We argue that insights into how undergraduate education can tackle gender inequalities need to be based upon broad and deep investigations of the various spaces in which gender is (re)produced and transformed in university settings. Students experiences of academic disciplines, curricula and pedagogy are important, but students experience them within the wider university experience, from which they also learn. We present a rationale for a more holistic approach to studying gender and an outline of a research design that aims to study how gender is (re)produced and transformed through university experience. European and Anglophone research has focused fairly extensively on gendered didactics and learning and teaching in universities but universities remain gender divided and unequal in complex ways (Leathwood and Read, 2009). Research aimed at understanding how gender is embedded in pedagogic practices and relationships often seeks to contribute to a transformative agenda and it is often based disciplines (Abbas et al, 2016). However, this literature is usually separated from research that looks at students gendered identities and the prevalence of gendered stereotypes on campus (e.g. Waller et al, 2014). In the social sphere, gendered relationships are fostered at social events, through dating, in students union clubs and societies, travelling between spaces and in online spaces. Literature and policy research in this vein focuses on how the relationships and activities that constitute students’ social spaces can foster sexualised gender stereotypes which sanction behaviour that can make campuses dangerous spaces and sites for sexual assault (Phipps and Young, 2015; Hayley, 2016). However, gendered identities at university are complex and they are not all negative. The social and educational spaces of universities may reproduce or transform the identities students arrive with in positive or negative ways. Gender is a process that cross-cuts any single environment and in this paper we draw upon the work of Doreen Massey (1994) which link space and time to the construction of gender. We use this to frame a project that can connect and make distinct the spatially diverse ways in which gender is constructed in higher education.

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