This paper explores perceptions of responsibility for including attention to gender and inequality in higher education curricula and pedagogic approaches internationally, through insights from Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) funded interdisciplinary research across India, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Perspectives from university staff and students identify perceptions around responsibility for the persistence of gender inequality in higher education learning, including positioning of responsibility as a 'traditional', 'religious', 'patriarchal' or 'cultural' problem, existing outside the university. This serves to position the university either as not being able to resolve the gender inequalities seen as brought into higher education by cultural ignorance or as a benevolent force for good that will resolve these with an assumed inevitability of linear progress that the university brings. This risks obscuring higher education's responsibility for perpetuating gender inequality and ways in which it may benefit from being invested in maintaining it.