Women's Empowerment in Higher Education Institutions from the Perspective of Gender Space: Educational Knowledge to Implementation

Abstract

This article explores the idea of women's empowerment as a key element in such a philosophy. It outlines the four pillars of empowerment—economic, political, knowledge, and psychological—on the basis of empirical study. The most successful cases of emancipation via education have taken place in informal education programmes that aim to encourage critical thinking on gendered social norms and the encouragement of corrective measures. So, the paper says, both macro- and micro-level interventions are necessary to establish a changed gender division of labour, with the former focusing on the private sphere, which severely restricts women's availability and opportunities for transformational action. Women's empowerment relies heavily on the development of agency, both on an individual and collective scale. For this to work, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) led by women must be involved. Policy challenges are discussed in the last section of the article. This paper concluded that when compared to their male counterparts, female Chinese school leaders were more pessimistic about the progress towards gender parity in contemporary China. Despite this, many of our participants painted an optimistic picture of gender relations in Chinese schools, with many assuming they were working towards achieving gender parity for all of their pupils. Women's empowerment remains a promising theoretical premise that has not received concomitant operationalization and support to reach its full range of possibilities, so there is a need to challenge its normative meaning and demand that it be taken seriously as a theory of change in gender relations.