Transforming Gender Attitudes through Higher Education: The Ethical and Epistemic Role of Female Scholars

Abstract

Female scholars in universities provoke important philosophical questions of justice, equality, and knowledge generation in academic institutions. The paper will consider how women in higher education contribute to changing the education system to achieve sustainable development, not as a goal that is an instrument and thus relevant to one of the policy goals, such as SDG 4, but as an ethical and epistemic one. Going beyond descriptive narrations, the research provides a normative and conceptual study of female academic agency and its relevance in inclusive and equitable education. The paper, based on the feminist philosophy, political philosophy and epistemology critically evaluates the moral duty of the institutions of higher learning to respond to gender inequality and acknowledgment of the marginalized epistemic input. Exemplifying experiential knowledge is used to put philosophical reflection of the structural barriers, epistemic injustice and institutional responsibility into perspective without making empirical or statistical assertions. The discussion shows that structural and epistemic injustice of marginalization of women scholars in the teaching, research, leadership, and policy making processes is a practice that degrades the moral authority and intellectual integrity of higher education. The paper concurs that the gender equity in higher education is not only normative, but also ethically and epistemically obligatory to the establishment of just, sustainable, and inclusive knowledge systems.