Women's Empowerment as a Tool for Sustainable Development of Higher Education and Research in the Digital Age

Introduction

On September 25, 2015 193 UN member countries agreed upon 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to transform the global society until 2030 (UN General Assembly, 2015). This chapter will focus on SDG 5 “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” (p.18) with regard to higher education and research (HE&R) worldwide. Of special interest in this respect are the targets of combatting all forms of discrimination against women, eliminating gender-based violence (GBV), ensuring women’s full participation in leadership at all levels of decision-making, providing equal access to economic resources and technologies, and adoption of policies and laws to secure women’s empowerment. The progress towards achieving SDG 5 is accelerating, but still “no country has fully achieved the promise of gender equality” (Equal Measures 2030, n.d.).

This research contributes to the analysis of the worldwide deficit of gender equality in HE&R, which is specifically detrimental to the sustainable development in the digital age, when knowledge and technologies play a crucial role. The study applies gender approach as a method of abstraction from biological differences between men and women to concentrate on socially, economically and culturally significant inequalities between the sexes. This method is widely used in applied political and management studies as an efficient approach to the areas where change is needed.

The gender analysis method applied in this chapter examines historic and present social relations in HE&R in gender perspective in order to identify inequalities between women and men in access to decision-making, resource allocation, and management. This chapter investigates which gender inequalities impede the development of HE&R worldwide and, based on the international experience, suggests recommendations for improving HE&R systems and organizations to ensure sustainable growth of the global economy of knowledge.

Background

The international community of gender researchers in HE&R has shown an increasing interest in gender issues related with the production and transfer of knowledge. Despite a general consensus that gender inequality in academia does exist, such issues as women’s participation in higher education (HE) management and decision-making, access to research funding, and gender disparity across study fields require more in-depth investigation. The established status quo should be questioned and revised based on the analysis of empirical data. The persistency of gender imbalance in global HE is aggravated by the general rigidity of the institutional cultures of universities (Shepherd, 2017). Investigating women’s share and performance in HE&R is intrinsically connected with ideologies, gender equality policies, scientific quality, and academic practice (Powell, 2018), so any gender research should be put into a broader societal context.

Women’s presence in HE&R occurs naturally today, but it is in fact an achievement of the long-standing movement for women’s rights and gender equality that is referred to as “feminism.” Women’s access to education and research has been one of the gender-specific issues on the general democratization agenda, so the historical progress in this field should be framed within feminist theory. The core of feminist theory is the notion that gender is socially constructed and embraces the social expectations, beliefs, norms and stereotypes of a “typical man” (masculinity) and a “typical woman” (femininity). Feminist theory views gender as similar to class in that it has two manifestations: men and women. The genders differ in power distribution and social status, with men being the privileged, dominating, higher-status class, and women the subordinate, lower-status class with limited access to resources and political, economic and human rights (Else-Quest & Hyde, 2018).