ABSTRACT
A chance meeting at a seminar on gender and development between two early career female academics from Tanzania and Ireland in 2010 set in train events and relationships that led to the Gender Awareness and Transformation through Education (GATE) project, an institutional collaboration between Tanzanian and Irish Higher Education Institutions supporting capacity development and gender mainstreaming. The insights gathered through this project culminated in the essays shared in this edited collection. Both scholars were interested in gender (in)equality in higher education and in understanding how universities, traditionally built to educate men and places of masculine power and privilege, could be transformed to become gender equitable and inclusive. Higher education institutions (HEIs) represent important sites of epistemic power where gender norms and cultural practices can be examined, explored, challenged, and reimagined. They are also key sites where values and world views are reinforced and reproduced (Bourdieu, 1985; Byrd, 2019; Gander, 2019).
