Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship concerning misogyny and gender-based violence (GBV) in schooling and its impacts. Less attention has been given to how these relations play out in universities.
But just like young people attending school, tertiary students enter university with pre-established ideas about gender. Fuelled by manosphere influence, misogynistic gender beliefs are escalating, and they are also highly emotionally charged. These emotional dimensions of gender are no accident. Rather, opposition to gender equality, anti-racism and queer rights – collectively, ‘anti-genderism’ – is currently providing a vehicle for far-right populism whereby anti-gender campaigns stir-up powerful emotions, which right-wing movements marshal for support.
Such ideas are spread by manosphere sites which promulgate beliefs that feminism is a conspiracy, immigrants and LGBTQIA+ people are threats, men are victims, and masculine life is war. When students enter university swayed by these beliefs, they may be usefully challenged through productive dialogue. They may also react aggressively to female academics or to knowledge they perceive to be threatening.
This is precisely what we are hearing.
Academic women’s experiences
We research gender-related issues in education. Since September 2024, we have gathered stories from Australian academics via surveys and interviews asking if they have witnessed or experienced a rise in anti-social language or behaviours, or resistance to diversity-related curriculum.
Our respondents are predominantly women located across disciplines, but most are in Education. They say that teaching social justice is growing harder and report feeling isolated in their efforts, unsupported by their institutions, ‘toning down’ curriculum to avoid student backlash, and absorbing the moral injury that comes with knowing that silence around injustice feeds bigger issues.
They also say that backlash to diversity-related content is overwhelmingly stemming from white men:
Of the cohorts exhibiting increased levels of misogyny, homophobia, and ableism … it’s white men. (Academic in Education)
It’s the Australian-born white men that are entitled and believe that I exist for their use. There’s no respect, they arrive late … put their feet on the desk. (Business)
Academics note that teaching about gender is particularly fraught:
It’s not safe. We’re more divided politically than ever and… the institution does not have my back. (Education)
According to our research, anti-gender backlash includes verbal and physical intimidation of female academics by male students within the context of classrooms as well as the weaponisation of student evaluations.
One respondent explained, when young men in her classes are presented with pro-feminist or diversity-related content, they collectively use the student evaluations to, “write about their tutor being dangerous and political … and how she should be removed from the university.”
Others say:
I have stopped challenging students for fear of the feedback as I am on probation. (Education)
Anonymous students complain that I’m ‘biased’ or have an agenda, and rate me quite low. My male colleagues who also talk about gender do not get these reactions. (Education)
Comments about student backlash are also consistent with manosphere messaging:
Last week a student expressed their opinion that it was ok to persecute lesbian and gay people because they do not have children and contribute nothing to society, just like childless, single straight women. (Politics)
I had a student suggest that Hitler was misunderstood… [This was] during a class on ‘teaching for diversity’. (Education)
Women who try to report incidents to their institutions invariably say:
Nothing is ever done. Complaints get swept under the rug. (Human Resource Management)
Universities as enablers of GBV
Like schooling in Australia which structurally enables GBV, so too does the higher education sector. Enabling conditions in universities include an inequitable flow of capital and prestige to research (coded masculine) over teaching (coded feminine) and to disciplinary areas dominated by cisgender white men, the naturalisation through institutional gaslighting of everyday sexisms in the academy, unfair promotion mechanisms that devalue knowledge coded feminine, and sexist/racist student evaluations of academic teaching that continue to be used as performance metrics and promotion criteria.
Although women constitute most workers in Australian universities, they remain a minority at every level of seniority. Academic women are more likely to be teaching, and to be teaching feminist forms of knowledge. Consequently, academic men either do not teach, do not teach feminist knowledge, or do not experience backlash with the same intensity if they do.
But it is not only individual men who can exercise ignorance in response to these dynamics. The university exercises this capacity when women are gaslit about their classroom experiences, referred to counsellors to ‘boost their confidence’, or their complaints swept under the rug.
Why we should pay attention
A rising culture of misogynistic attitudes and behaviours across Australian schooling and higher education should be of collective concern. The anti-gender mobilisations captured in our research are not merely harming academic women but must be viewed as part of a broader global movement that threatens democracy. By failing to support academic women and censure anti-genderism, the university is implicated in these trends. Universities can and must do better.
This article is based on the forthcoming article, Learning from women: When the manosphere goes to university from the research study, Teaching in an era of digital influence: Impacts on Australian educators. Data for the study currently includes 220 surveys and 24 in-depth interviews. Human Research Ethics were obtained from The University of Adelaide approval #2024-017.