Despite nearly half of all entry-level PhD candidates across the EU27 countries being women, women remain underrepresented at the highest levels of academic employment (e.g. full professorship or ‘grade A’ positions), holding less than a third of these positions; the largest gap remains in science and engineering, where women represent just 20% of the ‘grade A’ positions (European Commission, 2025).   Amongst heads of EU27 academic institutions, roughly a quarter are women (European Commission, 2025).  Such trends are visible worldwide, pointing to the prevalence of un/welcoming, sometimes overtly hostile, masculinised academic cultures that reward uninterrupted availability, informal sponsorship, competitiveness, and care-free career trajectories (Orupabo, 2025; Jones & Floyd, 2024). 

Gender inequity in higher education is not a problem of numeric parity alone, but of how organisational cultures are made visible (or rendered invisible) through data practices. What institutions choose to measure, whose experiences/what experiences count as evidence, and how this information is read – each profoundly shape whether gender-based inequities, harassment and violence are understood as structural problems requiring recognition and cultural change, or as individualised issues of “pipeline leakage,” merit, choice, temperament, or mis/interpretation. When university data metrics on outcomes such as student experience and academic career progression are gathered and understood without interrogation of underlying gender norms in higher education, institutional inequities can appear as individual deficit; experiences of sexism and gender-related violence can be more easily explained away as either one-off incidents, perpetrated by ‘bad actors’ or, worse, exaggerated, fallacious and not worthy of institutional attention. 

Gender-related harassment/violence and more everyday forms of sexism in university settings are enabled when academic organisational life normalises male-coded entitlement to space, attention, and gatekeeping power, while making the costs of resistance and reporting high. The UniSAFE prevalence report provides a concrete indicator of this dynamic through its reporting findings; when most targets do not report, and when uncertainty and non-recognition are common, the institution’s “official” data will systematically understate the problem – allowing sexist cultures to persist without organisational accountability (Lipinsky et al., 2022). Of course, such misrecognition is exacerbated by global political movements aimed at the destruction of equity and diversity as principles of inclusive governance (Butler, 2024) – sentiments that find their way into university spaces and complicate the pragmatics of higher education policy initiatives focused on gender equity and sexual harassment (Gray et al., forthcoming).

In this symposium, we grapple with the conference theme of ‘knowing and acting’ within the context of gender inequities and gender-related violence in higher education.  Across the three included papers, offering national perspectives from Australia, England and Denmark, we consider the framing of institutional conditions and supports. From the Australian context, we present findings from a national survey of academics detailing significant differences in how incidents of ‘everyday sexisms’ are read by men, women and gender diverse academics, with implications for ‘knowing and acting’ to create safer and more inclusive workplace cultures. From England, we present university staff members’ perspectives on gender-related violence and contextual enablers, considering which institutions ‘act’ and in what ways.  Lastly, from Denmark, we present the experiences of early-career academic women working in male-dominated STEM departments, where over-reliance on representation metrics obscures recognition of the everyday inequities and the emotional labour of women’s diversity work. As a group, these papers ask how the current conditions of a neoliberal, metric-driven academic landscape impact what institutional leaders (think they) know about the experiences of women and gender diverse people in the academy, what is seen or obscured, and the direction of institutional action towards gender equity.

Butler, J. (2024). Who’s Afraid of Gender? London: Penguin Random House. European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. (2025). She figures 2024 – Gender in research and innovation – Statistics and indicators. Publications Office of the European Union. Gray, E., Ullman, J., & Blaise, M. (forthcoming). “WOMEN ARE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST ON THE BASIS OF SEX”: Anti-trans and gender critical epistemologies in Australian universities. Jones, K., & Floyd, A. (2024). Women academics’ experiences of maternity leave in the neoliberal university: Unmasking governmentality. Gender, Work & Organisation, 31(3), 92-114. Lipinsky, A., Schredl, C., Baumann, H., Humbert, A., & Tanwar, J. (2022). Gender-based violence and its consequences in European Academia, Summary results from the UniSAFE survey. Report. Project no.101006261. Orupabo, J., Nadim, M., Mangset, M., & Halrynjo, S. (2025). (Un)divided work devotion? Navigating the ideal worker norm in academia. Studies in Higher Education, online pre-print, 1–13.