ABSTRACT
In a rapidly growing digital world, the increasing demand for advanced qualifications fuelled by an enthusiastic young cohort for better employment prospects, has given a new direction to cross-border mobility and internationalization of higher education. The human capital theories envisage the importance of higher education and how it enhances the prospects of employability. The more globalized markets of the world have provided insights into the greater benefits of higher education leading to a higher demand for higher education graduates. Across the border, internationalization abroad and internationalization at home are given utmost priority to produce a highly competitive employable chunk of the population, as it not only provides a macroscopic exposure of labour market but also enriches the power to adapt to skills and challenges of the future. The modified definition of internationalization emphasizes that it should be more inclusive and channelled so that it is not restricted only to a small elite group of mobile students and scholars but directed to the masses. Since student mobility is a result of various factors ranging from higher education capacity, personal and professional goals, and human capital targets to social, cultural, and economic factors that impact participation in cross-border mobility, it is important to build a gender perspective around it. In this direction, a less researched dimension around massification is the gendered perspective of internationalization of higher education across borders as a subset, of inclusive internationalization. In this light, the paper briefly examines the theoretical background around inclusive internationalization and highlights the gendered realities of trends in the internationalization of higher education using time-series analysis through a country-wise approach. The analysis is further extended to identify countries based on their performances with policy recommendations.
