Higher education policies on gender equality: standpoint of Women's Studies in India

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are positioned as key drivers of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of them being SDG5, the global drive to address gender inequality, and another SDG4, ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all.

The University Grants Commission (UGC), responsible for promoting and coordinating university education in India, has long taken steps towards these. These include policy interventions, including the quota system, to enable changes to the composition of students and staff; and the institutionalization of anti-hegemonic scholarship, including Women’s Studies Centres (WSCs) in the late 1980s. Objectives of WSCs were (i) to question the dominant systems of knowledge and social formation within the existing educational system and (ii) to make the HEIs accountable to the social concern against injustice, marginalization and oppression of women.

From their inception, these Centres have been awkwardly positioned within universities’ intellectual traditions, institutional identities and notions of social justice, with minimal infrastructure and fluctuating financing. However, at national level the role of the 163 WCS was afformed in the UGC guidelines as “help[ing] India achieve her UN Sustainable Development Goal of Promoting Equality and Empowerment of Women”. Misalignment in national policy discourses have been a constant feature of the sector, with the most recent emerging the 2020 National Education Policy, where the role for Women’s Studies is omitted entirely.

Set against this backdrop of complex and competing discourses about access and gender justice, was a mixed method study of universities of India and South Africa conducted in 2019. This paper reports on how the implementation and reception of policies of access and gender mainstreaming, intersect with the politics of participation for marginalized academics. We draw particularly from the insider perspectives of the academic staff of WCS in the 4 higher education institutions in India, to point to the ambiguities, messiness and contradictions of endeavors to achieve ‘gender equality’ at this level of quality education, including policy-implementation gaps, perverse incentives, broken pipelines from student populations, and the production of the New Middle Class.