Gendered experiences and meanings of International Student Mobility of former Mexican doctoral students: towards more equal societies?

• In Event: International student pathways, roles, and outcomes

Proposal

The mobility of international students worldwide has dramatically increased over the last decades. Some estimations show that there were 0.8 million international students in the 1970s, by 2015 the number had increased fourfold to 4.5 million. In 2017, 25% of enrolments in OECD countries at the doctoral level were international students (OECD, 2017). In Mexico, the country focus of this paper, International Student Mobility (ISM) has been financed uninterruptedly by the National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) since 1970 for the training of human resources. Over seven thousand Mexican doctoral students were supported by their flagship international scholarship programme between 1997 and 2008 to study abroad (Lopez-Murillo, 2015). This paper will explore the gendered ISM experiences of some of these former doctoral students.

It has been documented that heterogeneity in terms of social and cultural background, ethnic origin, age and even city of provenance have an effect on students’ HE experience and success (Bourdieu, 1990, Crozier et al., 2008, Jones, 2017). Moreover, from a sociocultural perspective, differences in gender also play an important role on learning processes and learning outcomes (Ro and Knight, 2016), and gender roles influence international trajectories of students (King and Raghuram, 2013). While there is emerging research regarding academic mobility and gender (Jöns, 2011), how gender shapes mobility patterns (Holloway et al., 2012), different degrees of acculturation subject to traditional gender roles (Lee et al., 2009) and gendered based experiences, the gendered nature of educational mobility has been under-researched (Bilecen and Van Mol, 2017). In light of this paucity, this paper aims to explore the individual international experiences of former Mexican doctoral students, focusing on the different meanings and challenges of ISM from a gendered perspective.

The paper is drawn from a larger piece of doctoral research which explores the array of capabilities that former Mexican doctoral students supported by the scholarship programme might have acquired through the international sojourn and its possible transformative nature, associated with individual experiences and their implications for social change. Additionally, it acknowledges personal heterogeneities, and how these differences in gender, age, geographical location, wealth and so forth have direct influence over the ability to convert the resources into capabilities to function (Nambiar, 2013, Sen, 1992). The experiences are identified from transformative learning theory concepts, where adult transformative learning as a process of making meaning and ‘meaning perspective’ assists as a frame of reference for interpreting the significance of an experience (Mezirow, 1991). Furthermore, from a behavioural science perspective, what makes any single item meaningful is not its own individual quality but the difference between this quality and others (Hawkes, 1977 cited in Pritchard and Skinner, 2002). Using these two frameworks for understanding students ‘experiences, enabled to determine whether they have led to transformation and the further exploration of the meanings of the transformative experience.

In the broader study, quantitative data of the participants’ lives, such as education, work trajectories and socio-economic backgrounds was gathered by an online cross-sectional survey from a maximum variation purposive sample of former doctoral scholarship awardees, with a 40% response rate. From this wider sample set, Mexicans without foreign familial associations and without previous international experience from the doctoral studies were invited to the interview phase, thus eliminating the possibility of influence of these variables on the transformative experiences. Informed by the phenomenological approach (Seidman, 2013, Patton, 2002), semi-structured in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 34 individuals: 59% male and 41% female. The quantitative data revealed for instance, that there was less participation of women in doctoral studies and that none of the participants reported to have had fathers with household related activities in contrast with 46% of mothers.

In this paper, I take extracts of some interviews with men and women, where issues related to gender such as parenthood, traditional wife´s household activities, and pre-conceived notions of partnering and gender roles were pinpointed as critical aspects of their acculturation processes and understandings during the international experience and in their subsequent life trajectories. These are further analysed against their life histories and those of their parents and identified as enablers or constrains of gender equality.

This empirical exploration aims to contribute to discussions of justice and gender equality, and about the degree of development of agency and autonomy acquired by these former international students and their influence over their societies. Further, this examination also contributes to the evaluation of the level of transformation of capabilities into functionings and well-being in the broader Mexican context. The paper finds different degrees of acculturative stress between men and women in the international milieus, associated to pre-conceived traditional gender roles. Additionally, it identifies the adoption of positive gender attitudes contributing to the reduction of gender stereotypes.

Author

• Karla Lopez-Murillo, Institute of Education, University College London