White Paper on Envisioning Gender Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity for Southeast Asian Higher Education

This White Paper examines how strengthening higher education leadership with gender equity, diversity, and inclusivity can contribute towards the development of enhanced spaces for collective learning and innovation contributing to Sustainable Development. It brings together the findings from the Project on Strengthening Leadership with Gender Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity in South East Asia implemented by the South East Asian Ministers of Education Organization Regional Centre for Higher Education and Development (SEAMEO RIHED) with the support of the British Council between January 2022 and October 2023. This Project was designed to take a regional approach to foster gender equity, diversity, and inclusivity by exploring their diverse interpretations across South East Asia and involved 35 universities from Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam, as well as five UK partner universities. In addition, the findings presented include data from a previous scoping study undertaken by Ridgeway Information published in March 2023 on South East Asian and East Asian countries.

 

Political contexts and cultural diversity vary greatly across the region, but some commonalities were observed between both regional and global contexts. These were, that while there is a growing diversity in awareness of gender inequality and its importance, the conceptualisation of this is often simplistic and policies on other diversities, such as class, race, dis/ability and ethnic difference lag further behind. Structural and cultural discrimination form an intersectional process, where gender interacts with other markers of social difference in mutually reinforcing ways. Despite gender being enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a prerequisite for peace, prosperity, and sustainability, HEIs have historically been structured as gendered and elite hierarchies, with deeply embedded inequalities. If HEIs are able to tackle this within their own institutions and leadership structures, they have the potential and capacity to make a significant difference within their local communities.