With women's ascendancy in higher education enrollment since the 1980s, many seemingly assume that gender issues have been “solved.” This is a restrictive understanding of the role that gender plays in higher education – including that it relates only to cisgender women – and it would be just as uninformed to say that because women vote, political equity has been achieved. Just as colleges and universities cannot be reduced to their admissions offices, our focus on gender cannot be reduced to how many women are paying customers. Gender, like the master narratives of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, insinuates itself into every facet of higher education institutions, influencing who does what, how, for what compensation and status, and with what amount of physical and emotional safety. Further, institutions sit within complex webs of external cultures that refract what happens inside them into different and often distorted images of colleges and universities. What happens in schools is the results of actions and reactions in a million small contexts, beginning long before anyone gets to college and remaining long after they leave or graduate.

This volume, The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education, looks at many facets of higher education frequently overlooked when one supposes enrollment causes equality. Such a false equation can actually undermine the progress of the majority of enrollees, and it leads us to neglect key issues beyond enrollment for the minority. As we and many researchers before us have reported, gender dynamics have a way of being reconstituted by the attitudes, perspectives, and histories of those who work and study in higher education. Those dynamics influence classrooms, student services, dorms, Greek life, athletics, cafeterias, the curriculum, and on and on.

The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education also aims to provide much‐needed attention to the complexity of gender. Biological sex is not reducible to gender. Rather than a simple binary – biological males and biological females taking up their birth‐assigned roles as masculine men and feminine women – we editors and contributors conceptualize gender as a social and biological system that produces complexity almost too vast to comprehend (see Montañez 2017). Biology happens to us in many ways, determining many of the resources we have for enacting particular genders. Yet, biological sex is not just genitals and gonads, an either/or, male/female proposition; instead, even these external markers vary on a continuum from mild irregularities like a hypospadias in boys or a large clitoris in girls, through combinations of male and female internal and external structures, to totally ambiguous genitalia. Add to that chromosomal, hormonal, and numerous anatomical variations from skeletons to breast tissue and the possibilities of biological sex are nearly limitless. Even more, humans increasingly have the ability to purposefully alter their biology (epigenetically, surgically, medically, technologically) in ways that can dramatically alter their possibilities for gender enactments. In short, biology does not always provide the surety and stability most assume it does.

Gender, then, picks up where biology leaves off. Gender is social, and it need not reflect the biology of the person displaying it. Indeed, because gender differs from culture to culture, we might well say that it reflects only a little about biological realities. Instead, gender refers to sets of performances (e.g. Butler 1990; Goffman 1976, 1977) of masculinity or femininity over time and whether these performances flout or conform to what a society deems masculine or feminine; that is, what it is appropriate for a “biological” male or female to do. How long might a person's hair be, what clothes might they wear or remove, what gestures and expressions can they use, what tones of voice can they emit, how might they walk? These and other choices and prescriptions determine gender in ways that respond to but are not assured by biological sex features. And, since both biology and gender can change over time, what is true about either now may not be true about them at another time.

Remembering the complexity of sex and gender becomes crucial to discussions of higher education. As we note here and contributors show throughout this volume, higher education institutions are saturated with consequences for whether one is male or female, masculine or feminine, cisgender or transgender or gender nonconforming. Whether one has a chance of graduating from a particular major, how likely one is to become a leader, or whether one is safe on campus often significantly depends on where one sits on the gender continuum. This collection focuses on these largely unwritten rules about gender and its relationships to higher education.

We should also make a special note about sexuality's role in this handbook. For the most part, our focus lies on gender and biological sex. We decided not to claim sexuality as part of our title because sexuality forms its own disciplinary domain and we have not focused on it in a way that would be suitable to specialists. Yet, sexuality is complexly imbricated with gender (e.g. Lorber 1996), such that one's sexuality can influence one's (and others') perceptions and enactments of one's gender. Readers will see such interconnections with sexuality throughout the chapters.

This volume takes seriously Lather's proclamation that “Every issue is a feminist issue” (1992, p. 91). The contributors tackle issues of higher education that sometimes receive a great deal of attention and sometimes elicit only rare mentions. All these issues support the complex ecologies of higher education worldwide, and all are deeply gendered. To show coherence among the tremendously diverse topics, we have organized the book into four parts.

Part I explores institutions of higher education as corporations of a sort – the governance and administration and workplace of higher education. For example, while the gendered nature of governing boards (Rubin, Ciarimboli and Coco) does not get as much mention as graduation rates (Williams and Wolniak), the gendered composition and interaction of these boards has profound implications for the construction of policies, institutional cultures, and day‐to‐day operations. The various genders inhabiting such institutions live with the consequences – pay the price or reap the rewards – of gender dynamics “above” them in the hierarchy. Likewise, questions about women and leadership abound in the gender and education literature; the matter appears in this volume (Dahlvig and Longman) because, as many indicators continue to show, such questions remain far from resolved. Kezar and Acuña examine the ways in which faculty in higher education are considered now that, in some cases, women outnumber men in some faculty echelons. Burke examines corporatization in higher education in ways not conceptualized by other researchers, while Wickens and Miller critique the pervasive notion that technology will democratize higher education and remove gendered barriers.

In Part II, the Handbook turns its attention to students' lives, particularly the gendered realities of different students on and around campus. Gender inequities in collegiate sports (Johnson and Newton) get a thorough reexamination, as do sexual assault education and prevention (Garcia, Wienski, Cote, and Silva) and the relationships between gender and substance abuse (Radimer and McCready). DeSantis takes a new look at an old practice in higher education – Greek life – and considers current questions on its viability as higher education continues to evolve. Beemyn writes about trans students and the multifaceted barriers, harassments, and decision processes they face before and during college. Marine investigates the gendered experiences of “non‐traditional” learners in twenty‐first‐century higher education: those students who are older than average or have obligations like full‐time jobs and care responsibilities. Stimpson similarly explores the gendered experiences of community college students. And Siegel, while not attending directly to gender, raises key issues for international students who are the first generation in their families to attend college, an issue with deep relevance for gender scholars.

In Part III, we and our contributors look at the services provided by universities and at higher education's “chalkface” – the day‐to‐day work and art of teaching in all its forms. Lehman, Newhouse, and Sax review global participation in undergraduate computing, proposing an agenda for new research. Siddiqui and Jessup‐Anger examine the curricula of study‐abroad programs and their intersections with gender. Renn continues the international focus with her chapter on single‐sex and coeducational higher education around the world. Johnson, McKinnon‐Crowley, Voyles, and Salcedo provide an in‐depth case study of how one institution's responses to campus violence teaches students – particularly already vulnerable students – about who gets to be safe on campus. Jeffries and Boyd explore the critical hopefulness made possible in campus women's and gender centers. Park and Park‐Ozee show that the gendered divisions of academic labor that characterized the last century continue into this one; research is still implicitly “men's work” and teaching and service are “women's work.” Niemi examines institutions of higher education as gendered workspaces, while Philipsen investigates faculty work–life integration. Friedman concludes by proactively asking “How High the Ceiling?” for leadership in the field of international education.

Part IV, finally, explores theoretical paradigms and methodologies, gauging their impact on the study of gender in higher education, both historically and contemporarily. Weaver‐Hightower provides an overview of the development of various critical theories and research methods in the field. Laura Parson offers new questions regarding methods for researching gender and higher education, focusing particularly on those that begin from the standpoint of women. Martino, Kuhl, and Omercajic, in a similar vein, appraise the epistemological and ontological significance of transgender studies in the academy, showing how trans standpoints challenge a range of gendered (including anti‐trans feminist), raced, and colonialist practices. Jourian pairs well with their argument, offering “trans* as method or analytic” to confront cissexism in higher education and student affairs research.

As editors, looking across the contributions, we see how much we ourselves have learned about gender and higher education as we have moved from the genesis of the collection to now. We are proud of the ways that the authors have deepened our appreciation for and knowledge of the history, practice, theories, and methods of higher education. We dearly hope that you, as reader, will find similar edification, and perhaps inspiration, in the pages that follow, taking the collected wisdom of these many authors to make differences in both local and larger contexts of higher education. After all, working to enact gender equity in colleges and universities – for people at all points on the complex spectrum of gender – provides investment in a future of humaneness, inclusion, advancement, and increased happiness for people around the globe.

References

1. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge.
2. Goffman, E. (1976). Gender Advertisements. New York, NY: Harper Colophon Books.
3. Goffman, E. (1977). The arrangement between the sexes. Theory and Society 4 (3): 301–331.
4. Lather, P. (1992). Critical frames in educational research: feminist and post‐structural perspectives. Theory Into Practice 31 (2): 87–99.
5. Lorber, J. (1996). Beyond the binaries: depolarizing the categories of sex, sexuality, and gender. Sociological Inquiry 66 (2): 143–160.
6. Montañez, A. (2017). Beyond XX and XY. Scientific American 317 (3): 50–51.