Gender And The Restructured University

In these nine chapters, fourteen academics from the UK, Australia and New Zealand examine some recently accelerating changes in higher education, and the possible implications for female academics. They analyze the globalization process, the global knowledge economy, the influences of new technologies, new managerial styles and organizational structures and cultures accompanying the new dominant economic theories, and a shift in the focus of universities from traditional concerns of liberal education to "national wealth creation". The authors consider the effects of this corporate-, competition-dominated orientation on female academics, and the threats which organizational restructuring may pose to gender equity among academics.

Women earn nearly half of all new PhDs in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Why, then, do they occupy a disproportionate number of the junior-level university positions while men occupy 80 percent of the more prestigious jobs? In Academic Careers and the Gender Gap, Maureen Baker draws on candid interviews with male and female scholars, previous research, and her own thirty-eight-year academic career to explain the reasons behind this inequality. She argues that current university priorities and collegial relations often magnify the impact of gendered families and identities and perpetuate the gender gap. Tracing the evolution of university priorities and practices, Baker reveals significant and persistent differences in job security, working hours, rank, salary, job satisfaction, and career length between male and female scholars.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Gender-Sensitive University explores the prevailing forces that pose obstacles to driving a gender-sensitive university, which include the emergence of far-right movements that seek to subvert advances towards gender equality and managerialism that promotes creeping corporatism. This book demonstrates that awareness of gender equality and gender sensitivity are essential for pulling contemporary academia back from the brink. New forms of leadership are fundamental to reforming our institutions. The concept of a gender-sensitive university requires re-envisioning academia to meet these challenges, as does a different engagement of men and a shift towards fluidity in how gender is formulated and performed. Academia can only be truly gender sensitive if, learning from the past, it can avoid repeating the same mistakes and addressing existing and new biases. The book chapters analyse these challenges and advocate the possibilities to ‘fix it forward’ in all areas. Representing ten EU countries and multiple disciplines, contributors to this volume highlight the evidence of persistent gender inequalities in academia, while advocating a blueprint for addressing them. The book will be of interest to a global readership of students, academics, researchers, practitioners, academic and political leaders and policymakers who share an interest in what it takes to establish gender-sensitive universities. This book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Winner of the 2007 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association Performing and Reforming Leaders critically analyzes how women negotiate the dilemmas they face in leadership and managerial roles in Australian schools, universities, and continuing education. To meet the economic needs of the post-welfare nation state of the past decade, Australian education systems were restructured, and this restructuring coincided with many female teachers and academics moving into middle management as change agents. The authors examine how new managerialism and markets in education transformed how academics and teachers did their work, and in turn changed the nature of educational leadership in ways that were dissonant with the leadership practices and values women brought to the job. While largely focused on Australia, Performing and Reforming Leaders strongly resonates with the experiences of leaders in the United States and other nations that have undergone similar educational reforms in recent decades.

Feminism, Gender and Universities demonstrates the positive and robust impacts that feminism has had on higher education, through the eyes and in the words of the participants in changing political and social processes. Drawing on the ’collective biography’ of leading feminist scholars from around the world and current evidence relating to gender equality in education, this book employs methods including biographies, life histories, and narratives to show how the feminist project to transform women’s lives in the direction of gender and social equality became an educational and pedagogical one. Through careful attention to the ways in which feminism has transformed feminist academic women’s lives, the author explores the importance of education in changing socio-political contexts, raising questions about further changes that are necessary. Delving into the deeper and more ’hidden’ echelons of education, the book examines the contested nature of current managerial or business approaches to university and education, revealing these to be incompatible with feminist thought. A plea for more careful attention to education and the ways in which the processes of knowledge-making influence (and are influenced by) gender and sexual relations, Feminism, Gender and Universities will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gender, pedagogy and modern academic life.

The first cross-cultural analysis of the differences in career trajectories and experiences between a senior group of women academics and a younger group who are at early and mid-career stages. Major themes in the autobiographical stories of these women were national context; organisational context; family, class and location; and agency.

This book sets out to examine the changing role of women in higher education with an emphasis on academic and leadership issues. The scope of the book is international, with a wide range of contributors, whose expertise spans sociology, social science, economics, politics, public policy and linguistic studies, all of whom have a major interest in global education. The volume examines the ways in which the leadership role and academic roles of women in higher education are changing in the twenty first century, offering an up-to-date policy discussion of this area. It is in some sense a sequel to the earlier volume by the same Editor, Women as Leaders and Managers in Higher Education, but with very different emphases. The pressures now are to respond to the demands of the technological age and to those of the global economy. Today there are more highly qualified and experienced female academics, and more expectation of their gaining the highest posts. Challenges still remain, particularly in terms of the top posts, and in equal pay. The discussion of global policy issues affecting the role of women in higher education is combined with country case studies, several of which are comparative. Together they examine and unpack the particular situations of women in a wide range of higher education systems, from Brazil to the US to Europe to Africa and the Far East, noting the shift towards more flexibility, more personal choice and a greater acceptance by society of their abilities. This volume is a useful and influential addition to published work in this area, and is aimed at the intelligent general reader as well as the scholar interested in this topic.