Power relationships in higher education from the gender perspective : inclusion, exclusion, and resistance mechanisms

Abstract

The general objective of the study is to understand and analyze what kind of power relations are developed in the Bolivian University. The qualitative approach was adopted that allows recreating social and symbolic interaction, assembling the voice of the actors. The sample has a non-probabilistic intentional character, having conducted a total of 80 interviews with teachers and university authorities. A semi-structured guide of in-depth interviews and observation charts has been designed for the ethnographic record. It is concluded that academic women perform differently than teachers in university management and policy. Three types of mechanisms mark their professional performance: inclusion, exclusion, and resistance, with a clear predominance of the latter. The factors that determine the functioning of these mechanisms are the androcentric organizational culture of the university, the family context, and the subjectivity of the teachers themselves. The habitus of “having to be a woman-wife-mother-professional home mistress” that configures the current ideology of women’s multifunctionality prevails consistently. In short, there is active and real power of men and another passive power of women that raises the need to make a critique of the position occupied by men and women, and of the subjective valuations that people and collectives have about power relations in the university context.