-economic and political systems globally.

(David, 2014, p. 1)

The overarching question about the nature and character of the expansion of global higher education has engaged and troubled scholars for over 75 years, given that, in 1945, there were only 500 universities and in 2019 there were over 10,000 according to UNESCO (Redding, Drew, & Crump, 2019, p. vii). This expansion has been considered the massification of higher education or the creation of massive universities versus universities for the masses (Langa Rosado & David, 2006, pp. 343–365). Rosado and I considered that “the masses” were groups of people, women included, who had previously been excluded from elite forms of higher education, namely the prestigious universities. In our case, we considered universities in Spain and the United Kingdom. There are now, internationally, very large institutions, catering for large swathes of students from a diversity of social class, ethnic and racial backgrounds, and gender or sexualities, but these institutions remain stratified by their elite and privileged status (Langa Rosado & David, 2006). The majority of students in elite and traditional universities come from the middle classes rather than the poorer or working-class backgrounds (Archer, Hutchings, Leathwood, & Ross, 2003), even though there has been an expansion of provision for women students.

There are many explanations for these transformations with agreement about globalization and the technical revolution in information and communication technologies (ICT) (Redding et al., 2019). Whether or not this can also be considered “academic capitalism,” a term coined by the American feminist scholar Sheila Slaughter, with colleagues Larry Leslie and Gary Rhoades, is more contested, calling into question changing political values around corporatization, individualism, marketization, and neoliberalism (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Slaughter and Leslie (1997) illustrated how the expansion of higher education was intertwined with the developments in capitalism and the particular political forms of neoliberalism. The thesis was that the expansion of the university together with economic development was not about increasing equality but about the growth of new markets and new social relations within economic development. In their analysis, this constituted a major shift from the post–World War II emphasis, in the majority of industrial countries or those now known as the global north, on public investment in the expansion of education, including higher education, as a means of developing social equalities and social mobilities. They went on to show how rapidly this transformation was taking place not only in the United States but also internationally. In a subsequent study Slaughter with another colleague Gary Rhoades wrote an extended analysis entitled Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: markets, state and higher education published in 2004 that illustrated quite how advanced the new system of capitalism entwined with higher education had become internationally.

They also argued that equality, fairness, and social justice as political values have been downgraded in the pursuit of more business or corporate approaches to global economies. There is also the question of the impact and influences of the changes on socioeconomic and structural factors including the participation of women and people from disadvantaged groups such as those in poor regions, Black and minority ethnicities (BAME), social class, and other diversities and sexualities. These latter are not a dominant consideration, despite the international policy changes to increase access and participation from disadvantaged groups. The policy changes arguably for increasing equality and social justice have therefore had complex implications despite the exponential growth in overall participation in some form of higher education (David, 2018). It can, in fact, be argued that the expansion of global higher education in the twenty-first century has led to increasing inequalities between countries and regions, social classes, gender and sexualities, and other diversities.

Student Access to and Participation in Higher Education: Issues of Gender Equality

Widening access to and participation in higher education emerged as a major policy concern for the UK New Labour government (1997–2010), as in many other countries mainly of the global north, connected to longer histories over struggles for the right to higher education, to concerns for greater fairness in society, and to try to ensure that higher education is more equitable and inclusive (Burke, 2012). It also wanted a different approach to expanding higher educational opportunities to fit with global economic expansion. Thus, major political contentious debates were set in train about academic excellence versus educational achievement, which had implications for how to implement fair access and widening participation. It also meant that the question of which kinds of student to include was debated: and the criteria for choice.

Widening participation in higher education was not a new policy mantra in the twenty-first century. Indeed, ideas about how to make educational opportunities more equal or equitable for various groups such as those in poverty, economically or socially disadvantaged, or on the basis of being working class, from an ethnic or racial minority, and according to gender, had been a policy theme throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Initially, though, it was a theme applied to reconstructing secondary and compulsory education, rather than access to, or participation in, higher education. Widening access and participation was also shaped by the growing diversification of student groups that have resulted from higher education expansion over the later decades of the twentieth century. Widening participation, often shortened to WP, gained discursive hegemony, and this discourse has gained momentum internationally. However, the discourse is highly contested within and across different national contexts, and there is no one agreed definition. There are also different associated policy discourses, such as equity, social mobility, social inclusion, and social disadvantage.

For example, Reay, Davies, David, and Ball (2001) observed how applicants to higher education from working-class backgrounds often stress the importance of locality and community in their decision-making process and the sense of security, comfort, and familiarity generated through these localized expressions. Ball and Vincent (1998) highlight how students from middle-class backgrounds are often able to draw on both the formal forms of “cold” or official knowledge available as well as “hot” knowledge—the knowledge available through informal social networks. Students from working-class backgrounds usually do not benefit from access to “hot” knowledge about higher education and therefore must rely on official forms of “cold” knowledge, which might be challenging to access and decipher (Burke, 2015, 2017).

In the aftermath of the UK Labour government's specific policy to expand and regulate undergraduate student access to and participation in different types of higher education, through the 2004 Higher Education Act, studies were commissioned (David et al., 2010). These were because of the acrimonious debates surrounding the questions of access to and widening participation in higher education, whereby the aim was to ensure 50% of the relevant age cohort participated in higher education. The UK Government through its Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with its major educational research program—the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP)—committed £2 million funding for the research and I was appointed to direct the studies (David et al., 2010, p. 14). We wrote (David et al., 2010, p. 13):

Over the last forty [1970–2010] years, the overall numbers of undergraduate students participating in some form of higher education has quadrupled from half a million in 1965, to two million in 2005–6 (HEFCE 2005a). As Hayward and colleagues go on to argue: ‘educational participation beyond the compulsory school age has increased in the UK since 1945, with a massive increase in full-time provision between 1985 and 1994’. Moreover, over the years from 1996–7 to 2005–6, in absolute terms, women outnumbered men and are 60 per cent of full-time student population in UK universities with some variations in English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh forms of access and participation.

We elaborated this (David et al., 2010, pp. 7–8):

The UK government, during the first half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, has been eager to develop and extend learning opportunities for both young people and adults, across their life course, to ensure that the education and skills base of the UK economy is internationally competitive…Deploying new ideas about forms of governance and what have been called new managerialism or neo-liberalism has meant that a variety of new and innovative approaches to education and individual or personal learning opportunities have been tried and tested…

Understandings of the meanings of fair access and widening participation were extremely eclectic and not at all concerned with altering existing power relations. There was contestation between meanings of educational achievements and “fair access.” Seven studies were commissioned through the TLRP ranging from statistical to qualitative studies of diverse participants in higher education and including one study of a community where adults did not necessarily participate in higher education. The main aim was how to improve learning by widening participation to higher education. The studies all focused on questions of “transforming institutional practices and on developing appropriate and sustainable pedagogies for social diversity and learning across the life course” (David et al., 2010, p. 180).

The implication for the future which came out of these seven fine-grained and sensitive policy-oriented studies was to “argue for the centrality of educational opportunities across the life course to ensure that they are aligned to men and women's changing socioeconomic and family circumstances” (David et al., 2010, p. 180). An array of inclusive and personal pedagogies was suggested that might engage students of the future in educational courses and new or innovative subjects, going beyond the twentieth century. This also had implications for social mobility and how to change circumstances for underrepresented groups in an entirely new light. We stated (David et al., 2010, p. 201):

Finally a vision for fair access, equity and diversity in participation in the global academy would surely incorporate the uses of critical and connectionist pedagogies, including developing inclusive and yet personal pedagogies to ensure people's lives across the life course were enhanced and improved…If we value inclusion, teachers, practitioners and policy-makers should maintain high expectations of all students as learners, whilst recognising the diversity of their needs, cultures and identities.

This was but one policy-related program of research to consider how to engage and involve different kinds of students from the more traditional 18-year-old white male student in higher education. Only one of the considerations was the question of involving more women students, and that was not a paramount consideration. Together with Burke and Moreau and others, I have considered how the changing context and transformations of higher education have implications for equity, social, and gender justice. Policy reforms driven by intersecting political forces are profoundly reshaping global higher education (Burke et al., 2019; David et al., 2019). Burke, Moreau, and I also considered the international statistical and social evidence to show how white middle class male privilege remains entrenched in complex ways in new forms of higher education. We have written extensively about the impact of such changes on equity in higher education and on women in particular (see for example Burke, 2012; Burke, Crozier, & Misiaszek, 2017; Burke et al., 2019; David, 2014, 2016a, 2016b). This has included attention to gendered and sexual violence (David, 2016b).

We also explored this in relation to ongoing structural inequalities and how patriarchal discourses work with neoliberalism to reproduce continuing, and generate emerging, forms of difference and inequality in and through higher education (David et al., 2019). This takes place in a context in which structural inequalities, such as gender, class, and race, are seen to have been erased and symbolic inequalities, that are associated with women and femininities, are made invisible through discourses that assert a logic of gender neutrality (Stambach & David, 2005). We also discussed how being caring and having caring commitments are dispositions that carry little value in the often seen as gender-neutral institutional spaces of universities. This is shown most clearly through the pursuit of an uncritical notion of excellence and the approaches to pedagogies. Explorations of, for example, how student parents are treated “carelessly” or without care, as are how the majority of academic staff have become precarious workers, while privilege remains for White middle-class men in power (David, 2016a; Moreau & Kerner, 2015).

Women and Gender Equality among Academics and Researchers in Higher Education

The massive expansion and transformation of global higher education has affected both the institutions that provide teaching, learning and research, and who becomes a student (Archer et al., 2003; Shavit, Arum, & Gamoran, 2007). Inevitably, this also affects who becomes an academic, across changing subjects and/or disciplines. Very little commentary has been made of the specific gendered and linked social characteristics of the students, their teachers, and the institutions. However, equality or the obverse, inequality in higher education, is still largely considered in gender-neutral terms. For example, as recently as October 2017, Roger Brown defined inequality in higher education as income inequality, relying on studies by the OECD (2011), to support his arguments and evidence (Brown, 2017). He argued that the huge growth in income inequality in most Western economies over the past 30 years or so was linked to the growth in higher education. He supported this by considering the development of global markets or neoliberalism in higher education and separately the notion of institutional developments and the ways in which higher education institutions had responded to the growth in global markets. Gender was not once mentioned and nor were ethnicity or race, although his book is about the implications for socioeconomic equalities.

Global expansion has led to increasing inequalities, including, but not only, for women (David, 2016a, p. 51). While women have secured a foothold in universities, not only as students but also as academics, they remain belittled and subject to forms of sexual harassment, rather than being treated as equals. This is what some have called the feminization crisis (Morley, 2011). With the expansion of universities, and the growing presence of women at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as among academics, we have also witnessed the rise of feminism, as a form of critique of traditional academic knowledge and activism to transform women's oppression in society. Feminism has taken diverse forms in the various countries of the global north with strong critiques of the differences between white and black feminisms, for instance. Heidi Mirza (2018a, 2018b) recently argued about the contestations between these diverse forms of feminism, drawing on her work over a 20-year period (Mirza, 1997).

There are also contestations about how to typify forms of feminism within higher education. What is often called second wave feminism arose out of the women's liberation movements (WLM) of the 1960s and 1970s (David, 2014, 2016a, 2016b). First wave feminism, by contrast, largely arose in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, focusing upon political, economic, and social changes for women's emancipation. This first wave was largely through the suffrage movements, as Banks (1986) has argued. The various arguments about how feminism has influenced both the sociopolitical and economic changes into the twenty-first century and the forms of academic knowledge developed to underpin these movements are also heavily contested stories (David, 2016a, 2016b). Nevertheless, the thread is one of the two forms of feminism: liberal or socialist.

In 2014, I undertook a study of over 100 feminist activists in the arts, humanities, and social sciences in international academia, to capture the views and values of these intergenerational and emerging feminists (David, 2014). The journeys of these 110 international educators were presented, grouped into three different generational groups, using the methodology developed by the feminist sociologist of education, Olive Banks (Banks, 1986). The three groups were those born between 1935 and 1950; 1950 to 1965; and 1965 to 1980. While these three groups are now senior and not younger generations, they do illustrate both the expansion and impact of higher education in women's lives and their limitations on involvement. All subscribed to the notion of being a feminist activist or educator and discussed how they engaged with feminism within higher education or outside. The older generations were relatively more politically engaged whereas the younger were more theoretically inclined.

In a subsequent study, I focused on just the feminist educators within the study of over 100 international academics: these were over a third (David, 2016b, pp. 89–125). I looked at how these women negotiated higher education, given that it “is typified by a misogynist or sexist approach within higher education management and leadership” (David, 2016b, p. 89). There were international networks of the participants in the study, although they were mainly resident in the United Kingdom at the time but had come from a large range of disparate countries. This makes it clear that there is a diversity of countries of residence, which is not at all continuous with countries of origin. The study was made up of a diversity of women academics, across the generations and ages, and also extremely varied in terms of their social and geographic locations: illustrative of the mobile, transnational academics who are characteristic of the overall academic profession in the twenty-first century (David, 2014, p. 17, 2016b, p. 100; Kim & Brooks, 2013).

Neither particular individuals nor institutions were targeted, but given research interests and predilections, it is not surprising that the study had many participants who saw themselves as feminist activist educators or academics. “Education feminists” was the term coined in the United States for the group who are committed to and publishing in feminist studies of education and gender (Stone, 1994). Over half the women from the first cohort, with three-quarters from the second, and the vast majority of the youngest were identified as part of this group (David, 2016b, p. 101). There remain clear social class differences in origins and approaches to feminism, gender, and education.

The notion of social class used was drawn from the participants' own accounts, in replies to online questions or through interviews, given that they were all social scientists and were involved in using such notions. Family backgrounds were defined not only by parents' social class as being about income or means but also by occupation, with many women having parents who were either schoolteachers or university professors. This turned out to be significantly more usual than expected, especially in relation to “education feminists.”

Indeed, one of the major transformations of higher education over the last 50 years, responsible for the increasing numbers of women as students in higher education, has been the incorporation of teacher education as an undergraduate study, with different patterns of types of teacher education across different countries in separate colleges or linked with other types of professional work (Acker & Wagner, 2019). Many of the participants in my study also had parents, mothers especially, who had participated in teacher education, not then named as higher education, and so were not (technically) “first-in-the-family” or “first generation” to go to university, although they felt it to be so. All evidence was through self-identification.

In a subsequent study, with Pam Alldred and others, funded by the European Union (EU) through its Daphne program attending to violence against women and girls (VAWG), we considered how to challenge gendered violence, bullying, and sexual harassment through higher education. Questions about gender and sexual relations, VAWG, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse are now more overtly in the public eye, globally, nationally, and locally. The question of why these issues are now more in the public eye is not clear, although it may have to do with both feminist activism and the transformations in culture, social media, and communications, contributing to new forms of capitalism and the commercialization of gender and sexuality as new forms of sexualization. Such violence against women and sexual harassment is no longer seen as just a problem for the global south but also the global north. But the roots of such gender-related violence are not adequately tackled and remain side-lined in political discourse.

In A Feminist Manifesto for Education (David, 2016b), I address the ways in which feminists in the academy have developed analyses of gender and education and, separately, gender-related violence. I also considered the above research study with Pam Alldred on how to challenge gender-related violence for children and young people. This education and training project was based in four universities across Europe, namely in Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Improved knowledge and understanding were essential for “youth practitioners” to better identify and challenge sexist, sexualizing, homophobic or controlling language and behavior, and know when and how to refer children and young people to the most appropriate support services.

(David, 2016b, p. 40)

There has been increasing levels of attention to issues of sexual violence in higher education over recent years, as its prevalence has become increasingly visible. There are clearly few political solutions that tackle the roots of this VAWG as forms of abuse of male power or patriarchy and misogyny.

On the contrary, gender mainstreaming as a policy notion became more commonplace in the early twenty-first century, in response to growing economic and social demands for women's involvement in employment and politics. The institutionalization of some feminisms and the mainstreaming of their demands (Walby, 2002) affected changes in political rhetoric. Among other things, they led to greater attention to the use of sexist and homophobic language (Millns & Skeet, 2013) and they were useful when it came to certain gender politics. However, the institutionalization also brought about a cooptation of many feminist claims (Montoya, 2009). This is well illustrated by the mainstreaming of the term “gender.” On the one hand, the use of the concept made it possible to recognize the sociocultural norms and values, pressures and incentives involved in constructing gendered subjects, and binary, heterosexual order. On the other hand, the term is frequently used to dismiss the necessity of feminist analysis. In fact, it is mostly employed in mainstreaming policies that tend not to be sensitive to central feminist issues in regard to power, hierarchies, and difference (Biglia, Olivella-Quintana, & Cagliero, 2015). Furthermore, the frequent use of gender-neutral language in laws produces inattention to gendered power relations (David, 2016b, pp. 65–66).

In recent times, there have been feminist contestations on university campus particularly over sexual harassment among students and training students to challenge sexual violence and between feminists as academics and students. Some of these contestations are very unfortunate and have become public media debates between waves of feminists on campus, showing how feminism per se has been brought into public disrepute (David, 2016a, p. 174). Yet feminist campaigning has successfully exposed sexual assault or harassment, rape culture, or lad culture on campus, although policies remain woefully inadequate, not only for students but also for women and feminist academics (David, 2016a). The old liberal-humanist arguments about how universities are spaces for creative thinking and allow for academic freedom and/or freedom of expression are being eroded in the neoliberal university. Even more importantly, new quasi-legal notions of radicalization are also having an impact on campus cultures and constricting and confining sociocultural debates.

There is an increasingly overt sexualized and laddish culture on campus, particularly, but clearly from above, not only among students. This has been the subject of increasing amounts of feminist research to try to make the campus safe for students and for others, including in developing policies dealing with sexual assaults, harassment, and a rape culture. Issues of campus safety are, however, only just beginning to be part of more inclusive gender policies internationally. British policies remain muted, although there have been some recent institutional responses to developing lessons in sexual consent for incoming undergraduate students. This is in contrast to the policies on rape and sexual assault on campus that the then US President Obama tried to initiate in 2014. Nevertheless, although in the public eye and with official sanction, these remained highly contested questions and few campuses in either the United States or United Kingdom have developed clear and comprehensive guidelines for dealing with these issues either for students or for academics (David, 2016b, pp. 184–185).

A Feminist Critique of Leadership in Higher Education

It seems clear that there is a toxic mix of globalization and changing gender and sexual relations, especially in higher education. Louise Morley (2012, p. 29) argued that part of the problem in higher education was “the cycle of domination of top roles by men in universities.” She continued that it was important to transform that vicious cycle in higher education to make education, and higher education especially, less misogynistic.

Morley has been a particularly strong critic of developments in the neoliberal university. In particular she has argued passionately about the moves toward creating new metrics (a term that is itself a twenty-first century neologism) and the numbers game is a form of misogyny posing as measurement. She also suggests that it is important for feminist academics to consider how to change the rules of the (patriarchal) game (Morley, 2013) so as to have a more gender appropriate future for universities. The contested nature of global changes especially around gender equality in education, including in higher education, means that the ideas have become emasculated rather than feminized by incorporation into neoliberal global universities.

Yet, as Morley (2011) has shown, most countries of the global north have developed policies for gender equity in the public sphere and education; and many countries of the global south also have developed frameworks for gender equity in public life and higher education. Based in Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) at the University of Sussex, she has conducted many innovative studies of global higher education. For example, one study of gender equity looked at examples from the global south, namely two African countries—Ghana and Tanzania—in terms both of widening participation and of how gender is done, undone, and redone in higher education via policies, practices, and the micro-political relays of power.

In another study, Morley (2013) argued trenchantly about how new managerialism and the so-called “leaderist turn in higher education” are subverting and reinforcing the rules of the game in patriarchal ways. She provided

…an international review of feminist knowledge on how gender and power interact with leadership in higher education… to unmask the “rules of the game” that lurk beneath the surface rationality of academic meritocracy.

She further argued (Morley, 2013, pp. 116–131) that:

…curiously, in a culture of measurement and audit in higher education, women's representation in different roles and grades is not always perceived as sufficiently important to measure, monitor or map comparatively…The data that do exist suggest that women disappear in the higher grades…This under-representation reflects not only continued inequalities between men and women, but missed opportunities for women to influence, and contribute to universities of the future.

Blackmore and Sachs (2007), two critical feminist researchers, based in Australia also undertook a major international study of how neoliberal changes were impacting upon forms of leadership and management in different forms of education and higher education. Entitling their study Performing and Reforming Leaders: Gender, educational restructuring and change, they clearly demonstrated that the concept of gender institutionalizes forms of change and does not necessarily lead to reverses in patriarchal power in educational institutions. What they focused on were the ways in which emotions were handled in education and how this linked with collective feminist work. In a subsequent critical piece, Blackmore (2013) developed her feminist perspective on educational leadership, particularly here with respect to universities. Again, she illustrated the diverse notions of leadership in higher education.

Conclusions about Women, Gendered Involvement, and Participation in Higher Education

Drawing on feminist critiques to shed light on complex and diverse inequalities in higher education, I have shown how gendered inequalities continue to intersect with other forms of difference despite decades of higher education policy focused on equity and widening participation. I have discussed and analyzed the emergence of widening participation and equity policies in many countries of both the global north and the global south, often for both social and economic reasons. Yet this is in a context where intersecting forces of globalization, neoliberalism, and marketization have repositioned students as consumers of the market of global higher education, leading to an individualizing focus on student access and participation, without attention to the contextual and structural inequalities that profoundly undermine institutional commitment to equity and widening participation. The individualist discourses have implications for students' experiences of higher education in relation to the different social location and in relation to the gendering of education, work, and family, reinforcing patriarchal assumptions that universities should be “careless” (Lynch, 2010; Moreau, 2016) and privileging the productive over reproductive dimensions of social life (Burke & Jackson, 2007). I have tried to show the power of feminist analyses of questions of equity, excellence, and WP to bring to light the ways that gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized or intersectional inequalities are reproduced and exacerbated rather than eroded through the neoliberal, patriarchal university.

The array of research papers included in this volume edited by Paivandi, Fontanini, and Joshi will contribute greatly to furthering knowledge about the diverse impacts of the varied changes in global higher education have on female students in a range of countries from both the global south and the global north. Given that the countries range across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, there is much nuance about the specificities, recent developments, and impact of the marketization about the presence of girls in higher education. This project includes countries that are not traditionally covered by this higher education research and will reveal fascinating insights into the workings of patriarchy and misogyny in relation to regimes of higher education. It takes as a central emphasis the colonial developments from France and other European countries. It focuses on a French colony in Africa (Cote D'Ivoire), and in Asia, Iran, and two countries of the Indian subcontinent (Bangladesh and India), two countries of Latin America (Brazil and Colombia), both linked to the two countries of the Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain), with the other European countries being Flanders, Greece, and Hungary, and only two other countries of the global north, namely Canada and Japan. The tendency is therefore for a balance toward cultures and ethnicities not central to previous research on gender and higher education. Nevertheless, this is limited to studies of women students, although conducted by researchers in higher education.

Through feminist perspectives, I have shown that neoliberalism, corporatization, and managerialism or academic capitalism work together with patriarchy to perpetuate and generate new forms of inequality and power relations. New managerialism and the so-called leaderist turn in higher education aimed at gender equity are subverting and reinforcing the “rules of the game” in patriarchal ways. Indeed, the effects of neoliberalism and managerialism have been to confine women to relatively junior academic positions and rarely the most senior leadership positions. Furthermore, tenacious feminist campaigning has successfully exposed sexual assault or harassment on campus and cast a light on how policies have not adequately protected female students and academics (David, 2016a).