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, validates, and supports women and men equally.

Higher education research has traditionally been framed within a masculine paradigm, often with man participants, as seen, for example, in much of the early student development literature (Hesse‐Biber 2014; Patton et al. 2016).¹ Before restructuring higher education, it is critical that scholars and practitioners begin from the position of women faculty, students, and administrators, in order to understand women's experiences in higher education, where and how they are marginalized, where and how they are empowered, and what they experience in programs designed to support them. To remake higher education into a more equitable place for women students, faculty, administrators, and staff, higher education scholars and practitioners need research that explores the experiences of all women in higher education, not just those women traditionally represented in – and often the ones conducting – higher education research. Women in higher education are a diverse group because of intersecting social systems that include, but are not limited to, culture, racial identity, and sexuality. Research is needed that is conducted from the standpoint of women marginalized in the modern higher education framework. Such research is important in order to know how, why, and where to improve the representation and comfort of women in higher education.

Informed by the dearth of research premised on the diverse experiences of women in higher education, and thinking about the transformation of the sector, this chapter focuses on the methods researchers can use to work from the standpoint of women in order first to understand them and then to remake higher education as more equitable for all students. Feminist research “offer(s) different interpretations of social interactions and, potentially, provide(s) possibilities for change both in higher education as well as in other settings” (Ropers‐Huilman and Winters 2011, p. 668). The choice of methods is critical in an exploration of gender and higher education: “Methodology is central to the production of knowledge through scholarly research, and necessary to decenter the ‘maleness’ of traditional research methods” (Allan and Tinkler 2015). Informed by an understanding of higher education as masculine and framed through a feminist lens, this chapter explores the feminist research methods that researchers can use to inform the transformation of higher education beginning from the standpoint of women.

In this chapter, I first define the key terms in our discussion of feminist research methods, woman‐centered research, and higher education. Second, I review feminist standpoint theory as a theoretical framework I suggest researchers use to explore the experiences of women in higher education. Third, I review the structures and types of research questions that guide feminist inquiries. Fourth, I briefly discuss how to select participants with careful attention to the standpoint of women not traditionally included in research. Fifth, I discuss specific research methods that researchers can use to explore the experiences of women in higher education, with examples of their use. Sixth, I highlight critical issues and considerations in ethics and validity. Finally, I discuss future directions in research that center the experiences of women in higher education. My goal, in the organization of this chapter, is to frame it as one might a qualitative research manuscript and, in that way, provide a guiding framework for any publication that results from the research I endorse.

Definitions

Before beginning this discussion of methodology, it is important to define the foundational terms and theories that will guide it. Most critically, I begin by defining gender as “the social discourse regarding how people identify, express, and embody the socially ascribed norms relating to their assigned sex at birth” (Nicolazzo 2017); thus, gender is subject to change. Gender is related to but separate from sex, which is rooted in biology. Importantly, neither sex nor gender is a binary; there are more than two biological sexes and more than two socially constructed genders. It is critical to identify gender as socially constructed in an international exploration of women in higher education, because the defining characteristics of gender differ across cultures and societies though not often in ways that nullify or reverse the marginalization of women in higher education. Further, woman is a social group that is not limited to women who were assigned female at birth. In this chapter, I use woman to refer to all who identify as women, including trans* women:

No one is born a woman; it as an assignment (not just a sign, but also a task or an imperative …) that can shape us; make us; and break us. Many women who were assigned female at birth, let us remind ourselves, are deemed not women in the right way, or not women at all, perhaps because of how they do or do not express themselves.

(Ahmed 2017, loc 347)

Similarly, it is important to understand that while gender is an organizing construct for both this chapter and the research methods I will discuss, it does not operate in isolation, as race, class, ethnicity, age, ability, and more interact to privilege and marginalize women. This is a concept referred to as intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Museus and Griffin 2011; Ahmed 2017): “Structural intersectionality refers to how multiple social systems intersect to shape the experiences of, and sometimes oppress, individuals” (Museus and Griffin 2011, p. 7). Understanding intersectionality is key in an exploration of the experiences of women, because it “promotes greater understanding of how converging identities contribute to inequality” (p. 10). Different social systems interact to privilege and oppress different women; simply assuming a universal experience for all women ignores how a White woman will often have a vastly different experience from a Black woman in the United States, and they will both have very different experiences from a Ghanaian woman. The social systems that interact in each case help to understand these differing experiences as the standpoint from which research begins, and also a key lens through which to explore findings.

Finally, while not all research methods that explore the experiences of women in higher education are feminist in nature, I argue that all research designed to truly understand their often‐divergent experiences is framed through a feminist lens. As defined by Ahmed (2017):

To be a feminist at work is or should be about how we challenge ordinary and everyday sexism, including academic sexism. This is not optional: it is what makes feminism feminist. A feminist project is to find ways in which women can exist in relation to women; how women can be in relation to each other. It is a project because we are not there yet.

(loc 240)

Feminist research is committed to understanding how gender relates to our research questions, which could mean exploring how women experience higher education or how men influence how women experience higher education from the perspective of women (Ropers‐Huilman and Winters 2011). My goal, as I speak about research gender and higher education, is to shift the framework from a masculine one to one that seeks to uncover and understand from the location of women. Through the framework of standpoint theory (Harding 2004), this feminist lens understands that women are not all located at the same position, which is why research begins from the standpoint of specific women or groups of women as an entry point to understanding their experiences.

Theoretical Framework

In the previous section, I suggested that research framed through standpoint theory and built from the experiences of women will be feminist in nature. Because there must be a link between theory and methods (Allan and Tinkler 2015), I see the feminist lens – specifically, a feminist standpoint lens – as critical in this discussion of research methods: “Feminist research, by definition, is committed to considering how gender implicates or is implicated by the phenomenon of interest” (Ropers‐Huilman and Winters 2011, p. 671). However, the history of research on women in higher education has often foregrounded the experiences of White middle‐class women and privileged their voices. As a result, the experiences of White middle‐class women have often been assumed to represent the experiences of all women, and the voices of women with a different background or experience have been silenced or ignored. So, while there is great diversity in feminist theoretical frameworks, I see postcolonial approaches to feminist research – specifically, feminist standpoint theory – as critical when conducting higher education research internationally with women. Researchers must acknowledge that different women have different experiences within the masculine higher education environment. While they may experience similar marginalizing structures, such as the promotion and tenure process, how they experience them, the extent of their marginalization, and the processes by which that marginalization occurs are often vastly different. Through a postcolonial approach to research, framed through feminist standpoint theory, scholars begin from the perspective of the women whose experiences they seek to explore.

Research on the experiences of women in higher education through the framework of feminist standpoint theory means beginning from the standpoint of women. That does necessarily mean that researchers must conduct interviews with the population of interest as their research method (or that they will not talk to members of other genders), only that the standpoint of the population of interest is the starting point for their exploration (Harding 2004; Smith 2005). For the feminist standpoint theorist, knowledge develops from experiences. Knowledge is context‐specific; it may be complicated and even contradictory (Harding 2004; Hesse‐Biber 2014). For Smith (2005), the feminist standpoint lens is the foundation for an everyday world sociology that situates knowledge in women's experiences; the participant standpoint is the site from which a research project should begin (Hesse‐Biber 2014). Research framed by feminist standpoint theory often incorporates an intersectional analysis of the structural aspects of social life, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and class (Hesse‐Biber 2014). Through feminist standpoint theory, regardless of data collection and analysis methods, research begins from the standpoint of women. (It is important to note that standpoint is not the same thing as perspective, which often connotes a method of data collection that relies on narrative data. Standpoint as the starting point for research is the theoretical place from which one begins their exploration.)

In acknowledging that women's experiences – specifically, their marginalizing experiences – in the masculine higher education structure differ, it is important to consider intersectionality: “Gendered identities are both chosen and ascribed, yet those identities are constructed within various cultural contexts that define what it means to be women and men, and how individuals can span or interrupt those definitions” (Ropers‐Huilman and Winters 2011, p. 669). As social constructs like gender and race may vary between cultures, it is important to consider how different aspects of identity might interact to exacerbate marginalization or to privilege women in some settings while marginalizing them in others. Ahmed (2017) provides extensive discussion of how this might look. For example, a White woman faculty member might be privileged in some settings because she is White, in others because she is a professor, but disempowered in still other settings because she is a woman. In contrast, a Black woman faculty member might be disempowered in the former settings, for example by being racially profiled at the airport and selected for screening. She will similarly be privileged as a professor and disempowered as a woman, though her experience of privilege might look and feel different to the White woman's. How different aspects of identity interact is a key point that researchers can and should seek to understand. The differing experiences and intersecting aspects of participants' identities can be missed if researchers do not begin from them.

Finally, discussion of the importance of standpoint and the intersection of different identities raises an important point: researchers (especially White researchers) must consider their own positionality as researchers. They must consider how to represent diversity in different academic contexts and consider the limits of their own lens and their own personal experiences. As such, researchers need to be careful when reporting results to ensure that that they do not create realities for their participants (or in their conclusions) based on their own lives. Their research must also seek to identify/understand how oppression works differently from different positions (McNae and Vali 2015).

Research Questions

Framing research questions is a critical part of the research process, because one's research questions direct the selection of methods, identification of participants, and analysis of data. Framed through standpoint theory, research questions can and should identify the unique challenges that face women in higher education by prioritizing the standpoint of the women from whom the research begins. First, researchers should craft research questions that seek to identify both what they want to know and what they do not know about their topic. These questions should ask what characterizes the experiences of the women whose experiences, lives, and work they are exploring. For example, in my institutional ethnography exploring how institutional procedures, practices, and procedures marginalize undergraduate women in STEM fields (see Parson and Ozaki 2017; Parson and Ozaki 2018), I began by asking participants to describe the day‐to‐day work of being a woman in STEM education. It was critical to my understanding of the topic that I first understood what animated and coordinated the lives of women in STEM before I could seek to identify how the institution was involved in their marginalization.

My subsequent research questions sought to identify and understand the institutional practices, procedures, and discourses that coordinated my participant's daily lives. Only then could I begin to identify which practices created challenges for women in STEM and understand how the institution marginalized them. Research only moves toward what may seem like more salient questions, such as why and how, after it has elucidated the fundamentals of the subject it is exploring. This is critical for all qualitative researchers but especially White and man researchers. By crafting research questions through standpoint theory, researchers can see how the standpoint of their subjects guides their research.

Research Methods

In choosing research methods for a study that begins from the standpoint of a woman or a group of women, I believe there should be certain expectations: the research will be from the standpoint of women, the researcher will behave ethically, the researcher will recognize that women as a group are not homogenous, the researcher will value multiple ways of knowing and intersectional identities, and the researcher will conduct research in a way that respects women. To guide our discussion of researching women and higher education, I will examine several qualitative research methods that are appropriate for such research and provide examples of each type. This is not intended to be an all‐inclusive list. For each method, I will describe appropriate research questions, data collection, and data analysis, and provide examples of its use (participants, setting, and ethics, as applicable).

Ethics

Ethics should always be a key consideration in one's research methods, but special consideration needs to be paid to the protection of participants who might be vulnerable given their position in a masculine environment. There is a broad range of work on the ethics of conducting research with marginalized groups (Goodkind and Deacon 2004; Milgram 2012; Hoskins 2015; Falcon 2016); here, I briefly discuss a few key considerations.

Methods need to focus on the ethical collection, analysis, and reporting of data. First, feminist research seeks to minimize harm to participants and, importantly, to minimize researcher control of participants (Ropers‐Huilman and Winters 2011). In doing that, researchers need to show awareness of sociopoliticultural context and, also, the context of the setting where the research is conducted, whether it be an interview, observation, or focus group, to ensure participants feel safe and their identities are protected. Key aspects of considering ethics in research include obtaining informed consent, the setting, confidentiality of the data collected, the reactions of participants to disclosing sensitive information, and including participant‐checking to ensure the researcher's understanding and translation of events are aligned with what the participant meant.

Finally, it is important not to underestimate the importance of considering one's own positionality in the research one is conducting. Practicing reflexivity throughout helps researchers to stay aware of their positionality, especially as it relates to research participants. Researchers need to be mindful of how differences in authority, even as researcher and researched, can contribute to their questions and the research participant's responses (Ropers‐Huilman and Winters 2011; Hesse‐Biber 2014).

Since so many types of relationships are possible, each with its own complexities and usefulness, feminist research advocates an ongoing attention to the ways in which those relationships are serving the needs of the research, the researcher(s), and the research participants. This self‐reflexivity is clearly not an easy process. What happens when power imbalances and varying positionalities complicate notions of sharing, reflexive thinking, and the desire for a deep rapport with re‐ search participants? Whose interpretations of participant's lives are ultimately included in research findings if it is clear that the researcher and participant's positionalities have led them to different understandings? In what ways is it useful for researchers to divulge the ongoing steps of their reflexive processes, and in what ways might that impede certain readings of their emergent understandings?

(Ropers‐Huilman and Winters 2011, p. 681)

In feminist and qualitative research, researchers need to recognize that they cannot remove their bias from their research. Similarly, they must not pretend that their analysis, findings, and conclusions are drawn in a bias‐free state. Instead, it is important that researchers acknowledge their biases as they report their findings and use validity methods to help identify whether and how their biases have colored their interpretations or blinded them to certain findings or interpretations.

Future Directions

Thinking of higher education as a gendered institution, with gendered substructures, systems, policies, and practices, and responding to calls to explore the institutional roots of discrimination instead of focusing on the deficiencies of the individual, institutional ethnography is a qualitative research method that begins from the experiences of disadvantaged, underrepresented, or marginalized groups as a lens to explore the institutional practices, procedures, and discourses that coordinate their work (Smith 2005). Institutional ethnography explores how the lives of groups of individuals, such as women faculty and students, are structured. By identifying the structures that coordinate work, researchers can identify what institutional practices, policies, procedures, and discourses are creating challenges, and, as a result, make recommendations for institutional changes to improve the experiences of women in higher education.

Framing research from the perspective of those marginalized and disadvantaged as a lens through which to explore the institution provides an opportunity to identify the institutional practices coordinating and marginalizing participants that they may not be able to see themselves. Institutional ethnographies conducted in single families and schooling, policy development, and psychiatry have provided important insight into the use of institutional ethnography to understand the institution and how it marginalizes disadvantaged groups. Developed by Dorothy Smith (2005, 2006), institutional ethnography has been used to explore many institutional settings‐such as the experiences of nurses, environmental policy development processes, and the experiences of mothers in relation to K–12 schooling – but not often to explore higher education. (This is shifting, as many projects are underway that explore higher education through an institutional ethnographic lens.) It has the potential to be a powerful tool in higher education research, where, despite decades of inventions, there are still differences in experiences, representation, and outcomes for women and underrepresented groups. Institutional ethnography can help us identify those structures and guide a reconstruction of the institution.

As a feminist research method, institutional ethnography is motivated by “a deep commitment to understanding the issues and concerns for women from their perspective, and being especially attentive to the activities and the ‘goings on’ of women in the research setting” (Hesse‐Biber 2014, p. 113). Beginning with those experiencing discrimination or marginalization in higher education, woman participant experiences become an entry point to understanding how women's everyday activities and work life are shaped by, constituent of, and in some ways embedded in the higher education institution (Smith 2006). Data collection starts with participant interviews or observations that illuminate the day‐to‐day work of being a student, faculty member, or administrator in higher education. The identification of the policies, procedures, and discourses coordinating the work of women in higher education informs subsequent data collection as an iterative process: the data gathered and analyzed inform each stage of collection. Additional interviews, classroom observations, and texts help clarify and understand the institutional practices and policies that coordinate the work of women in higher education. Through this iterative process, which begins from the standpoint of women, subsequent data collection informs understanding of the institutional practices, policies, and procedures that coordinate their work and provides insight into whether and how those practices are creating challenges for women participants.

Institutional ethnography methods provide an opportunity to understand how group identities defined as “different” are constructed. For example, Griffith (2006) examined how policy shapes the ways that single families are viewed as “different” and therefore socially deviant. She began from the experiences of single families, identifying texts related to the single family, including media stories about single parents (and perceptions of dysfunction) and how schools identify and track students from single‐parent households. Through that understanding, she discovered how the construct of single parents coordinated the work of single families and their often marginalizing treatment at the hands of school administrators and teachers (Griffith 2006). This research demonstrates how understanding of institutional processes is informed by beginning from the experiences of a group of marginalized individuals, including reviewing texts and mass media that inform the discourses that shape and define an identity as problematic. This process of text collection and analysis is key in institutional ethnography research. Using this method in higher education is an opportunity to discover how discourses about women shape their treatment there.

Further, institutional ethnography methods of interview, observation, and textual analysis provide an opportunity to map complicated institutional processes. For example, Turner (2006) used institutional ethnography to explore land development and municipal planning, creating maps of policy development and processes that illuminated “standardized working relations and forms of language and text‐based sequence of action through which democratic planning and government processes operate” (p. 140). Beginning, again, from the standpoint of those impacted by planning decisions, Turner identified different actors in those decisions, and the policies that regulated them, in order to map the process from beginning to end – a process that was often obscured both to those affected by the decisions and to those involved in making them. Mapping within institutional ethnography has the potential to be a very powerful tool in higher education research, as the processes and procedures that impact women and coordinate their work are often hidden. By tracing the path of how decisions are made at the institutional level and creating a map of the process, there is an opportunity to identify where and how the policies that marginalize women are made and, potentially, where changes need to occur in order to empower them instead.

Finally, research in the field of psychiatry demonstrates how institutional ethnography can be used as part of an activist agenda (Burstow 2016). The collection of studies reported on in Burstow's Psychiatry Interrogated (2016) covers a wide range of topics and begins with those understood to be disadvantaged or hurt by the existing systems of diagnosis and treatment. Beginning from their standpoint acts as a lens through which to understand the institutional processes that lead to the problematic treatment of individuals identified as needing psychiatric care. Understanding that a disadvantage, challenge, or harm exists is called the “problematic” in institutional ethnography research, and institutional ethnography is an opportunity to identify whether and how institutional factors are creating such challenges. Institutional ethnography as a method for activist research that identifies the experiences of women in higher education as disadvantaged is an opportunity to explore how and why their disadvantages persist.

Conclusion

As I approach research from a feminist standpoint – especially as I think about institutional ethnography – these research methods for exploring women and higher education run counter to the standard empirical paradigm on which virtually all higher education sits. This masculine paradigm shapes nearly every aspect of the modern research university in both Western and non‐Western contexts, as Acker (2000) explores in her theory of gendered organizations. That is why these methods are so important as part of acknowledging movement toward change as an objective or result of research. There is no one way to research women and higher education, but researchers should pay attention to the core goals of feminist research, consider the ethics of research methodology choices, recenter research on women participants, acknowledge and value all women's voices, and work toward greater equity in higher education. Understanding higher education environments, policies, practices, and discourses that marginalize women informs institutional transformation and interventions to improve student and faculty experiences, feelings of belonging, and academic success. Improving their experiences has the potential to increase the number of underrepresented women students and faculty who enter, persist in, and graduate from higher education. It is necessary to explore and understand the social, political, and scientific systems that are embedded within higher education practices in order to remake higher education into a welcoming and equitable environment for women.

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