‘It’s not something that we think about with regard to curriculum.’ Exploring gender and equality awareness in higher education curriculum and pedagogy

In recent years, gender mainstreaming has increasingly been positioned as a central policy imperative in many countries. At the same time, gender as a focus of academic study has come under attack in the USA and Europe, and some suggest there to be a crisis in feminist teaching. This renders it vital to explore in the context of contemporary higher education where gender and feminist content and approaches are present and absent. This research set out to develop insight through a cross-disciplinary, qualitative case study including documentary analysis alongside staff and student interviews. Findings highlighted contradictions, including that people often claim to champion gender and diversity generally whilst simultaneously rejecting responsibility for the same issues in their own teaching. These insights identify challenges, including attribution of responsibility for inequalities around the representation of gender as belonging elsewhere, with others, in terms of both teaching spaces and temporality.