Gendered Inequalities in Higher Education
By Barbara Read
Barbara Read’s research focuses on gendered inequalities in higher education and the ways gender intersects with other aspects of identity/positioning such as social class, age, and ‘race’. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, she focuses in particular on student experience of the social world of the university, on academic cultures and practices, and the changing nature of academic work and knowledge production.
She recently led an ESRC-funded network ‘Examining Gender in Higher Education: STEM and beyond’, a partnership of Glasgow academics (including Prof Michele Schweisfurth) with academics in Rwanda, The Gambia, Uganda and Kenya, and the pan-African NGO Forum of African Women Educationalists (FAWE). This network provided a platform for collaboration and knowledge exchange on a range of gendered issues affecting both student and staff experience in HE in sub-Saharan Africa and the UK. One particular strand of interest was the particular experience of women studying STEM subjects in the network’s countries of focus – all countries where women are greatly under-represented in STEM fields. Partly based on collaborations developed in this network, Barbara is currently leading an ESRC-funded project entitled Gendered Journeys: the trajectories of STEM students and graduates through higher education and into employment in India and Rwanda.