Men, gender and knowledge construction in higher education

Academia, higher education and knowledge production continue to be gendered and male-dominated, despite increasing enrolment of women, and the advancement of policies promoting gender equality in higher education across the world. The place and dynamics of men and masculinities in higher education are explored in more detail through a focus on Latin America, and specifically the discipline of education in Chile. In recent years, the Chilean higher education system has advanced in creating and implementing gender-equality policies in research to promote the participation of women in knowledge production. However, these policies have not addressed either the resistance or the complexities of what it means to advance a gender-equality policy agenda in highly feminized disciplinary fields such as education. Drawing from the discussion on hegemonic masculinities, we analyse the discourses of university scholars in the educational disciplinary area. In a qualitative study (2017-2020), we analysed the national policies on knowledge and gender during 2010s in Chile, including 62 semi-structured interviews with scientific policymakers, research directors and academics from the educational field. This chapter shows that the presence of a high number of women in the educational field has been considered a mirror of gender equality, inhibiting a reflexive process on masculinity and its privilege in historically feminized spaces. This chapter is an invitation to focus more on questions of institutionalized sexism in academia, which perpetuate historical practices of gender discrimination.