Gendering the Massification Generation: Higher Education Access and Choice in India

Gendering the Massification Generation examines why young people from the same families and communities in India experience different decision-making processes regarding higher education access because of their gender. In India and other contexts where higher education is massifying, and gender parity of enrolment has been achieved at the undergraduate level, there are still many questions to be asked about gender and access to higher education. Based on an exploratory study of gendered higher education access and choice within the state of Haryana, India, the authors explore the gender inequalities of higher education access and choice in the Indian context and connect these with the broader international phenomenon of widening participation. Through an in-depth analysis of the ‘massification generation’, where young people from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds are accessing higher education, often for the first time in their families and communities, readers are encouraged to apply a lens of social disadvantage and gender and to recognise the norms and transgressions of femininity and masculinity in relation to higher education access and choice. With global implications for the ways in which gender is analysed and framed in widening participation research and policy, this is the ideal book for scholars, students and policy makers working on higher education, as well as for researchers and NGOs specialising in gender, school-to-higher education transitions, international development, sociology and area studies.