Women's centers in universities and colleges in the United States are flourishing as they transform individuals and institutions, providing education that combines the academic and activist, and develop leadership that is rooted in collaboration. This handbook provides insights from women's center directors at institutions across the country on how best to build a women's center that can improve the quality of women's experiences in college. The best centers aid universities and colleges in responding to particularly difficult challenges in higher education related to gender. Practical information is included on specific programs, providing an overview of successful centers. The institutional environments examined are diverse, ranging from research universities to community colleges, from large state-supported land grant institutions to small private liberal arts colleges. Chapters focusing on the structural issues of creating and transforming a center explore how to create crucial components of women's centers, such as leadership development programs, distinguished artists and scholars series, information and referral services for non-traditional students, women-centered counseling services, resource libraries, publications, and internship programs that involve both academic and experiential learning. Other chapters focus on social issues and the intransigent and wide-ranging challenges facing centers, including for example, sexual harassment, racial divisions among students, the climate for women in the sciences, and the need to build a stronger sense of intellectual community outside the classroom. The directors of women's centers around the country respond to these and other problems, and provide an overview of some of the best practices related to responding to a number of very difficult challenges in higher education.

University and College Women’s and Gender Equity Centers examines the new institutional contexts surrounding women’s centers. It looks at the possibilities for, as well as the challenges to, advocating for gender equity in higher education, and the ways in which women’s and gender equity centers contribute to and lead that work. The book first describes the landscape of women’s centers in higher education and explores the structures within which the centers are situated. In doing so, the book shows the ways in which many women’s centers have expanded their work to include working with athletics, Greek life, men, transgender students, international students, student parents, veterans, etc. Contributions then delve into the profession of women’s center work itself, and ask how women’s center work has become "professionalized?" Threats and challenges to women’s and gender equity centers are also explored, as contributions look at how their expansion has helped or complicated the role of centers? The collection concludes by highlighting current successes and forward-thinking approaches in women’s centers and asking how gender equity centers can best prepare for the future? Through narratives, case studies, and by offering strategies and best practice, University and College Women’s and Gender Equity Centers will engage emerging and existing equity centre professionals and women’s and gender studies faculty and students and help them to move the work of gender equity forward in the next decade.

Women's colleges have had a long and prestigious role in the education of American women. This volume offers insights into the continuing significant role of women's colleges in higher education. It provides a brief history of women's colleges in the U.S. in the context of social and legislative issues that have affected the country, examines how women's colleges have managed to survive in an era of coeducational institutions and equal opportunities in education, and identifies the unique features of women's colleges that make them attractive to young women. Charts and tables. Extensive bibliography.

Co-published with How do we interrupt the current paradigms of sexism in the academy? How do we construct a new and inclusive gender paradigm that resists the dominant values of the patriarchy? And why are these agendas important not just for women, but for higher education as a whole? These are the questions that these extensive and rich analyses of the historical and contemporary roles of women in higher education— as administrators, faculty, students, and student affairs professionals—seek constructively to answer. In doing so they address the intersection of gender and women’s other social identities, such as of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, and ability. This book addresses the experiences and position of women students, from application to college through graduate school, and the barriers they encounter; the continuing inequalities in the rates of promotion and progression of women and other marginalized groups to positions of authority, and the gap in earnings between men and women; and pays particular attention to how race and other social markers impact such disparities, contextualizing them across all institutional types. Written collaboratively by an intergenerational group of women, men, and transgender people with different social identities, feminist perspectives, and professional identities— and who, in the process, built upon each other’s work—this volume constitutes a call to educators and scholars to work toward centering feminist and other marginalized perspectives in their practice and research in order to equitably address the evolving complexities of college and university life. Employing a wide range of theoretical lenses, examining a variety of models of practice, and giving voice to a diversity of personal experiences through narrative, this is a major contribution to the scholarship on women in higher education. This is a book for all women in the academy who want to better understand their experience, and to dismantle the remaining barriers of sexism and oppression—for themselves, and future generations of students. An ACPA Publication