Diversity, gender and widening participation in global higher education: a feminist perspective

Abstract

This article provides an overview of global higher education focusing particularly on issues of diversity and gender. The main evidence is drawn from seven unique projects on Widening Participation in Higher Education funded by the British Government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England and administered through the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The issues are contextualised from a feminist perspective, current global and national policy debates about extending fair access to, and participation within, higher education and the contestation about these debates on global higher education in the twenty‐first century. Whilst there is clear evidence that participation in higher education has increased, especially for women, by contrast with traditional students defined as young, white, male and middle‐class, this participation is neither equal nor fairly distributed. There are systemic and systematic inequalities but, nevertheless, opportunities for critical and feminist pedagogies within the global academy have increased and offer the potential for the future of the twenty‐first‐century global academy.

Keywords:

• feminism
• diversity
• gender
• widening participation
• higher education