Mapping an agenda for gender equality in the academy

Key words:

• Gender equality
• Academy
• Agenda

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Introduction

Higher educational organisations across the EU, and indeed globally, remain male-dominated. The fact that men occupy 86 per cent of all positions of Rector/ President/Vice Chancellor and 76 per cent of all full professorial positions, illustrates the way in which these organisations are designed by men for men. Their deeply embedded structural and cultural features reflect, reinforce and perpetuate patriarchal and more recently managerialist and neoliberal forces. This article provides an introduction to a Special Issue focussing on gender equality in higher education. Articles included offer a critique of how higher educational institutions across Ireland, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are addressing the perennial issue of gender equality. The Special Issue emanates from a symposium funded by the Irish Research Council and hosted in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, in October 2018. The papers are organised according to three over-arching themes: the gendered character of academia; female leadership in academia; and gendered organisations. It concludes with suggestions regarding a future research agenda.

The gendered character of academia

Drawing on a comprehensive New Zealand data set, Brower and James (2020) found that a male academic’s odds of achieving a professorial or associate professorial position were more than double a woman’s odds with a similar research score, age, field and university- and the odds were higher still if attention was only focused on achieving a full professorial position.

In ‘Creating gendered change in Irish higher education: Is managerial leadership up to the task’?, O’ Connor demonstrates that men are on average three times more likely than women to access a (full) professorship in Irish universities. Furthermore, while men’s chance (at 1: 5) varies little, women’s ‘chance’ (at 1:15) varies a great deal- from 1:9 at Maynooth University to 1:31 at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Such variation patently undermines the assumption that the key problem is women’s caring responsibilities, lack of ambition, self-confidence etc. since there is no evidence to suggest that these vary between institutions. Furthermore, the lack of organisational variation in men’s ‘chance’ suggests that there is a tacit acceptance of men’s greater entitlement to such positions. Using a feminist institutional perspective and an ex-post facto research design to understand the persistence of gender inequality, O’ Connor’s article draws on 34 qualitative interviews undertaken with men and women at Presidential, Vice Presidential and Dean level in Irish universities. It identifies four categories of responses: Denial of the existence or relevance of gender (mainly men); stereotypical gender awareness (mainly men); awareness of gender inequality (both men and women); and gender competence (both men and women). Only a minority of respondents interviewed were in the latter category: the one most likely to be associated with creating change in the professorial gender profile.

Kathleen Lynch’s article on ‘The Care Ceiling in Higher Education’ draws on an impressive data set involving 102 interviews with men and women (59 per cent women), strategically sampled from a total of ten higher educational institutions and including senior management, academics, researchers, technicians, library staff, administrative staff, Human Resources and general service workers. Lynch convincingly points to the ‘anti-care ethic of capitalism’ (157–174) that exists in the academy in a context where the contradictions between caring and undertaking paid work have been exacerbated by the corporatisation and commercialisation of higher education and compounded by managerialism, financial constraints and a reduction in staff numbers. She explores five key themes: new managerialism in the academy and its implications as regards time and productivity; the audit culture and caring: precarity, gaming and threat; carelessness as a cultural value in academia; to have or not to have children that is the question, for women; and the gendered character of care. The picture she presents is of organisations which are dominated by a concern with metrics, whether these are performance audits or global rankings, at the expense of unmeasurable processes such as care which she describes as ‘a disposition, a set of ethics’ (157–174). Undermining this ethic of care has negative consequences for students and staff, for the culture of the organisation and ultimately for humanity and the world.

Colin Scott’s article on ‘Managing and Regulating Commitments to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education’ is a practitioner piece. He highlights the failure both of measures to comply with the legislation as well as indicators of a commitment to equality to deliver ‘anything like equality of outcome’ (175–191). Scott indicates the limited impact of Irish equality-related legislative changes on the gender pay gap and the under-representation of women in senior positions in higher education. He describes the mosaic of structures and governance mechanisms through which the nine grounds for equality laid down in the legislation, in addition to socio-economic disadvantage, are tackled in one case study university- University College Dublin. The governance mechanisms include hierarchical ones such as policies requiring gender balance of 40 per cent on appointment panels (on a comply or explain basis); competition mechanisms such as transferring the costs of maternity leave from the budgets of individual schools to a central levy on all salaries; community mechanisms including the decolonisation of the curriculum; and design mechanisms which ‘nudge’ people towards compliance through unconscious bias training. He argues for a reflexive governance approach since ‘it tends to shift the regulatory emphasis from control to learning as the basis for effective action’ (175–191).

Female leadership in academia

Given the recognised importance of leadership in fostering organisational, and particularly cultural change, it is appropriate that three of the articles in this Special Issue interrogate the issue of female leadership in the academy.

Judith Harford’s article on ‘The Path to professorship: Reflections from women professors in Ireland’ focuses on the experiences and priorities of the 24 per cent of women who are at that level. Specifically, Harford foregrounds the narratives of ten women professors who have made a strategic decision not to engage in leadership/ management roles. She locates this pattern in an Irish society where women in the public arena have had a subordinate role historically; where the Catholic Church has traditionally controlled key institutional structures, and where predominantly Irish born and Catholic men have dominated positions of leadership in higher education. In a context increasingly affected by managerialism, her respondents highlight three themes: the importance of mentors, sponsors and networks; their own prioritisation of research over management and the happy coincidence of personal objectives and organisational priorities (i.e. research publications) which have ensured their own personal success. These women are unwilling to ally themselves with a managerialist structure and culture that they perceive as masculinist and unacceptable at a personal, moral and ideological level.

Jane O’Dea’s article on ‘Hazardous manoeuvres: Thoughts on being a female university dean’, emanates from a philosophical perspective, and reflects on male constructions of autonomy and academic freedom in a Canadian academic context. She recognises the reluctance of many women (like those in Harford’s study) to expose themselves to the double standards implicit in being a female leader. Yet she is unequivocal in her position that women’s presence is essential to resolving complex gender relations. She argues that it is necessary for female leaders to transcend the gender binary leadership divide and to ‘own their right to ‘take the power’ and lead in the manner they believe best accomplishes the task at hand’ (205–219). Rising to those challenges, O’Dea sees as a source of ‘vital satisfaction’- one that she has experienced herself and encourages other women to consider.

Tanya Fitzgerald’s article on ‘Mapping the terrain of leadership: Gender and leadership in higher education’ explores women’s position as inside/outsiders in masculinist and managerialist organisations, where a ‘masculinity of power’ is perceived as inevitable. Her article draws on 30 interviews with academics at Dean, Pro and Deputy Vice Chancellor level in universities across Australia and New Zealand. Using in-depth narratives, she explores two main themes: these women’s experiences of making themselves visible in leadership positions as well as the possibilities implicit in what she terms ‘the quiet spaces.’ It is both disquieting and unsurprising to hear these academically successful and powerful women describe their difficulties in being heard in the gendered spaces of senior decision-making where subtle informal strategies are used to marginalise and ‘other’ them. The second theme focuses on this group of women’s agency in forming networks and quietly looking for support outside of their organisation. Maintaining their own spaces, identifying common interests, discussing practical matters, working to redefine expectations of women, trying to lead in a different way, collectively agitating for change and refusing to accept the status quo are all features of this agency. Fitzgerald argues for gendered organisational transformation and for gender equality to be a key marker in ranking systems. Despite recognising the complexity of women’s positioning, she remains optimistic about the potential for change arising from women’s use of ‘the quiet spaces.’

Gendered organisations

The similarity in the themes involving the challenges and facilitators in both the academy and in wider social structures is striking and clearly suggests that common processes are at work as regards both the barriers and facilitators of women’s access to senior positions and effecting change in gendered neo-liberal organisations.

Marianne Coleman’s article on ‘Women leaders in the workplace: perceptions of career barriers, facilitators and change’, draws on 60 interviews with elite women in senior leadership roles, across a variety of public and private sectors, including education, media, banking, engineering and retail. The career barriers these women identify are very similar to those identified in higher education viz a masculine work culture involving male networks, male sponsorship, micropolitical manoeuvres including discrimination and bullying; stereotypes, including the double bind of femininity/competence surrounding female leadership, as well as cultural assumptions about the gendered allocation of care; masculine work patterns and expectations. The facilitators are also similar and include mentoring, role models and networks and particularly sponsorship (reflecting a recognition of the importance of sponsorship as a career accelerator: O’Connor et al. 2019; Harford, this issue). There are interesting differences between the private and public sectors: with those at this level in the private sector being less likely to have children and those in higher education sector being most likely to own their feminist views.

Carol Taylor’s article on ‘Slow Singularities for Collective Mattering: Feminist Praxis in the Accelerated Academy’, tackles the question of how feminists can effect change in neo-liberal contexts such as the academy characterised by ‘acceleration, work intensification and productivity … oriented to producing academic subjectivities rooted in self commodification’ (255–272). Taylor recognises the importance of micro level interactions, of ‘singularities, condensed events unique in their force and affect’ (255–272), effectively critical moments which throw institutional gendered politics into sharp relief. Her vision is one of an embodied materialist feminist ethics, where through taking time, valuing the other and recognising the materiality, vulnerability and interdependence of self and others at critical moments, a non-hierarchical form of knowledge and mutual responsiveness is created: one through which the aims and purpose of the university can be reimagined and the distortions of neo-liberal managerialism nullified. Drawing on new materialist feminism, with its focus on embodiment, she advocates a radical critique of the fundamental assumptions underpinning the dominant ways of producing knowledge. Like Kathleen Lynch, she stresses the importance of a feminist ethic of care, which she describes as finding ‘focused and nurturing ways of working against damaging conditions … attending to, noticing, staying with the trouble, and doing what you can in inimical conditions so as to create the possibilities for new ways of scholarly being, writing and research’ (255–272). Like Fitzgerald she sees this as a way of challenging and undermining the bureaucratic enactment of power, an act of resistance focusing on creating spaces for ‘relational care practices’.

Future research agenda

None of the articles in this Special Issue deal explicitly with the most overt abuse of power reflected in the various kinds of sexual harassment highlighted by the Me Too# movement. Implicit in Fitzgerald’s, Coleman’s and Taylor’s articles is, however, a focus on those micropolitical processes which facilitate and legitimate access to power by men and which devalue or denigrate women. These can be seen as on the same continuum as sexual harassment, albeit at a less extreme level.

With the exception of Kathleen Lynch’s article, the issue of precarity is also not discussed. The extent and gendering of precarity in Irish higher education is unclear (Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019; O’Keefe and Courtois 2019). This seems to reflect variation in the definition of precarity: 19 per cent of the full-time equivalent academic staff (including hourly ones) are in non- full-time permanent positions: with women being more likely than men to be in these positions (24 per cent versus 15 per cent respectively: HEA 2019). However, when attention is focused on actual staff numbers, 26 per cent of all academic staff are in non-full-time permanent academic positions (Cush 2016), excluding hourly paid staff. Across the EU, women are more likely than men to be employed on precarious research contracts- but the opposite is the case in Ireland, with four per cent of women versus just under ten per cent of men being in precarious work (EU 2019). At the very least the data provided by the Higher Education Authority (2019) needs to be extended to include a focus on staff numbers on the academic and research tracks to enable further exploration of this issue.

It is possibly still too early to assess the effectiveness of Athena SWAN (AS) as an instrument of institutional gender transformation in Irish HEs and elsewhere. However it is salutary to note that, based on Graves, Rowell, and Hunsicker's (2019) extensive research on its impact in the UK, even in AS award winning departments, women were less likely than their male counterparts to be familiar with the criteria and processes for promotion; were less likely to see that process as evidence based, unbiased and fair and less likely to have been encouraged to apply for promotion. This shows the extent to which Athena SWAN leaves ‘normal’ gendered processes and practices untouched, and suggests that it is not an effective tool for transforming the structure and culture of higher education (O’Connor 2019). Worryingly, AS might well become just another ‘badge’ for university websites, much like those collected for rating activities in Trip Advisor. We pause to wonder at this point about what might the logics of audit and university rankings produce if AS awards were included? Might they act as an external and visible pressure so as to bring about meaningful change?

The emergence of the Technological University consortia is even now beginning to change the face of the Irish higher educational system and the extent to which this may impact on the gender profile of those in senior positions remains to be seen. The impact on the gendered organisational culture of the implementation of the HEA (2016) recommendations as regards the appointment of Vice Presidents for Equality and the linking of core state funding to the achievement of a professorial quota of 40 per cent women by 2024 is also still unclear. Carvalho and Santiago (2010, 399) question the extent to which the top-level ideological commitment to managerialism ‘truly touches HEIs’ shop floors (sic)’. Variation in responses to that question could well be explored. Finally, it is unclear where the internal drivers for change will come from in a context where many women are disenchanted with managerialism and unwilling to occupy lower managerial positions and where men are less likely to be aware of gender inequality or to see it as very important (HEA 2016). It is also unclear what proportion of men at full professorial level have made strategic decisions not to pursue the management/leadership path, and what the implications of that might be.

Clearly there is an extensive research agenda still to be explored in higher education. This Special Issue is an important contribution to that task.

Notes on contributors

Pat O’Connor is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Limerick, and Visiting Professor at the Geary Institute, University College Dublin. She previously held Visiting Professorships at the Universities of London, Aveiro, Linkoping, Deakin and Melbourne. Her 120 publications include seven books and over 80 peer reviewed articles. Her current research interests are in gender inequality in higher education, with a particular focus on leadership, stealth power, micropolitics, excellence, organisational culture and masculinities/femininities in STEM.

Judith Harford is Professor of Education, Deputy Head of the School of Education and Vice Principal for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Social Sciences and Law, University College Dublin. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London), the Ireland Canada University Foundation Flaherty Visiting Professor, 2017–18 and a Fulbright Scholar in the Social Sciences, 2018–19. She has held visiting scholar appointments at Boston College and the University of Toronto. She specialises in the history of women’s education and in gender equality in higher education.

Tanya Fitzgerald is Professor of Higher Education and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include gender, policy and leadership in higher education, histories of women’s higher education, and educational biography.

ORCID

Pat O’Connor http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3465-5390

Judith Harford http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5511-1283

Tanya Fitzgerald http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6275-0964