Resistance to mainstreaming gender into the higher education curriculum

Abstract

Disregard of gender and of women’s contributions in the higher education curriculum is still a widespread phenomenon. Building on feminist institutionalism, this article explores the forms and types of resistance that efforts to engender the higher education curriculum must contend with and discusses the ways in which resistance to curricular reform is entrenched in a web of both gender-specific and apparently gender-neutral academic informal (non-written) rules. In doing so, the authors use empirical evidence collected by an action-research project undertaken at a faculty of political and social sciences in a Catalan public university (Spain). The Spanish case is intriguing because mainstreaming gender in higher education has been prescribed by various national and regional laws that are nonetheless poorly implemented. The article also reflects on the positive feedback loop action-research projects can facilitate within gendered institutions such as universities and pinpoints the role of feminist agency in counteracting resistance to institutional change.

Keywords

Action research curricular reform feminist institutionalism gender mainstreaming universities

Introduction

Engendering the higher education curriculum entails the integration of gendered content into the courses of undergraduate and graduate programmes, paying attention as well to the intersection of gender with other markers of identity such as race, ethnicity, class or sexual identity. Providing a broad range of ‘navigational insights’ helps students to identify and problematise existing gendered norms and roles (Lyle-Gonga, 2013). Furthermore, including women’s perspectives and experiences as well as acknowledging their contributions to course content empowers female students by challenging gender stereotypes (Cassese and Bos, 2013; Rios et al., 2010).

As defined by the Council of Europe’s Group of Specialists on Gender Mainstreaming, a gender equality perspective should be incorporated ‘in all policies at all levels and at all stages’ (Council of Europe, 1998: 15). Although numerous policy statements produced in the last decades have mandated the implementation of gender mainstreaming (GM, henceforth) in education, including higher education institutions, several studies show that the gender equality perspective ‘has not emerged as a serious priority in curricular reform’ (Cassese et al., 2012: 238; see also Foster et al., 2013; Grünberg, 2011; Verdonk et al., 2009). Quite the opposite, there is a continued resistance to integrating gender into the higher education curriculum (Atchison, 2013: 228).

The aims of this article are twofold. First, we seek to identify the types and forms of resistance that efforts to implement GM in the higher education curriculum must contend with. Failed policy attempts allow for the examination of both how and by whom the status quo is preserved and which factors must be addressed for an effective implementation of gender equality policies (Bergqvist et al., 2013; Cavaghan, 2016). Second, since resistance to gender equality initiatives is shaped by how different institutional contexts and organisational cultures reinterpret gender equality and the GM policies themselves (Cavaghan, 2016: 5; see also Benschop and Verloo, 2006), we aim to contribute to the extant literature by exposing the informal (non-written) rules underpinning such reinterpretations and their constraining effects during the implementation phase within academia. In doing so, we benefit from the theoretical insights of a feminist institutional analysis (Mackay et al., 2010), which helps us bridge the disciplinary boundaries between the gender and politics scholarship and organisational studies (Benschop and Verloo, 2015: 107–108).

Our empirical analysis builds on an action-research project undertaken at a faculty (school) of political and social sciences of a public university in Catalonia (Spain). The Spanish case is intriguing because mainstreaming gender in higher education has been prescribed by various national and regional laws that are, nonetheless, poorly implemented. The data and methods used in the empirical analysis are described before moving to the survey of the different types and forms of resistance and their underlying informal gendered rules. The final section discusses the findings, highlights the positive feedback loop action-research projects can facilitate, and pinpoints the role of feminist agency in counteracting resistance to institutional change.

Universities as gendered institutions

Opposition to gender reforms is likely to emerge where institutional cultures protect male privilege and power (Mergaert and Lombardo, 2014: 15), where innovations do not resonate with the values and norms of their members (Hafner-Burton and Pollack, 2009), and where gender reforms target the very same gendered norms, practices and routines of organisations and institutions (cf. Benschop and Verloo, 2011: 286). As a result, resistance, defined as the effort towards ‘maintaining the status quo and opposing change’ (Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013: 299), may lead to non-implementation of gender reforms and produce indifference to or non-awareness of gendered policy problems (Cavaghan, 2016: 11).

In diagnosing whether resistance to GM in teaching reveals a broader pattern of ‘evaporation’ of gender equality (Weiner and MacRae, 2014: 5), it is crucial to expose where and how formal rules concerning gender (written, like laws) have failed to be enforced as well as how various informal (non-codified) norms and practices safeguard male dominance. These include both gendered and apparently gender-neutral norms that have differential effects on women and men (Mackay, 2011: 181). It is also necessary to reveal the ways in which institutional narratives of gendered behaviour legitimise gendered outcomes (Lowndes, 2014). Indeed, as highlighted by Lombardo and Mergaert (2013: 301), the causes of resistance to GM ‘lie in the gendered norms deeply rooted in institutions and organisations’. Informal rules, such as socially shared values and norms, conventions, routines and practices, guide in practice institutional processes and may undermine gender reforms when formal rules are not actively maintained or enforced (Waylen, 2014). Indeed, institutional reform efforts must contend with actors often ‘remembering the old’ and ‘forgetting the new’ (Mackay, 2014).

Resistance can take the form of both explicit action, through policy discourses and decisions that distance themselves from the goal of promoting gender equality or that go against it, and implicit non-action or inadequate action, like negative inertia and the allocation of inadequate resources (Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013: 301). Actors might resist the goal of transforming gender roles or the very same processes of change. Resistance can be expressed in different forms, such as the denial of the need for gender change, since inequality is no longer perceived to be a problem; the trivialisation of the importance of gender equality policies, since gender change is not a considered a priority or it will come naturally without the need for intervention; and the refusal to take responsibility, since it is up to women to seize opportunities (see Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013: 301–305).

Feminist institutionalist scholarship has established that, besides operating at the individual level, gender is a ‘feature of institutions within which individuals are “nested” ’ (Mackay et al., 2010: 580). Each institution has a particular ‘gender regime’ (Connell, 1987) that operates through a ‘hidden’ day-to-day interplay of formal and informal norms with gendered implications (Kenney, 1996), including the production and reproduction of gender-blindness through organisational and management practices (Benschop and Verloo, 2006). As discussed below, universities have a gender regime of their own (Eveline, 2004).

Concerning personnel policy, institutional sexism is observed through men’s over-representation in the academy, especially in the higher ranks, through the ‘motherhood penalty’ when it comes to promotions, as well as through the gender pay gap (Mason and Goulden, 2004; Monroe et al., 2008). This glass ceiling yields a symbolic representation of the scientist as male (Bates et al., 2012). Disguised in meritocratic norms, selection processes are often blighted by gender stereotypes that discriminate against women’s access, retention and promotion (Steinpreis et al., 1999). The existence of male informal networks within academic institutions also hinders women’s career advancement, with female scholars being offered fewer professional development opportunities than their male peers (Kantola, 2006). Likewise, non-blind peer-review processes are underpinned by sexist prejudice and male comradeship, with reviewers overestimating men’s achievement and underestimating the scientific productivity and competence of female academics (Wenneràs and Wold, 1997).

Yet, the genderedness of universities goes well beyond personnel policy. Several gender norms sustain the ‘logic of appropriateness’ with regard to the kind of tasks individuals are expected to perform (Chappell, 2006). Women’s association with feminine traditional roles such as dealing with emotions and care-giving leads them to take up positions associated with ‘institutional housekeeping’ and ‘relational work’, with less visibility and less power but more labour-intensive dedication (Valian, 2004). At the same time, when occupying top managerial positions, women’s status and power is downplayed while the service dimension of these roles is emphasised through a ‘gender devaluation’ process (Monroe et al., 2008: 219).

It also remains the case that feminist scholars are regarded negatively within academia (Barataa et al., 2005: 235–236), and many researchers remain unfamiliar with the epistemological, theoretical and empirical challenges that gender studies scholarship entails for their discipline, even in their areas of expertise (Dahlerup, 2010). The ‘gender politics’ of many disciplines also prevents the majority of academics from acknowledging the extent to which scholarship takes on the preferences of its ‘founders’ – men (Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll, 2006: 507; see also Lovenduski, 1998), favouring the reproduction of androcentric knowledge (Fotaki, 2013: 1253).

Very few courses include gender themes (Foster et al., 2013: 578) and most gender courses tend to be elective, allowing students to avoid exposure (Cassese et al., 2012: 238). Likewise, the pervasive gender citation gap in reading packs or research articles is typically justified by the allegedly low numbers of women authors, an argument debunked by recent studies. This is actually caused by the higher recurrence of self-citation by men and citation among men (Mitchell et al., 2013), as well as by the gendered personal networks of professors and their stereotyping (Maliniak et al., 2013).

Data and methods

In 2013, our discussions around the gender-blindness of the Political Science curriculum within our university turned towards the possibility of a group research project. Three feminist researchers applied for a grant to the teaching innovation centre of the university to measure the scope of this phenomenon, building the case on the international and domestic recommendations and formal rules mandating the revision of curricula with a gender perspective. The project also sought to raise awareness of the need for curricular change and aimed to identify potential resistance. Given that all actors are crucial in securing successful policy implementation (Benschop and Verloo, 2011), an action-research approach was applied in pursuit of bringing together collective action and reflection. We looked beyond the ultimate enablers – i.e. professors – and investigated the broader institutional setting within which they act using a mixed-method research design.

In order to trace the adoption of GM in the higher education curriculum, we examined the legislation and recommendations passed by international, national and regional authorities and paid attention to the implementation of gender reforms by analysing both the documents issued and the specific actions put in place by relevant actors, or the lack thereof. This required us to look at the university’s managerial staff, governmental authorities and evaluation agencies in the field of higher education. We also counted on the participant observation of one of the researchers in the (regional) governmental advisory body monitoring gender equality in academic institutions.

To explore professors’ attitudes towards GM and its actual implementation at our faculty we used different sources. First, we assessed the extent to which gender topics were mentioned and female authors were included through the analysis of the syllabi of the over 60 – optional and non-optional – courses offered in the four-year degree in Political Science. Since gender content might well not be listed in a syllabus but still developed in the classroom, and vice versa, our initial findings were checked by a graduate student against her own experience. Second, we conducted three focus groups with undergraduates, one with third- and fourth-year male and female students, and two with second-year undergraduates (one mixed group and one all-women group).¹ To avoid self-selection, the call for participation was presented as a discussion around teaching quality, class participation and the student–professoriate relationship. Third, an online survey was administered to the 80 professors associated with the BA – 62 completed questionnaires were returned, of which 33% belonged to women, a proportion greater than their presence as instructors, which is around 25%. The survey was presented as a means to reflect on teaching strategies and learning goals. Lastly, further evidence was obtained through participant observation of departmental meetings where the results of the study were presented, and of a training session that was organised to help professors develop gender competence.

Exploring resistance

While resistance may be of either institutional or individual type (Mergaert and Lombardo, 2014), in practice this distinction is not straightforward. Institutional resistance expressed through the specific allocation of resources and priorities may eventually turn into ‘unintended’ individual resistance as, for example, when the institution has not promoted the development of the gender competence of its staff. Simultaneously, a strong individual resistance from high-ranking actors will develop into institutional inertia toward the status quo (Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013: 301). Building on Lombardo and Mergaert’s work, we explore the extent to which efforts to engender the higher education curriculum are met with opposition at both the institutional and individual levels and pinpoint the informal rules (values, norms, routines and practices) underpinning the different forms of resistance.

Institutional resistance

The mandate to mainstream gender into education was set as an international priority at the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing 1995). Yet, subsequent reforms have largely concentrated on female students’ enrolment and on the recruitment of women professors, rather than on mainstreaming gender into the academic curricula (Unterhalter and North, 2010). Issues related to the higher education curriculum have been addressed since the late 1990s by several European Union recommendations and further developed in the reform leading to the creation of the European Higher Education Area, which mandated the inclusion of Women’s and Gender Studies in the reorganisation of undergraduate and graduate programmes (Kortendiek, 2011).

How did Spain accommodate the international mandates? The Social Democratic government elected in 2004 undertook various actions to engender science policy as part of a broad gender equality programme. In 2005 a state-wide advisory unit was created, namely the Women and Science Unit (currently located within the Ministry of Economy and Competition) that became a key actor in the mainstreaming of gender into different laws (Alonso and Lombardo, 2016: 294). The Equality Law (Act 3/2007) states that the significance and scope of gender equality must be furthered into both the curricula and research, and specific postgraduate studies must be created; the University Law (Act 1393/2007) requires universities to include gender-specific content in the curricula; and the Law on Science, Technology and Innovation (Act 14/2011) prescribes the adoption of GM throughout research policies.

In Catalonia, various regional acts prescribing greater integration of gender into higher education curricula and research have been passed, and a Woman and Science Committee was established in 2005 within the Inter-University Council of Catalonia. While the state-wide advisory board is composed of politically appointed experts and regular consultation with universities’ equality units has yet to be established, in the Catalan case universities’ equality unit directors meet at least twice a year with government officials in charge of university policy as well as with senior officers of the Catalan women’s policy agency in order to promote gender equality in academia (Alonso, 2015).

However, official rhetoric has so far failed to materialise in effective GM measures and no public body has assumed the supervision of the mandated gender curricular reforms. The approval of new programmes and their subsequent monitoring are made by the state-wide evaluation agency (National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation; ANECA) in conjunction with regional agencies (University Quality Assurance Agency [AQU], in Catalonia). Our analysis of the different guidelines produced by these independent public entities indicates that no specific instructions about GM were given to universities when undergraduate and graduate programmes were harmonised to meet the European Higher Education Area criteria (see ANECA, 2005). No indicators have been created by evaluation agencies to monitor the gender diversity curricula and curricular evaluations have not taken GM criteria into account. The fact that gender equality policies became a non-priority with the accession of the right-wing Popular Party to the national government in 2011, and the significant cuts imposed on equality policies by the gender-blind austerity programme adopted to tackle the economic crisis (Bustelo, 2016; Lombardo and León, 2015), may help explain why accreditation agencies have not felt compelled to act. That is, implicit institutional resistance through non-action can be traced back to the higher executive level, led by a party that holds strong prejudices against feminist policy.

Whereas the state-wide Women and Science Unit has not issued any specific recommendation regarding the higher education curriculum, the Catalan Woman and Science Committee has passed soft law such as the Decalogue for Universities’ Equality Plans (2013). However, as observed through participant observation by one of our group members, arguments made by the directors of the universities’ equality units in favour of curricular reform have been explicitly disregarded by committee government officers, who tend to believe in gender-neutral quality criteria and thus do not see the need for engendering the curriculum. The denial of the need for gender change is coupled with an implicit form of resistance, namely the refusal to take responsibility, leading to non-action. This resistance builds on the (partly formal, partly informal) norm that quarantines universities’ autonomy as untouchable, with curricula being defined as universities’ exclusive competence.

Opponents conveniently ‘forget’ that several legal requisites are imposed upon universities, such as a minimum common content for each discipline, and that evaluation agencies certify applicants’ academic merits before they can compete for vacancies or promotions at universities (Clifton, 2006). As noted by Cavaghan (2016: 18) in her study of the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission, ‘GM implementation remains vulnerable to the institutionalized local incomprehension of the GM agenda it seeks to displace and to loyalties to preexisting practice and assumptions of what constitutes legitimate and credible activity’.

Lack of supervision of the implementation of GM by evaluation agencies has allowed universities to ignore the call for curricular reform. Like in other policy areas, GM is regarded as a non-priority action within universities, with the managerial staff lacking a minimum gender competence, which translates into insufficient political will and economic support. Equality policies remain peripheral and equality units are usually under-staffed and under-budgeted, as shown by a recent report on Spanish universities (Elizondo et al., 2010). Our own interaction with resistant institutional actors (including some deans and other top managers) and discussions with feminist professors from other departments have provided us with other valuable insights. Suggestions to engender the curriculum and to create new gender-specific courses are generally perceived as illegitimate interferences in faculties’ affairs and as a non-applicable reform in certain fields (such as the ‘hard’ sciences or engineering), constituting an explicit resistance to accept responsibility.

GM tends to be identified by resistant university actors with an ideological (feminist) project and, at most, is valued as a social-sensitising project to be undertaken through non-curricular activities by the equality units. This explicitly denies the need for gender change of teaching practice. Such reaction is not alien to the organisational culture of disembodiment that prevails in universities, which prevents many individuals from recognising as relevant issues the invisibility of women as sociohistorical subjects and their contributions in course content or the lack of attention to gender in teaching methods. Indeed, gender curricular innovations do not resonate with the worldviews of the managerial staff in charge of research and teaching policies. The Woman and Science Committee’s recommendation to survey students about the extent to which gender has been mainstreamed throughout course content has also been dismissed through non-action by all universities, which deprives universities from having a monitoring system and a means to motivate professors to engender their teaching.

At our university, the few institutional changes in this field did not occur until 2014, thanks to the initiative of the recently created Vice-Rectorate of Social Responsibility, to which the equality unit has since been ascribed. Social responsibility issues, including gender equality, were introduced as relevant criteria in the calls for teaching innovation projects. Furthermore, since 2014 the tutors’ training programme has included one module on GM. This notwithstanding, gender is rarely mainstreamed in the pedagogical vernacular of general courses and the few gender-specific courses – found in just seven out of the 24 BA programmes offered at our university – are typically elective ones, which allow students to ‘opt out’ from gender training, as indicated by the report recently issued by the equality unit of our university (UPF Igualtat, 2016).

Individual resistance

The results of the survey administered to the professors of our faculty showed that over 60% of respondents consider GM to be very or fairly relevant for their courses, whereas almost 36% of them disregard it as barely relevant or not relevant at all – GM is especially disregarded in the case of methodology courses. It is worth noting that there is a high correlation (.565, p < .05) between respondents’ knowledge on how to apply GM and perception of its relevance. No significant gender differences are found. Therefore, institutional non-action in providing adequate training is largely responsible for sustaining the widely shared norm that course content is gender-neutral, which results in an implicit denial of the need for gender change among a large proportion of the teaching staff.

The analysis of the syllabi of all courses of the BA in Political Science (academic year 2013–2014) revealed that gender is dramatically absent. Just 3% of the topics listed in the syllabi dealt broadly with issues of gender, feminism, women, sexuality and related themes. In the specific case of political science, the traditional separation of the public and private spheres as areas of study may contribute to the maintenance of informal gendered rules about the relevance of topics (see Tolleson-Rinehart and Carroll, 2006), ultimately manifesting in an explicit refusal to accept responsibility. This form of resistance is also legitimised by the academic freedom norm – partly formal, partly informal – that guarantees professors’ autonomy in drafting course syllabi and organising their teaching. We should note, though, that such autonomy is already bounded by several prescriptions affecting the skills courses must develop, the proportion of seminars to be taught in relation to lectures, and standardised grading criteria.

Concerning the references used in courses, on average, only 19% corresponded to female authors. Over 35% of syllabi included no single female author and 34% of syllabi had less than 20% female authors in their reading packs. Only in eight out of the 60 courses on offer (13%) did women authors represent over a third of the total, of which female professors taught seven. The non-random distribution of this gender bias confirms that the citation gap builds upon the informal rule conflating masculinity with expertise and reputation. Our subsequent interactions with some colleagues revealed that the perception that the most relevant scholars are male is very frequent – another example of how gender equality is explicitly undermined. This form of resistance is underpinned by the gendered networks of the professoriate and the conflation of masculinity with expertise and reputation.

Opposition to GM through the trivialisation of gender equality is also deeply entrenched in gender ideologies. Post-feminist discourses that view gender inequalities as a thing of the past (i.e. the fallacy of equality) tend to be well established in academia (Morrison et al., 2005). As shown in Table 1, when asked to compare female and male graduate students’ prospects on several aspects related to the labour market, 56.7% of respondents, most of whom are political scientists or sociologists, considered that both groups have the same job opportunities. Similarly, 38.3% of respondents denied gender differences in career advancement, 25% perceived no inequality in access to decision-making positions, and up to 46.7% denied the existence of a gender pay gap. These data mask important differences among male and female professors, with the latter providing a much more critical evaluation. Graduate students’ prospects in regard to career advancement are considered to be the same across sex by 22.2% of female professors, as compared to 55.3% of male professors. Concerning salary, gender equity is perceived by 44.7% of male professors and 27.8% of female professors. When it comes to job opportunities, no gender differences are perceived by 65.8% of the male vis-a-vis 38.9% of the female professoriate. As to access to decision-making positions, 26.3% of male professors and 16.7% of female professors believe equality prevails.

Table 1.

Professoriate’s evaluation of gender differences in graduate students’ prospects in the labour market.

	Women worse	No gender differences	Women better	Don’t know
Career advancement	40.0%	38.3%	3.3%	18.3%	100%
Salary	35.0%	46.7%	0.0%	18.3%	100%
Job opportunities	18.3%	56.7%	6.7%	18.3%	100%
Access to decision-making positions	53.3%	25.0%	3.3%	18.3%	100%

To further delve into gender ideologies, we examined professors’ explanations of why it is that women make up just a third of full-time faculty members in Spanish universities while they represent slightly over 50% of graduate students. As reported in Table 2, the most common answer given by male professors (38.1%) was the constraints on women’s academic progression due to ‘their’ family responsibilities. An imbalanced academic career was thus considered a ‘woman’s problem’, thereby avoiding critical engagement with the construction of gender roles, men’s lower commitment to parenthood and the lack of institutional attention to diversity in access, promotion and retention of female professors. The second most common answer was that the achievement of parity is just a matter of time (33.3%). It is thus assumed that the ‘problem’ will naturally disappear with generational replacement. The fallacy of equality that builds on female students’ better academic performance and the gender balance of most majors, bar STEM disciplines, explicitly trivialises the relevance of gender equality policies within universities. Some of the answers coded in this category even questioned the accuracy of the data presented in the wording of the question, despite the official source being provided, explicitly denying the need for gender change. This form of resistance can also be traced in the few answers (9.5%) revealing traditional ideas about gender-role specialisation, such as women’s higher willingness to sacrifice their academic career for the sake of their family or their being less career-oriented than men.

Table 2.

Professoriate’s evaluation of the leaky pipeline in academia.

	All	Male professors	Female professors
Work-life balance constraints	42.6%	38.1%	50.0%
Institutional constraints within universities	25.0%	19.0%	34.6%
Time will solve the problem	25.0%	33.3%	11.5%
Women less interested in academia	7.4%	9.5%	3.8%
	100%	100%	100%

Note: The original open answers provided by respondents have been clustered in these four categories.

Women professors’ explanations to the issue of gender imbalance in academic careers were, in general, more critical. Work–life balance constraints were the top reason highlighted (50%) followed by institutional constraints (34.6%, compared with 19% among male professors) such as male comradeship in recruitment and evaluation committees, productivity assessments being blind to maternity leave, or the existence of gender prejudices about women’s competency as researchers. Women professors also showed scepticism towards the possibility that time will fix gender equality within academia (11.5%) and gender stereotyping was marginal within their answers (3.8%).

When the results of the project were presented in a departmental meeting, most attendees did not interact at all in the discussion, which shows an implicit refusal to accept responsibility. Silence prevailed when reporting that undergraduate students can easily recall several of the male scholars studied in their courses but struggle to name a few female authors, despite the reason for this bias lying in professoriates’ decisions – namely, the over-representation of male authors in the reading packs.² The androcentrism of knowledge was not acknowledged as a problem, due to professors’ gender-blind training and the fact that the institution has not addressed this deficit adequately. The few faculty members who participated in the discussion expressed consternation at the fact that most students considered gender inequalities to have been extensively overcome, but they failed to reflect on how professors themselves contribute to students’ gender-blindness – precisely by orienting their teaching towards the ‘main[male]stream’ of the discipline.³ The refusal to accept responsibility may also be due to the fact that GM makes individuals reflect on their own gender stereotypes and ultimately exposes them to criticism, thereby challenging their own personal identity and behaviour (Lombardo and Mergaert, 2013: 301).

Lack of interest was also observed during participant observation at the training session – certified by the teaching innovation unit of our university – designed to enhance the gender competence of professors while presenting them with recommendations and materials to revise courses taking gender into account. We avoided being the trainers to prevent being identified with a feminist project rather than a faculty-level goal. Although several reminders were sent, attendance was rather low (20 teachers, including two of us and several PhD students) and suffered from an acute self-selection bias. Most participants (70%) were women and fewer than a third were tenured professors, meaning that most men, especially those with more seniority, ignored the call.

Non-attendance also reflected the predominant norms that exist around the academic profession. Particularly in research-intensive universities, teaching provides no significant payoffs to professional advancement and students’ evaluations of professors carry a limited weight in promotion decisions (Winslow, 2010: 782). Therefore, the (partly formal, partly informal) norm attributing more value to research than to teaching helps sustain professors’ implicit refusal to take responsibility. It should be highlighted, though, that the perceived usefulness of such training is gendered. At our university, in the period 2009–2014, women made up 56% of the participants of teaching training courses, despite representing just 37.5% of faculty members (UPF Igualtat, 2016). This aligns with the fact that, on average, women allocate more time to teaching than men, with ‘gender status expectations rais[ing] one’s definition of the work required to be successful at tasks deemed appropriate for one’s gender’ (Winslow, 2010: 789).

Summary of findings

Table 3 provides a summary of the different forms of resistance that GM into higher education curricula faces, namely the denial of the need for gender change, the trivialisation of gender equality and the refusal to accept responsibility. As has been discussed throughout the empirical analysis, resistance builds on several informal rules (values, norms, routines or practices), which are either based on societal gender ideologies (like gender roles, stereotypes and expectations, or post-feminist norms about equality and prejudices against feminist policy) or on apparently gender-neutral academic norms that produce gendered effects (such as the cult of individual merit, the academic freedom norm, or the higher value of research over teaching). All of these non-written rules help sustain the gender regime of universities. While some forms of resistance are inherently institutional or individual, others operate at both levels. After all, members of an organisation ‘internalise the existing informal unequal norms and might act to preserve the status quo’ (Mergaert and Lombardo, 2014: 6). Opposition to change tends to be expressed vocally, with most of the identified resistance therefore falling into the explicit type.

Table 3.

Gendered informal rules and resistance to engendering the higher education curriculum.

Form of resistance	Example	Informal rules	Type of resistance
Denial of the need for gender change	Disbelief about the message or data (i.e. curriculum not considered to affect gender equality)GM opposed as a doctrinal issue (only accepted as a social-sensitising project, outside teaching)Women perceived to be more oriented towards care-giving and men towards professional goals	Organisational culture of disembodiment (i.e. belief in gender-neutral quality criteria)Prejudices against feminist policyGender roles	Institutional and individual, explicitInstitutional and individual, explicitIndividual, explicit
Trivialisation of gender equality	Time will fix gender inequalityImbalance in the academic career is ‘women’s problem’There are no relevant women authors in my field	Fallacy of equalityCult of individual responsibility and meritocracyGendered professoriate’s networks; Masculinity conflated with expertise and reputation	Individual, explicitIndividual, explicitIndividual, explicit
Refusal to accept responsibility	It can’t be imposedIt is not relevant for this discipline/for my course; I wouldn’t know how to apply itLack of engagement in discussionsLow attendance (especially by male professors) to the gender training session	Universities and faculties autonomy;^a Academic freedom in course design^a Knowledge androcentrism; Gender-blind professors’ and managerial staff’s trainingGender stereotypesResearch more valued than teaching in staff promotions;^a Gendered expectations	Institutional and individual, explicitInstitutional, implicit, and individual, explicitIndividual, implicitIndividual, implicit

Note: Own elaboration based on Lombardo and Mergaert (2013: 305).

Partly formal, partly informal rules.

Conclusions

Our analysis provides new empirical evidence on resistance to the implementation of GM in academia, a relatively unexplored sector, with attention paid to both the individual and the institutional levels. Specifically in the case of the higher education curriculum, we show that formal gender norms tend to be ‘forgotten’ through non-actions or non-decisions as well as through decisions that go against them by the different actors intervening in the design, implementation and supervision of curricular reforms. More generally, we also contribute to expanding the theoretical insights of resistance to GM by unveiling the role played by either gender-specific or apparently gender-neutral informal rules which nonetheless produce gendered effects. A feminist institutionalist approach is thus crucial in the study of universities since identifying the enabling informal rules that reinterpret and undermine GM is an essential step in the design of effective implementation strategies to counteract resistance.

An action-research approach is extremely useful in identifying both resistances and the informal rules underpinning them. Furthermore, this approach has the potential to instil a positive feedback loop. For example, our project put GM into teaching on the table as a relevant issue and was embraced by the managerial staff of our school. As a result, GM was included in the improvement plan of the BA in Political Science submitted to evaluation agencies. This action was instrumental in setting up a new gender-specific course. Simultaneously, by providing basic notions on GM, this project also helped sensitise some professors about the need for curricular reform. At the university level, some gender-training workshops for professors have been organised by the teaching innovation centre. Furthermore, a spill-over effect has been set in motion, with similar projects having been led by feminist academics across all schools within our university in the past two years. However, the degree of gender change in the curriculum remains very modest.

Given the widespread resistance, the effectiveness of curricular reforms relies on the provision of strong institutional incentives capable of altering the ‘rules of the game’. In Catalonia, feminist academics and parliamentarians coalesced to include in the Equality Law (Act 17/2015) gender impact assessments and gender improvement plans in the periodical submission of undergraduate and graduate programmes before the regional evaluation agency (article 28). Right after this law was passed the heads of the universities’ equality units requested the presence of this agency as a full member of the Woman and Science Committee. Its director has publicly committed to set specific guidelines – in collaboration with gender experts – for universities to certify their progress in gender curricular change. This legitimises the need for adequate gender training among the professoriate, the staff of quality units within universities, as well as the staff of the evaluation agency. Most crucially, not only will the ‘burden of proof’ no longer fall upon feminist academics or equality units, but their gender expertise is likely to be increasingly valued by universities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to Elisabet Puigdollers, Rebecca Tildesley, Eva Maccioco and Ana Sabartés for their assistance in different phases of the project. The authors are also thankful to Alba Alonso, Emanuela Lombardo and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Last but not least, our gratitude goes to the Head of our Department and the Dean of our Faculty for their support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by the Center for Learning Innovation and Knowledge (CLIK) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Notes

References

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