A mixed methods research focusing on the feminist perspective was applied using an adaptation of Bronfrenbrenner’s (2005) ecological cycle to investigate the causes and appropriate responses to the underrepresentation of the Ugandan Muslim Woman in the field of higher education. The premise of the study was based upon human rights. The UN Millennium Development Goals Report (2007) suggested that despite the leaps and bounds female emancipation groups were taking toward a free, fair and equitable environment toward education, women still fared poorly in accessing higher education. Equality of access to and attainment of educational qualifications was necessary if more women were to become agents of change since education for girls was argued to be the single most effective way of alleviating poverty (King 1993). However, "Traditional cultures and sexist stereotypes diffused by media and religious extremists often affect girls' access to education; dropout rates and professional or higher education opportunities" (UN Report 2003). Notwithstanding Uganda’s affirmative action policies that openly favoured women’s progress in education, various factors adapted from Bronfrenbrenner’s ecological cycle (2005) were found to combine to lower the academic performance and aspirations of girls even when they did remain in school. An online questionnaire and semi structured in depth interviews captured women’s voices at Makerere University, Uganda and these were qualitatively analysed and coded into themes which were identified as enablers, barriers and strategies adapted by Muslim women in their pursuit of higher education. Interestingly enough religion and culture were perceived as both barriers and enablers depending on the attitudes and perceptions of different families. It is hoped that the findings of this study would subsequently make a significant contribution, so that women’s education is more effectively represented as a means towards achieving targets set by several mandates including the Millennium development goals (MDG’s), Education for All (EFA) and Widening Participation into higher Education.

This is a study about nine women graduates, including myself, who come from white working class backgrounds and it considers the enduring influence of higher education in our lives. I was interested, firstly, in why research to date has paid limited attention to the experience of higher education generally and to that of graduates in particular and, secondly, in why white men and women from working class backgrounds remain under-represented in higher education despite a decade of policy interventions aimed at increasing their participation. Since I also come from this background I have chosen to take an auto/biographical life history approach to look back at my experiences and at those of some of my contemporaries in the light of what we might have expected from our participation in higher education. My commitment is to doing reflexive feminist research which has an ethical aim and a moral purpose. To this end I have used Sen's capability approach as the basis for analysis. This led me to crafting life histories as counter-narratives to de-humanising accounts of working class participation in higher education. They address instead the value of higher education to lives lived over time. I have concluded that analyses of the value of higher education must also account for heterosexual norms and for the problematic nature of conceptualising value itself. My aim was thus to contribute to a new way of talking about the value of participation in higher education and to inspire further research inquiry from the perspective of students and graduates.

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This thesis presents a small-scale qualitative research study of women's careers in some of the universities of Pakistan. The area is explored through the in-depth life story interviews of fifteen women professors, in senior positions, in public sector universities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The rationale for conducting this research is both personal and professional. My work in public sector higher education for more than a decade has developed the need to explore and research the area of higher education from a feminist perspective. The objective of the study is to understand the lives of these women through their own narratives. I wanted them to share their individual experiences, opinions about their childhood, family, education, work, progress, opportunities and challenges so that I could develop some positive role models for young women aspiring to pursue a career in higher education. The factors identified both negatively and positively influenced their professional journeys within a theoretical framework of patriarchy. Semi-structured interviews were used, which suited the objectives, as it was expected that more information would be gathered through flowing conversations. The data collected through this process was thematised, interpreted and analysed in the context of the selected theories of family, social position, women and higher education, childcare, and work outside homes within the broader framework of patriarchy. These emerging themes are embedded in the patriarchal values and norms of Pakistani society. An attempt to develop a local feminist lens was made so that a linkage can be formed between women working in Pakistani higher education institutions and elsewhere in the world. It is anticipated that this research will be a foundation for future research in the area of successful women in leadership positions in Pakistani higher education institutions, and will fill some of the gaps in existing knowledge in the region. I also expect that this research will contribute to existing knowledge about the issue on a global scale.

‘Class, motherhood and mature studentship – (re-)constructing and (re)- negotiating subjectivity’ is a thesis which explores the complex psychosocial dimensions of aspiration, motivation and participation in higher education as a working class mature student and mother. Psychosocial interviews were used to explore the lives and experiences of thirteen working class mothers who became mature students at four Universities in South Wales. Taking an explicitly psychosocial approach to analysis, and drawing on the researcher’s own subjectivity as a tool used in concert with an eclectic range of relational, psychoanalytic work, it considers the emotional/affective and unconscious elements of aspiration, motivation and the consequences for subjectivity as working class women, and as mothers and students within the landscape of contemporary neo-liberalism. The thesis aims to offer nuanced understandings of aspiration, motivation and transformation as a complex psychosocial phenomena centred around a web of intergenerational and affective practices in relation to classed relational, cultural, historical, geographical, and temporal contexts. As a thesis it argues that; aspiration, motivation and participation in higher education needs to be understood within the context of real women’s lives and the relational and affective landscape of family, class, gender and culture if issues of aspiration are to be addressed. It considers that paying attention to unconscious processes is central to academic understandings of this psychosocial phenomena, supporting the warrant for psychoanalytically inflected research methodologies. It contends that aspiration, motivation, participation in higher education and social mobility are complex processes containing painful aspects, conflicts and contradictions. It argues also that the way in which higher education is used by the women as a space in which to (re)- negotiate subjectivity is more complex than government agendas of social mobility take account of. Finally, in highlighting and exploring the links between trauma and higher education, it suggests and supports the idea that the potential of the ‘space’ of higher education goes beyond transparent universal understandings. In addition to being a material space, it was also an imagined and emotional ‘place’. For the women in this study it was a ‘place’ of safety and containment but not without risk.

As part of the process of widening participation in higher education there has been an accelerated growth in women’s access to undergraduate study. The main aim of this research is to understand generational differences in women’s opportunities to attend university in England. The mother-daughter relationship is used to explore the role played by mothers in their daughters’ education beyond compulsory schooling, at a time when transition from secondary education to university has become commonplace. An investigation is made into the strategies mothers are employing to improve their daughters’ higher education choices and prospects. Using a qualitative methodology, paired mothers and their adult daughters have shared their views through in-depth interviews that discuss education, class, feminism and mothering. The mothers’ home and school backgrounds are examined in relation to their daughters’ upbringings, to consider differences in social mobility between the generations. A Bourdieusian framework is used to provide a theoretical underpinning, including how middle class values are being reproduced through mothers’ transmission of their economic, social and cultural capital. Research findings reveal that mothers are providing their daughters with extended advantage to access a university education, often in contrast to their own backgrounds. Mothers are simultaneously maintaining their daughters’ lifestyle during the study years, supporting their daughters during a period of extended adolescence. This enhanced mothering practice is promoting a transformation in familial outcomes and challenges the historical norm of fathers’ class background determining women’s imagined futures. Overall the research found that despite significant social change the daughters’ generation is failing to engage with feminist issues. The daughters’ decisions to maintain stereotypical female roles challenge the continuing progress of equal opportunities for women.

This exploratory theory building research examines women’s leadership journeys within Higher Education in the UK. It takes a critical management perspective and draws on Bourdieu’s Social Action theory to provide a view through a new lens to answer the following question. Why, despite advances in equality legislation and policy, are there still so few women in powerful leadership positions in the UK HE sector? A positive deviance sampling approach was used to identify women who have reached very senior positions in HE in pre-1992 universities in the UK. Analysis of career narratives was conducted focusing on women’s world views and drawing on their sensemaking to provide new insights into how gender and power shape the modern, complex world of work. Findings demonstrate that structural power inequalities persist resulting in discrimination and sexism throughout women’s career journeys. Bourdieu’s concepts of the field, capital, habitus and symbolic violence are used to shine a light on the key role of cultural hegemony and symbolic violence. The concept of the internalisation of structural constraints, resulting in psychological constraints to agency and action is introduced.

In the academic year 1996/1997, the number of women undergraduates enrolled on degree courses at UK universities for the first time in history surpassed the number of men (Dyhouse, 2006). Year-on-year, statistics continue to indicate that women outnumber men in higher education (HE). Feminist scholars have noted that, as a consequence, women’s participation in HE has in recent years been constructed as an unequivocal ‘success story’, with women widely regarded as both outnumbering and outperforming men (Dyhouse, 2006; Leathwood and Read, 2009). This thesis seeks to trouble the notion that women really are the educational ‘winners’ by virtue of their gains at the point of access by highlighting some enduring gender inequalities within HE – that is, women's uneven experiences of the cultures and structures of HE by gender, class, ethnicity and discipline. Using a qualitative case study design, this thesis seeks to explore the everyday ‘lived’ experience of a small number of women undergraduates studying either a science, technology, engineering or mathematical (STEM) discipline or arts/humanities discipline at one high-performing British university. Using a combination of focus group interviews and 14 longitudinal case studies of individual women (comprising participant-kept diaries, in-depth interviews and email interviews), this study seeks to provide a detailed understanding of women's lives both inside and outside of their course and their negotiations of academic achievement, disentangling some of the complex processes involved in identifying with, and specializing in a discipline over time. In this study, a ‘patchwork’ theoretical approach has been adopted in order to conceptualise women’s identities, incorporating insights from feminist post-structural theory, new material feminisms and Becky Francis’ (2012) concept of gender monoglossia and heteroglossia as re-worked from Bakhtin (1981, 1987). This study indicates that women's gender and academic identities are intricately interwoven and often complex, contradictory and precarious – with women differently taking up and discarding dominant discourses of the ‘ideal’ and ‘successful’ university student in line with their distinct classed, ethnic and ‘aged’ backgrounds. This study also highlights the role that academic disciplines play in shaping women’s lived university experience both inside and outside of formalized learning contexts. In particular, the data suggests that the discourses of academic success open to the women were uneven, and powerfully shaped by the science/arts divide. Yet this study also highlights how the high-performing university was constructed by many women as a positive and freeing space, offering up a variety of discourses of student success.