Globalization And Women In Academia

In this cross-cultural exploration of the comparative experiences of Asian and Western women in higher education management, leading feminist theorist Carmen Luke constructs a provocative framework that situates her own standpoint and experiences alongside those of Asian women she studied over a three-year period. She conveys some of the complexity of global sweeps and trends in education and feminist discourse as they intersect with local cultural variations but also dovetail into patterns of regional similarities. Western feminist research has established that relatively few women hold senior positions in universities and colleges. Using the now common metaphor of the "glass ceiling," this research has developed a range of social, cultural, and institutional explanations for women's underrepresentation in academic life. International studies show that women in non-Western countries are also underrepresented in higher education. Yet do Western explanations and strategies for change hold for academic women working in non-Western universities? The very diversity among women's experiences calls into question many of the analytic tools, terms, claims, and solutions formulated by Western feminism. This is the first study to show how cultural differences figure into the institutional dynamics of "glass ceilings." It raises important theoretical and practical, strategic, and tactical questions about issues of cultural difference and institutional power.

A cross-cultural exploration of globalization and women in higher education. Compares experiences of Western and Asian women within a framework that raises important questions about cultural difference and institutional power.

Gendered Universities in Globalized Economies combines the best in theoretical analysis and practical research in an insightful survey of the organizational culture of the university in today's globalized world. Currie, Thiele, and Harris's qualitative research--narrating the views of academics, general staff, and managers of American and Australian universities--examines the gendered power structure of university life. Gendered Universities describes the corporatized university from the inside, showing how neoliberal globalization has forced it to become more competitive, aggressive, and entrepreneurial. The authors consider why universities seem to preserve patriarchal cultures despite pervasive equal opportunity legislation and feminist activism on campus. This important study is a must read for education, gender, and policy studies scholars seeking a deeper understanding of globalization and the impact of the "new managerialism" on equity issues.

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.

This book explores the significant role education plays in the promotion of human development and gender equality in India, situating this progression in relation to developed nations, the other BRIC countries and the ongoing attainment of the Millennium Development Goals.

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.

Scientific and engineering research is increasingly global, and international collaboration can be essential to academic success. Yet even as administrators and policymakers extol the benefits of global science, few recognize the diversity of international research collaborations and their participants, or take gendered inequalities into account. Women in Global Science is the first book to consider systematically the challenges and opportunities that the globalization of scientific work brings to U.S. academics, especially for women faculty. Kathrin Zippel looks to the STEM fields as a case study, where gendered cultures and structures in academia have contributed to an underrepresentation of women. While some have approached underrepresentation as a national concern with a national solution, Zippel highlights how gender relations are reconfigured in global academia. For U.S. women in particular, international collaboration offers opportunities to step outside of exclusionary networks at home. International collaboration is not the panacea to gendered inequalities in academia, but, as Zippel argues, international considerations can be key to ending the steady attrition of women in STEM fields and developing a more inclusive academic world.

The significance of Higher Education to national knowledge-based economies has made the sector the object of government policies, international monitoring, and corporatization. This radical global restructuring of higher education is gendered in its processes, practices, and effects. Exploring how the re-organisation of the sector has redefined academic, management, and professional roles and identities, this book considers the different impacts of structural change for men and women working at diverse levels of the academy. Drawing from empirical studies undertaken in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australasia the contributions offer a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including large scale comparative data and case studies. They inform what is a key policy issue in the 21st century – the re-positioning of women in the academy and leadership. Despite a range of institutional equity strategies in which women learnt the ‘rules of the game’, this book shows that structural and cultural barriers – often conceptualised through metaphors such as sticky floors, glass ceilings, chilly climates, or dead-end pipelines – have not disappeared as might be expected as the academy becomes numerically feminized. Each chapter provides an insight into how historical legacies, cultural contexts, geographic locations, modes of regional and institutional governance, and national policies are mediated and vernacularized through practice by localized gender regimes and orders. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.