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Luqian Huang, Durham University, United KingdomAbstract
Equality, inclusivity, and the promotion of wider participation remain core objectives within the global higher education sector. Despite the apparent progress, exemplified by the increasing number of female students surpassing their male counterparts in many universities, gender inequality continues to persist and warrants sustained attention. Like many other Asian countries, there is little gender disparity during the nine-year compulsory education (primary and secondary education) in China, but gender disparities become starkly pronounced when it comes to higher education. Such inequality against women can be reflected in many folds, particularly in terms of more obstacles for female students to enter prestigious institutions and obtaining master’s and doctoral degrees. The increasing access of female students to universities and degree-granting institutions in China indicates that it may not be the overt policies, laws, or sovereign barriers explicitly preventing women from pursuing higher education. It might be those subtle, non-coercive mechanisms through which gender inequalities continue to manifest in higher education and beyond that require more scrutiny. This paper will draw on the Foucauldian framework of governmentality to understand how power, knowledge, and discourse contribute to form the social norms according to which the constructions of the subject, like gender, are realized and normalized in Chinese higher education context. Through unravelling the link between affective governmentality as gendered apparatus and gender inequalities in education, this paper can help identify affective governance from both individual and social agencies and therefore inform educational practitioners to take actions.
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Conference: ECE2025Stream: Education
This paper is part of the ECE2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Huang L. (2025) Incorporating Affect and Governmentality in Understanding Gender Inequalities in Chinese Higher Education ISSN: 2188-1162 The European Conference on Education 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 131-143) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2025.12
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2025.12
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