Australian university websites as colonialities of gender

This paper offers analysis of the first phase of a research project, Understanding and Addressing Everyday Sexisms in Australian Universities. This phase involved a critical content analysis of all 39 of Australia’s public university websites, focusing on how they represent gender, absences in relation to gender and the navigability of the websites in relation to gender equity policy. Drawing on Maria Lugones’s colonialities of gender, this paper demonstrates how university websites have the potential to reproduce or renegotiate inherited institutional everyday sexisms and broader gender inequities. Themes of reconfiguring acceptable gendering, conspicuous absences, and in-built obscurity that emerged from this process are discussed. The paper invites the reader to conduct their own content analysis as an intervention to increase their awareness of the imaginaries their university website offers. Throughout the paper, examples of better practices–everyday feminisms–are highlighted, inviting universities and other public institutions to rethink their online architectures.