Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education by Kristine De Welde and Andi Stepnick

Abstract

Kristine De Welde and Andi Stepnick’s (2015) edited text, Disrupting the Culture of Silence: Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education, is an ambitious volume that explores many of the systemic challenges women faculty face in higher education in the United States, how they are sustained through policy and patriarchy, and potential activist solutions to dismantle institutionalized sexism. The editors draw on Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations and concepts of institutional culture, structure, and climate to guide their understanding of the status of women faculty in the academy and the potential for organizational transformation to improve their status. De Welde and Stepnick pose four primary questions that guide the book: