The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education

26Researching Gender and Higher Education

Laura Parson

Higher education, as an institution, continues to be a structure that replicates and reproduces the larger disadvantages seen in society. Men are predominantly represented in higher education leadership (e.g. presidency), and a gender imbalance persists in associate and full faculty positions in the United States (Catalyst 2017). Similarly, Canada, Australia, Europe, India, and Japan all show, to varying degrees, an imbalance in faculty positions, where women are underrepresented, especially at the university level and in tenured positions (Catalyst 2017). Higher education is a gendered institution and a part of a gendered society; gender is present in an institution's policies, distribution of power, practices, images, work ideologies, and processes (Acker 2000, 2012; Britton 2000; Britton and Logan 2008). Accordingly, higher education scholars and practitioners are still making decisions in higher education premised on an institutional structure built when all participants, students, faculty, and management were men (DuPre 2010; Šidlauskienė and Butašova 2013). As a result, though advances have been made, instead of reducing the marginalization of women in society, higher education still reproduces the same disadvantages and may even exacerbate them. In order to make higher education and, therefore, society more empowering and emancipatory for all women, it is necessary to remake the institution into one that empowers, ...