Women in Higher Education: Empowering Change (review)

Women in Higher Education: Empowering Change addresses the perennial problems faced by women in higher education and suggests possible strategies to effect change in the status of women and feminist scholarship. JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz states up front that empowerment is attainable but that it cannot be truly achieved without a more significant transformation of institutional values. Further, she rightly cautions against the popular view of interpreting women's progress in higher education in terms of numerical representation. Instead, women's status must be understood in terms of the persistent challenges faced by women within courses, disciplines, departments, and institutions.

It is helpful to organize this review around the "challenges" and "strategies" offered throughout the book. Although the various chapters cover a broad assortment of perspectives (from course-based to disciplinary to departmental to institutional), I was struck by the inherent similarities in both the problems and solutions that were presented.

Curricular transformation is noted as a major challenge across several chapters, as authors describe their efforts to infuse the concept of gender into fields such as health (chap. 1), art (chap. 5), and literature (chap. 7). Chapters 1 and 5 focus specifically on the difficulty of teaching about "women in health" or "women in art" when these fields continue to adopt the "male as norm" perspective.

A related challenge noted throughout the book is that of skepticism—that students, colleagues, and institutional leadership no longer view gender as an "issue." The increasing presence of women as students, faculty, and leaders in higher education, the rise of women's studies as a field of scholarship, and the incorporation of gender into courses spanning the curriculum become "evidence" of women's progress. Those advances can be viewed as masking the central problem, which DiGeorgio-Lutz defines as: Women "still remain a relatively unheard minority population when it comes to defining the values, goals, and ever-evolving mission statements of colleges and universities" (p. 1).

As evidence buttressing this viewpoint, Annica Kronsell (chap. 3) describes the isolation experienced by faculty women in a department in which they are the numerical minority and in which male perspectives continue to be central to the department's norms and values. Such an environment contributes to a sense of "homelessness" among the women faculty, who feel stifled, unconfident, and passive.

In Chapter 4, Sharlene Hesse-Biber discusses barriers to advancing feminist scholarship as its own interdisciplinary field. Instead, "feminist scholars conducting research from their disciplinary standpoints consult with their colleagues from other disciplines, but little change in disciplinary approach emerges" (p. 58). Bonnie Morris (chap. 11) describes the current backlash against feminist studies. She attributes this backlash and widespread disrespect for the field to several factors, including conservative ideological shifts, institutional cutbacks, and a concern that women's studies has become too text-oriented and theoretical.

The authors propose various solutions to address the challenges raised throughout the book. A primary theme echoed in several chapters is that gender should not be viewed as an "add-on." For example, curricular transformation is not achieved simply by including readings about or by women. Rather, gender issues should be integrated into course content and pedagogy. This approach is particularly important when students are skeptical of "gendered" perspectives. Margaret Konz Snooks (chap. 1) advises instructors not to begin by discussing gender inequality, which students are likely to challenge outright, but to start with more familiar and acceptable topics that lay the groundwork for an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual issues related to gender.

Pedagogy can also facilitate students' awareness of gender issues by promoting "engagement" in learning. Cindy Simon Rosenthal describes a course on gender and leadership that used three different research projects aimed at achieving "higher level learning" through experiential education and reflection (chap. 2). In Chapter 6, Peggy Douglas describes an approach termed "radical learning" which promotes "discovering...