Founded on and sustained through patriarchal thought and value systems, higher education remains a highly gendered and en/gendering institution. This reflects and simultaneously constitutes epistemological injustice, and creates a viscous cycle or de/privilege. Moreover, regionality de-centres and further marginalizes women academics, and those…

The role of nuns in the Catholic church as carers and caregivers has been given scant attention. This paper narrates a historical contextualised tale of an ethic of care, caregiving and caring. Interview data were drawn from a qualitative study of four Catholic nuns. Interviews were informal and conversational, with participants asked to reflect…

Purpose: This paper examines the experiences of a team of female academics (teaching a large cohort of undergraduate students) and the coping mechanisms used to combat the challenges they confront in the Australian higher education sector. Design/methodology/approach: Using a reflective autoethnographic method and strengths perspective, the…

This qualitative study explored a targeted recruitment initiative that was designed to attract and recruit female academic staff in STEM disciplines at an Australian University. Semi-structured, one-on-one interviews were conducted with female and male key informants: 16 Panel Members and six Applicants. Codebook Thematic Analysis was applied…

In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics' experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a…

Frenetic digital timescapes reduce academic life to the endless achievement of metrics. These forces produce unsustainable work practices that disconnect us from ourselves, from ideas, from the natural world and from each other. While there is a substantial body of literature critiquing this, the use of arts-based inquiry into academic work is…

The nursing workforce constitutes the largest professional health workforce in Australia. Nursing is traditionally a female dominated profession. This study reviewed Australian universities that provide entry to practice nursing education. The study identified the distribution of females and males in leadership in nursing education, the…

In University life, the first women to achieve status or leadership positions inevitably are perceived as role models to their colleagues, peers and students. Role model theory suggests that although we generally understand the meaning of terms such as "role model" or "mentor", the position of role model has several dimensions…

This paper conceptualises the inaction of school leadership teams in response to systemic sexual harassment as institutional gaslighting, a theoretical tool to date unutilised in studies of sexual harassment in educational settings. Drawing on case studies of two women teachers who experienced sustained sexual harassment in Australian schools, and…

This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys' private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these…

A significant body of work problematises the assumption that student evaluations of teaching (SET) actually measure teaching quality. This is concerning, given that SET are increasingly relied upon not only to evaluate candidates for employment (so job acquisition is influenced by flawed data) but also to inform performance metrics for those in…

A gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) exists. Fewer females enter academia or advance to senior level positions in academia than the number of females who earn advanced degrees. There are many reasons for this, but common themes include disproportionate responsibilities for childcare and imposter syndrome. For…

The workplace for early-career researchers (ECRs) in STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) is highly competitive; ECRs urgently need to publish and attract funding to secure their next job. The literature suggests this environment is more difficult for women than for men. They start the postdoctoral period in equal…

This article examines how women academics at an Australian regional university perceived caring responsibilities as an extension of their paid employment during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores how women academics negotiated boundaries around paid work, caring as a component of paid work, and their private caring…

This article reports on a study analysing changes in the use of digital technologies and working from home during the COVID-19 crisis and the impact of these changes on the wellbeing of five female university lecturers from Australia and Sweden. Applying collaborative autoethnographical methods, this study employed Weick's sensemaking framework to…