Institutions of higher education are gendered workplaces. The pronunciations of academic neutrality have been quieted, for the most part, by research and scholarship revealing the ways and means by which the structures and practices of higher education have been built on and reproduced through cultural norms that masquerade as natural characteristics of those who work in such institutions. This chapter explores the ways in which institutions are gendered, and how academia is a specific kind of gendered institution. It will also discuss the specific mechanisms of academic structures and infrastructures that embody gender, as well as the aspects of academic gender that appear to be missing in analyses of gendered higher education. Finally, it will explore who benefits (and, of course, who does not) by having higher education gender analyses skewed toward faculty. The chapter closes with an explanation of why the continuing investigations of higher education remains necessary in light of the “new managerialism” (Teelken and Deem 2013) that at least some scholars have concluded is the reigning definition of institutions of higher education.

Institutions as Gendered Organizations

American sociologists Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977) and Dorothy Smith (1979) were among the earliest scholars to name organizations as gendered. Focusing on the people who “run the administrative apparatus of the large corporation” (p. 4), Moss Kanter examined individuals and their work experiences through the lenses of power and capitalism, uncovering mechanisms that created and sustained power imbalances through workers' roles and images, structures and processes, and actions. Smith's work identified discourses on organizations that were “grounded in the working worlds and relations of men” (p. 148). Joan Acker's “theory of gendered organizations,” according to Britton (2000), “systematized more than a decade of insights by researchers in the areas of organizations, occupations, labor markets, and gender” (p. 418), and broke with tradition by arguing that organizations should not be seen as gender‐neutral until “infected” by workers' identities, but rather should be viewed as sites where identities already exist and are reproduced. “The positing of gender‐neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations,” wrote Acker (1990), “is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference” (p. 139).

Patricia Yancey Martin (2003), for example, explores the implications of what she calls a “two‐sided dynamic – gendering practices and practicing gender” (p. 342), demonstrating how men and women socially construct each other at work; her research lays bare the mechanisms by which gender is “talked about, acted on, used, denied, and ignored in [work] settings, and when, why, and how gender is viewed as legitimate or illegitimate as an issue for discussion and action” (p. 343). Martin's work builds on the tradition of “framing” gender as an act, performance, or accomplishment, introduced through the scholarship of West and Zimmerman (1978), Connell (1987), Kondo (1990), and Butler (1993). She underscores the connections between these scholars' gender work and that of Britton and Acker, all of whom explore aspects of gender in organizations. Her analysis of corporate culture endorses Connell's claim that behavior is gendered “only because and when enacted within a gender order (or institution) that gives it meaning as gendered” (p. 344). It also connects to Britton's conception of paid work as “conceived, organized, and practices springs from and is shaped by gendered conceptions” (p. 345). Martin boldly concludes that “radical reforms” will be necessary to disentangle gender from the “allegedly rational‐legal‐technical gender‐free workplace” (p. 345) – including the complete dismantling of corporate structures so that one could start again.

Joanne Martin (2011) is one of many researchers to have questioned and explored the possibilities of restructuring gendered workplaces, asking: “Are there any nations or types of organization, anywhere, where men and women are actually equal?” (p. 213). Finding none, she subsequently explored what a gender‐equal environment would look like, and concluded that gender researchers as a group might consider turning their attention away from documenting inequity and toward investigating novel forms of gender quality in organizations. Ridgeway (2011) suggests that gender inequity exists in organizations (and elsewhere) because of the way that gender frames social relations. Using her framing perspective, she posits that positive change could come from reducing gender status beliefs and reducing the range of contexts culturally tied to gender.

Kahn (2012), on the other hand, argues that organizations are marked by dysfunctional patterns of group and intergroup behavior (e.g. gender inequity), which remain in place because they “serve irrational functions for system members of which they are often unaware” (p. 225). Changing these patterns involves altering structures, changing leaders, and developing integrating mechanisms – though all of these, Kahn concludes, are not sufficient without being accompanied by “parallel efforts to reduce members' needs to use divisions between groups as the context for acting out” (p. 237).

Stainback et al. (2016) examine the organizational gender equity process via leadership change, specifically asking if hiring more female leaders serves to undo gendered organizations. Exploring the question of women's greater equity via Cohen and Huffman's (2007) conceptual framework of women leaders as either “change agents” or “cogs in the machine,” they find that women's representation on corporate boards, as corporate executives, and as workplace managers is associated with less workplace gender segregation. Correll (2017) argues that a “small wins” model of change, wherein researchers work with teams of managers to produce “concrete, implementable actions that produce visible results” (p. 725), can produce important changes in organizational equity.

A small but significant number of researchers correctly argue that much of the study surrounding organizational gender equity flows through the lenses of women's perspectives – in other words, that gender equity is really a woman's issue and therefore needs to be resolved by adjusting the roles, responsibilities, and organizational places of women, without problematizing the ways in which men contribute and are subject to equity issues themselves.

Berdahl et al. (2018) state that “a key reason why the workplace gender revolution has stalled is that work remains the site of masculinity contests among men” (p. 422). Their review of theory and research on masculinity and the connections between masculinity and work leads them to the concept of “masculinity contest cultures” in organizations, which they link to a number of “undesirable organizational maladies” that prevent the gender equity in workplaces so many are seeking (p. 425). Kuchynka et al. (2018) argue that a kind of zero‐sum thinking explains why women's status gains in workplaces have not led to more robust gender equity overall. They find that men, but not women, reduce their support for gender‐fair policies when the gender hierarchy from which they benefit is threatened.

Reid et al. (2018) argue that such masculinity contests are not inevitable; their analysis of three male‐dominated occupations (fire‐fighters, consultants, and business executives) shows that such contests are shaped by the structure and organization of teams within the occupation, the temporal structure of the occupation, and the core tasks of the work (p. 579). Additionally, they find that social class mediates, interrupts, and in some cases exacerbates the salience of such contests, where they exist. Finally, Ely and Kimmel (2018) suggest a proactive stance on organizational gender equity: one route they offer is an “outside‐in” approach, wherein broader culture issues are leveraged within the organization to transform the discourse inside it. They acknowledge, however, that this strategy rests on workers (likely women) initiating and furthering such (likely difficult) discussions. The other course of action they offer is an “inside‐out” strategy, where organizational leaders develop aspirational visions for their company that reorient people (men, they state) away from the masculinity contest and toward a work environment that is aligned with gender‐equitable goals (p. 632).

Higher Education: A Gendered Organization of a Specific Kind

Academic organizations of all kinds are subject to the same forces that affect other workplaces. Higher education – the academy, as it is known at least in Western higher education – maintains as gendered an organizational structure as industry and major not‐for‐profits, for example. Its mechanisms, processes, structures, and actions replicate the inequitable gender regimes across the many facets of its workplace. What makes academia different than other organizations is its wholesale belief that meritocracy supersedes the cultural inequities that are manifest in other kinds of institutions. In other words, because advancement in higher education is built primarily on who can obtain the most grant money, who can publish the most, and who can obtain the most fame through research and scholarship, academic cultures take as gospel that those who obtain these riches are deserving of them.

The widespread acceptance of meritocracy as the explanatory factor behind the gendered realities of higher education allows inequities in the system to be maintained and perpetuated. Further, as all manifestations of schooling rest on the expectations of a populace who believe that teachers should work from a perspective of giving (with fewer financial rewards) and should love what they do because they are “naturally” drawn to students, the academy operates as though it is “above all the worldly concerns” (Meyer 2000), even as those who benefit most from its gendered structure do so with significant power and tangibly higher status.

Researchers and scholars who work on the gendered structures of higher education do so from a number of theoretical perspectives. Eveline (2004) writes about the gendered university as being shaped by a set of assumptions about competence and success, constructed by and for men, which she argues leads to a “vision of masculinity as the normal, universal requirement of university life” (p. 27). She further claims that this vision leads to the assumption that the relational and emotional work of the institution – mostly produced by women – needs no reward or compensation, and that professional and home lives are separate (p. 27).

Grogan (2014) states that there is less recognition in the academic organization of the ways in which masculine cultures cause damage to women and men (p. 15). She calls for new ways of theorizing leadership wherein the identification of local narratives of gendered practices in educational settings can aid such theory development. Klein (2015) demonstrates this in German higher educational settings, where what she calls the “economic” and “heterogeneity” rationales clash, with those who support economic interests generally controlling how the gender equity question is defined – which is to say, purportedly neutralized (p. 154).

American researchers of the gendered state of academic organizations have also emphasized the processes by which observable patterns of gender conformity appear in higher education environments. Meyerson and Tompkins (2007) state that “a hallmark of this theoretical tradition is its emphasis on institutional processes that persist despite their deviation from the logic of efficiency” (p. 305). They cite Meyer and Rowan's (1977) work on the ways in which highly institutionalized organizations – like higher education – adapt to the ceremonial requirements of their environments based on a rationale of legitimacy, thereby creating their own “institutional logics” (pp. 305, 308). The investigation of gender bias as an overall organizational construct thus became more common, and the landmark Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Report on the Status of Women Faculty in the School of Science (1999) was the standard to which other academic organizations were held. This report named the myriad constructs making up an academic career in higher education, measuring the ways in which men's and women's experiences and rewards differed through work practices, structures, and cultural definitions of competence and success (as noted in Bailyn 2003).

Maintaining that academic service is institutional caregiving that is heavily dependent on the un‐ or underpaid labor of women, Massé and Hogan (2010) theorize service as a “major yet frequently overlooked dimension of faculty labor” (p. 11), with the goal of continuing what Adrienne Rich (1979) gave voice to almost 40 years ago – the integration of economics, culture, patriarchy, and gender in analyses of higher education as a workplace (p. 4). Ironically, Bird et al. (2004), as well as Nielsen et al. (2005), demonstrate that the very act of creating and evaluating “status of women” and institutional change reports is usually assigned to women, making the analytic acts doubly gendered.

Valian (2004) argues that these early twenty‐first‐century American studies of gender equity in the academy were actually the start of a new discipline: gender equity. Her call for the study of gender equity in higher education centers on faculty and high‐level administration; she argues that an entirely new framework for assessing gender equity in academia would raise equity throughout the institution as a whole. Monroe et al. (2008) interviewed 80 female faculty at a Research I (high‐research‐activity) university, whose recommendations for building a more gender‐equitable academy included redefining paths to tenure and definitions of success, rewarding service and building community, and offering spousal hiring and daycare (pp. 228–230).

Consideration of the whole academic workplace (as opposed to only tenured or tenure‐track faculty) as a unit of gendered analysis shifted the ways in which many researchers define and measure gender equity in higher education. Massé and Hogan (2010) argue that investigating academic service – “the potentially endless lists of tasks on campus, ranging from writing recommendations, advising students, and mentoring junior colleagues, through serving on committees and organizing events, to serving on institutional committees and task forces and writing reports” (p. 1) – as gendered, audible, and visible labor would be a significant way to improve the lives of all academic laborers. The contributing authors to their volume on gendered service in academic “language and literature workplaces” demystify service, examine strategies for challenging simplistic views of service as “good work,” and theorize about the future of service practices, with the overall goal of creating immediate and long‐term positive change (p. 11).

Valerie Lee, in the last chapter of Massé and Hogan (2010), speaks to what is still often missing in analyses of higher education as gendered workplaces: race, as well as other identities in the institutional politics of labor. Writing about the complications, rewards, and struggles of being Black in an institutional structure built on Whiteness, she wrestles with what academic service looks and feels like as it sits within the other markers of being a successful academic professional (pp. 261–274). Patricia Hill Collins (1986) argued early on in academia's attention to gender inequities that “black women have long occupied marginal positions in academic settings,” holding an “outsider within” status that allows for unique standpoints and more fully developed understandings of and possibilities for gender equity in the academy (pp. S14–S15). Her work highlights the tensions experienced by any group perceived as outsiders as they work within the insiders' space, and suggests that outsider status could be used – at its best – to offer a balance between what are accepted as institutional norms and others' (outsiders') perspectives.

By 1991, Kimberlé Crenshaw reimagined the concept of intersectionality in the context of marginalization and positioning of Black women in critical race theory, offering a framework to analyze the multiple, competing identities within one person, one group, one institution – and between them all (Crenshaw 1991). Applied to academia, multiple researchers and scholars have used intersectional analyses as they explore what being an exemplary scholar and teacher means. Few analyses of higher education workplaces depend on intersectional analysis, leaving each kind of gap – between instructors and tenure‐track faculty or between associate deans and presidents, for example – as an individual piece of the more complicated, connected picture within and outside of academia.

Folbre (2014) suggests that intersectionality “represents the sharpest dividing line between the communitarian tradition of socialist feminism and the individualist tradition of liberal feminism” (p. 6) – in other words, that focusing on an individual woman's equity status in the workplace says nothing about collective women's workplace equity and ignores the realities faced by many women in every kind of organization, including academia. Through economic and class lenses, Folbre writes that organizational pressures have redefined “ideal employee” to mean those who can work the most hours; in academia, that means people (usually men) who have spouses or partners at home who can take care of children and other extra‐work responsibilities.

Gendered Academic Structures Made Visible: What We Mean When We Say Higher Education Is Gendered

Bailyn's (2003) definition of gender equity in the academy resides in three major institutional structures:

1. The legal structures that equate equity with equality: equal pay, equal opportunity, and freedom from sexual harassment.
2. Equal opportunities.
3. Integration of the public sphere of economic work and the private sphere of family, community, and other personal involvements (pp. 139–141).

She maintains that the legal structures of the academy are necessary but not sufficient, given that such structures exist in an imperfect world; in other words, that equality is not equity. Just because women have the legal right to equal pay, for example, does not mean that they will be able to circumvent gendered cultural norms about who can achieve success. Academic success, by definition, was built for and by men.

Bird (2011) argues that in order to overcome systematically gendered barriers in academia like those that Bailyn and others advance, the institution needs to “implement systematic solutions” that teach faculty and administrators how to see and address them” (p. 203) using training programs and other strategies (e.g. Bailyn and Fletcher 2007; Connell 2006). She notes that, like most work organizations, universities divide faculty employees by task, but that they differ from other institutions in other important ways, most notably in that they are “professional bureaucracies with a high degree of decentralization and highly educated and autonomous faculty members” (p. 205). Faculty, she continues, belong to their own departments and disciplinary community structures, furthering the compartmentalization and creating disjunctures between formal university expectations and reward structures and informal (or other disciplinary) expectations and rewards. This lack of alignment means that faculty members are often left to navigate these incongruities on their own, leading to inequitable rewards and successes.

Taken together, the academic structures that Bailyn (2003, 2007), Bird (2004, 2011), and others make visible can be articulated as such: a curriculum that aligns to men's life circumstances; research‐intensive opportunities that more often are available to men; ill‐defined faculty evaluation criteria for teaching, juxtaposed with well‐defined research criteria in performance evaluations; norms for who is supposed to accomplish particular tasks in the institution, according to gender (e.g. who gets coffee, who does academic “caretaking”); greater rewards for publication and scholarship (Roos 2008); segregation of academic disciplines; work–life balance and information network issues; over‐reliance on and rewards for grant monies; student evaluations of teaching; lack of formal training in university teaching; unclear definitions of university service and lack of accounting for said service in evaluations; and overrepresentation of male faculty in online offerings, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Fain 2012).

These are some (though not all) of the invisible gendered structures of academia. Studies of the visibly gendered structures in institutions of higher education can seem obvious by comparison, though recently they have been less frequently mentioned or studied – perhaps because scholars assume that such institutional signs are clear. Nonetheless, the literal structures of the academy also constitute its gendered make up: the names of “great” scholars, artists, and researchers given to buildings and listed in the institutional directory are overwhelmingly those of White men, as are the pictures on the walls, the monuments and statues on campus, the notable alumni, and the ranks of tenured faculty.

There are also structures that exist in the opaquely tangible and visible spaces of gendered higher education – these have components that may seem gender‐neutral, but when applied or viewed in their implementation across campuses, their enaction is identifiably gendered. Collegiate sports, for example, embody one of the greatest examples of this type of gendered institutional structure. College men's football and basketball teams make up 78 percentage of college sports' attention and money, in spite of the passage of Title IX in 1972, which made discrimination on the basis of sex illegal in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance (Zimbalist 2016). Collegiate sports occupy an extraordinarily strong place in the U.S. national consciousness – the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) 2018 television broadcast rights alone garnered a revenue of $857 million (Gough 2018). This outsized attention led, and continues to lead, to outsized salaries for men's teams' coaches and other athletic staff. In 2013, the highest‐paid public employees in 39 U.S. states were athletic coaches (Fischer‐Baum 2013), 27 of whom coached football – for which there is no female team (all but one of the basketball coaches on the list were for men's teams as well).

Likewise, the attention paid to particular parts of schools and colleges belies a supposedly gender‐neutral institutional infrastructure. On measures of institutional attention, average faculty salaries, and amount of revenue contributed to the institution, for example, schools and departments with a high male weighting, such as business, medical (and currently health sciences), and law, score highly, while those that are closer to gender parity, such as English, education, and humanities, languish behind (Massé and Hogan 2010).

Gendered Academic Structures Made Visible: Who We Mean When We Say Higher Education Is Gendered

Missing Persons in Gendered Analyses of Higher Education

While scholars have investigated higher education as a gendered space from many perspectives, service workers are virtually never included in these investigations. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) categorizes staff at U.S. educational institutions according to 15 occupational categories:

research; public service; librarians, curators, and archivists; student and academic affairs personnel; management; business and finance; computer, engineering, and science; community, social service, legal, arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations; healthcare practitioners and technical operations; service occupations; sales and related occupations; office and administrative support occupations; natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations; production, transportation, and material moving occupations, and graduate assistants.

(National Center for Education Statistics 2018, pp. 15–16)

This large pool of workers, without whom postsecondary institutions could not run, are ignored by scholars and researchers in studies of the gendered nature of higher education (Long 1998). They are disproportionately people of color, and they belong to the poor or working class; their jobs are also strongly sex‐segregated. In 1998, Long reported in the magazine Academe on the then state of unionized campus workers at four major U.S. universities – the University of California, Davis, Columbia University, Yale University, and Rowan University – highlighting the conditions in which they negotiated and executed their responsibilities. Twenty years later, Loveday (2016) explored the role of shame in mediating the experience of working‐class staff and students at English institutions of higher education. Using “accent” and “pregnancy” as analytic units for discovering the ways in which shame was embodied in several universities, she looked at how study participants made sense of their classed and gendered identities in this field, and how shame had constrained and affected their actions (p. 1151).

Using Folbre's (2012) framework of institutional “care work,” Cardozo (2017) corroborated the dominance of women and people of color in the ranks of workers in higher education. She noted that though their paid positions did not always involve the nurturing of students, it was women – and women of color in particular – who primarily executed the work of taking care of others (students, colleagues, colleagues' children) at the institution.

Turner and Grauerholz (2017) recently authored one of the few studies that specifically calls out the absence of Black male professionals in higher education, defining “professional” as “faculty, administrative or professional staff” (p. 212). Asking, “Does the United States' postsecondary education system perpetuate the discriminatory ideals and practices of the private sector and the broader society?”, they interviewed Black male administrative and other staff professionals, as well as several faculty members, at a single U.S. research university. By defining a higher education professional as more than just a faculty member, Turner and Grauerholz's findings revealed deep social class and gender disparities (e.g. disparate treatment, tokenism, lack of respect and recognition) in the higher education system they investigated.

Given the large numbers of non‐instructional staff who support the operations of higher education institutions in the United States, in conjunction with the strong gender stereotypes that classify such positions, the opportunities for research regarding how such staff experience their work are vast. By defining investigations of higher education and gender in terms of faculty and high‐ranking administrators and making staff members largely invisible, institutes of higher education maintain the illusion of being a social good, committed to gender equity for those whose education credentials and research productivity make them “deserving” of such efforts (Niemi 2017). Ignoring the prolific gender stereotypes in non‐instructional employee populations also allows students and their families to go on believing that college credentials take graduates away from expected roles and into the kinds of positions in which they they see their professors (Massé and Hogan 2010).

Miriam David's (2015) analysis, “Women and Gender Equality in Higher Education?”, squarely names the continued challenges surrounding what counts as gender equality in higher education: “It is abundantly clear that despite the huge increases in educational opportunities up to postgraduate research where women have been sufficiently able to attain as much if not more than men, that they remain subordinate across all sectors of academic employment” (p. 15). She notes that policy discussion remains focused on students, and particularly on there being more female than male undergraduates in European and U.S. universities. Not only does David identify a lack of concern about women's subordination within higher education staffing across all positions, but she rightly points to a “lack of overall shifts in gender equality in labour markets and political systems” (p. 15). As long as power centers remain within White male populations, it will be easy for researchers, scholars, and policymakers to continue to ignore much of the staff that does the daily work of higher education, thereby continuing to negate major sources of gender inequity within its systems.

The Continued Necessity of Gendered Analyses of Higher Education and the New Managerialism

For several decades now, changes in enrollment have driven the call for changes in the structure and function of higher education. Couched in the language of racial and socioeconomic equity and diversity, such calls are also about who will hold power in the global marketplace. For example, in “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education” (U.S. Department of Education 2006; commonly known in the United States as The Spellings Report), the authors call for increased college accessibility, affordability, accountability, and quality, particularly for minority students, echoing others' public and academic calls for increased participation and quality in higher education. However, nowhere in this report do the authors address the increasingly female population in the sector. The Spellings Report argues that other countries are now graduating more of their citizens to more advanced levels, and that the United States is losing its competitive world advantage: “Our collective prosperity,” it states, “is being threatened.” The Report's lack of attention to gender as an analytic unit is striking, but not surprising, given the common Western belief that the gender problem in higher education has been solved.

Proponents of college innovation throughout the Western world support this line of reasoning, even as they reinvent the infrastructures on which higher education is built. Institutions of higher education need new customers, and customer service, in college as in any other business, means giving people what they think they want. Recent developments in time to completion, year‐round classes, online courses, digital badges, certificates, learning outcomes tied to business standards, and, perhaps most pernicious of all, for‐profit higher education have made headway into the higher education business sector without threatening the gendered power base on which it sits.

Affluent citizens, major foundations, venture capitalists, and educational entrepreneurs are all rethinking mass education as a rich source of business, with the issue of cost reduction being the central point of convergence (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013). With higher education now framed not only as a business, but as tied to business – in the form of higher education–job force training–workplace integration – higher education reform is much more willing and able to create credentials that tie directly to the needs of capitalism.

Arguments of a “female advantage” and a “boy crisis” ultimately circumvent the greatest underlying issue in higher education: schooling does not meet the learning needs of many women or men, even though decades of scholarship on women's and men's college completion offers evidence of its multitude of positive societal implications. “Never mind college degrees,” writes Paul Krugman (2015), “all the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding positions in corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isn't about who has the knowledge – it's about who has the power.” Women's overall enrollment and achievement in higher education notwithstanding, on virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well‐being, and physical safety, women still fare worse than men because they have less power than men to control these aspects of their lives. The causal connection between success in obtaining higher education credentials and social power outside education is not a given.

The ability to translate a degree into a job, or into any rise in social equity, rests on a host of factors beyond the degree itself. Many who have investigated the ways in which women have gained some measure of gender equality through formal education have come to the same uncomfortable conclusion (see, for example, Spencer et al. 2003). Ringrose (2013) argues that post‐feminist presumptions of gender equality obscure continued gender inequities throughout systems of education. With globalization named by many as the driving force for unsettling or reformulating the structure of higher education, it remains imperative that issues of gender equity remain at the fore of inquiry. The demands of new knowledge economies and their impact on gender within the academy are central to the understanding of gender equity work worldwide (Blackmore 2002; Bousquet 2012; David 2015).

Gilborn (2008) discusses how “gap talk in education” works as a way to divide and conquer marginalized groups as they compete for educational resources. By pitting these groups against one another, those with financial power work in the cracks between them, shaping realities while they are distracted by the fight for contested financial resources. Connell (2010) notes that the statistical gaps that researchers have now so clearly identified in the back‐and‐forth over who is doing better and who is doing worse in schooling operate to “reduce our imaginations” about what a relevant gender issue in schools can be. With such reduced and self‐imposed options, we do not have to argue about the ways in which many boys of color are systematically disenfranchised or many girls in various cultural backgrounds are expected to succeed in school and then return home to take care of their families. The logic of individualized competition makes proponents of school reform argue among themselves. It also transforms schools into entrepreneurial actors competing for resources. If we take performance regarding gender out, this competition is less threatening, and more focused – schooling can be surrounded by universal arguments regarding poor and minority populations achieving their dreams.

Similarly, the professoriate can claim to be paying attention to gender and other forms of social equity if higher education development is framed through an “innovative” managerial lens. “New managerialism” – defined here as a system of institutional governance based on replacing input–output control with performance management, key performance indicators, decentralized decision‐making, and equality and diversity (Teelken and Deem 2013) – has driven universities to shift their institutional operations to the use of such factors. Throughout Western countries, institutions of higher education now claim to measure and act on data that result from these kinds of characteristics. And yet, continued research demonstrates that while quality is measured – most of the time on an individualized basis – equality is not (see Deem et al. 2005; Curtis 2011).

Conclusion

The connection between a “new” managerial state, capitalism, and higher education – bundled under the aegis of “innovation” – has likely sealed the trajectory for the wholesale auction of intellectual capital in Western knowledge economies. Institutions of higher education can claim to be attentive to gender, class, and racial equity while perpetuating structures that support fewer full‐time instructional positions, more out‐sourced labor for non‐instructional staff, and higher student debt. As a structure cast in high status for a small number of high‐profile male researchers and a much lower status for everyone who supports them, higher education will remain gendered at its core unless we begin asking different questions. As Bousquet (2012) writes, “A labor market arranged around working for love [as higher education is] – rather than fair compensation – is actually one of the most sexist, racist, and economically discriminatory arrangements possible” (p. 26). Teasing out these inequities remain a central task for those who care about the future of higher education as a possible force for greater social equity.

Complex relational struggles and politics surrounding gender and power have a way of finding a new hiding place in contemporary debates. While there has been a great transformation in women's higher education as students, in Western societies and developing countries alike, women's labor participation has not been equally transformed. As David (2015) states, “The expansion of universities has gone hand‐in‐hand with new systems of ranking and changes to academic capitalism” (p. 25). Winning a game of numbers, as current higher education gender discourse claims, is irrelevant if the structure remains misogynistic (David 2015; Niemi 2017). Critiquing the discourse of managing diversity in the globalized university by questioning how organizational culture impacts all who identify as women may help change the endeavor by reframing it as equity‐minded rather than “feminist.” Seeing higher education as gendered in all its forms remains the daily work of the academy.

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