Women's Experience and Gender Bias in Higher Education

Researchers have shown that women are underrepresented in all facets of post-secondary education. Long-standing biases and gender stereotypes discourage women and from studying science-related fields and from pursuing a career in academia and different professional environments. Moreover, those women that do enter academia have not made equitable gains in hiring and promotion in faculty and administrative positions. These gaps in leadership have created an opportunity for institutions to advance the development and mobility of women in spite of the challenges they often experience; specifically, racism, sexism, ageism and classism. Female representation still needs to be improved in key roles in the field, and the way in which an equitable education contributes to fairer and less biased academic and professional environments worldwide should be more investigated.

Frontiers in Education is proud to offer this platform to foreground research focused on women's experience and gender bias in higher education. The work presented here highlights the diversity of research performed across the entire breadth of Higher Education research and presents advances in theory, experiment, and method with applications to compelling problems.

We welcome high quality submissions on inclusive education from diverse disciplinary and international perspectives, including empirical, conceptual and theoretical research. As an example, studies about the gender bias that currently persist in Higher Education, the gap between legislative development and daily practices at universities, inequality between women and men is evident in access to higher-level academic roles (such as Chairs), as well as to management (rectorships), due to the persistence of mechanisms producing gender discrimination in the university are welcome in this collection.