Gender and Education

Looking Back, Moving Forward: Gender Equity in Higher Education and Research, 2015–2025

This Special Issue will critically examine how gender equity in higher education and research has been shaped over the past decade by shifting institutional policies, evolving global frameworks, and persistent structural challenges. While initiatives such as Athena Swan and other Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategies have driven university commitments to addressing gender disparities, the effectiveness of these interventions remains debated, with concerns around performative gender equity practices and gender-washing highlighting how institutions may prioritize metrics over meaningful structural change (Crimmins et al., 2023; Tzanakou & Pearce, 2019; Lewis, Benschop, & Simpson, 2017).

The Special Issue will explore the key contradiction between institutional commitments to diversity and the entrenched inequalities that continue to shape academic careers, where gendered expectations around care work, teaching, and service disadvantage women and marginalised academics despite formal policy shifts, while neoliberal feminism promotes individualist models of gender equity that emphasise leadership training over systemic change (Guarino & Borden, 2017; Misra et al., 2011; Gill et al., 2017; Rottenberg, 2018). The collection will address how the convergence of political, economic, and epistemic crises has exposed the limits of neoliberalism as an explanatory framework, with universities increasingly shaped by crisis-driven governance, precarious labour conditions, and what Shore and Wright (2015) describe as the 'crisis university' operating under necropolitical forces that devalue care, dissent, and relationality while disciplining marginalised academics through abandonment, affective exhaustion, and epistemic exclusion (Mbembe, 2003).

We are particularly interested in publishing work that critically examines institutional efforts to address gender equity in academic contexts over the last decade, with a particular emphasis on how gender intersects with race, Indigeneity, sexuality, disability, and class.

Contributions from diverse geographical, institutional, and disciplinary contexts with a global perspective are invited and we especially welcome contributions from those working outside of academia, including practitioners, equity professionals, activists, policy-makers, and community leaders, or from collaborative teams that bridge academic and non-academic spheres.

Topics can include but are not limited to:

• Evaluations of gender equity interventions and strategies
• Institutional barriers and performative equity
• Intersectional and inclusive practices
• Neoliberalism, academic labour, and precarity
• Gender metrics and data-washing
• Political and populist threats to gender equity
• New models and future directions

About the editors

Associate Professor Samantha Owen Ph.D. (Reading U.), M.A. & Grad Cert (W.European Studies) (U. Pittsburgh) is a regular reviewer, has edited and contributed to Special Issues for journals in her area and served as the Editor-in-Chief for an open access journal, Cultural Science. Currently she is the Director, Gender Equity & Inclusion at Curtin University. Her role is to foster positive and progressive leading practice in gender equity, inclusion and belonging across the global Curtin community. She is the Chair of the Gender Equity Inclusion Advisory Group and an appointed member of the Gender Equity Inclusion Global Reference Group. Samantha leads Curtin’s SAGE Athena Swan Academic program, and the GEI programs under this portfolio. From 2023-2025 she co-led a DFAT funded program for senior women in leadership in the public service in Vietnam and led a team to revise the Vietnamese public service curriculum, Gender in Leadership and Management. Samantha is also the Academic Co-Lead for the Curtin University Gender Research Network which has a broad membership across the global Curtin campuses.