ABSTRACT
Conventional policy studies in postsecondary education assume that academic structures, processes and practices are gender blind. The lack of attention to gender, both as conceptual category and analytical lens, means that the differential experience of women and male academics is attributed to individual differences rather than to the consequences of a male ordered world. This chapter provides the theoretical and methodological tools to produce policy analysis. It introduces the theoretical foundations underpinning feminist theories, followed by a feminist critique of conventional policy analysis. The chapter discusses selected studies whose conceptual design, analysis and interpretive methods exemplify feminist critical policy studies. Consequently, in the literature on postsecondary education one finds explanations for college dropouts as the individual’s failure to engage in activities that facilitate academic and social integration. Connecting postpositivist policy analysis with the feminist theories emphasizing analysis of power and politics does provide new ways of framing policy agendas for postsecondary education, and new policy analysis methodologies are emerging.
