Gender Equity and Diversity SCRIPTS in the Universities: A Comparison of the UK and India

While universities have long been a bastion of training (national) elites and knowledge production, they have also been sites of deep contestations over key values and notions of the liberal script. In both liberal and non-liberal societies, calls for and shifts toward democratization have promised equality and participation, and (specific) scripts for gender equality and diversity have diffused worldwide. There are both contestations from the outside as well as tensions inside. For example, right-wing populist parties have argued against knowledge production, questioning gender, sexuality, and race studies as fields of research and scholarship and challenging their inclusion into curricula. Inside academia, contestations also appear in struggles over merit, excellence, and epistemic justice. Indeed, internal tensions exist between the key values of liberal scripts: meritocracy and excellence on the one hand and equality and diversity on the other hand. While the reliance on meritocratic principles was supposed to pave the way for democratization, academic excellence is often constructed in ways that position democratic values of equality and diversity in opposition to or in non-compliance with meritocracy. We use an empirically grounded, interdisciplinary, interinstitutional, international collaborative approach to theorize “varieties of diversity scripts” to explore the tensions and contestations of key promises and values of the liberal script: equality and meritocracy. Our analytical approach is based on neo-institutional theories and discursive institutionalism. We discuss the findings of our computational text analysis of university websites in the United Kingdom and India to map the varying notions of gender equity and diversity to explore how university leaders navigate the complex relationship between the values of equality and meritocracy. We investigate the changing relationship between science, policy, and society in the liberal world order and the resulting cultural cleavages and contestations.