It's not about the women: gender equality in research

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has recently released its Gender Equality Action Plan 2015–16 in which it pledges to carry out a program of monitoring, evaluating and raising awareness in regard to a range of existing and new gender equality initiatives. New initiatives include changes to eligibility requirements for the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to allow for career interruptions and investigating unconscious bias training for ARC College of Experts and/or assessors. While the Action Plan is extremely welcome—and indeed overdue—the short time frame for the plan arguably raises questions about its potential effectiveness. Moreover, existing ARC data already suggest clear areas and issues for attention in regard to gender equality, issues which we suggest require systematic and focused attention across the sector (and not just by the ARC in regard to its schemes and internal processes). Consider, for example, the following outcomes for women and men for ARC Fellowships which provide a useful shorthand guide to success at key career stages:

• DECRA fellows (2012–2015) despite nearly equal numbers of DECRA fellowships being awarded to men and women in the first round of the scheme (2012), since then nearly twice as many men as women have been awarded fellowships in each round.

• Future fellows (2012–2014) approximately twice as many men as women were awarded fellowships.

• Laureate fellows (2012–2015) nearly three times as many men as women were awarded fellowships.

The above disparities are, however, not necessarily evident in the available ARC data on success rates which reports that women are roughly as successful as men. However, the data present the percentage of women and men who are successful relative to the respective numbers of women and men applicants, not their success rates in the schemes overall. This means, for example, the 2015 published Laureate success rate for women appears as 15.4% compared to men's at 12.3%, when in fact successful women represent only 3.4% of applicants as a whole in contrast to successful men at 9.5%.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us with a series of issues in regard to women and research, principal among which is the perception that it is all about the women. Take the Laureate fellowships, for example. When it became apparent that so many more men than women were applying for and being awarded Laureates, the ARC responded in 2010 by instituting two Laureate fellowships especially for women, the Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Humanities and Social Science) and Georgina Sweet (STEM) fellowships.¹ The recipients of these fellowships receive up to $20,000 additional funding each year for supporting ‘an ambassadorial role for the recipient to promote women in research and to mentor early career researchers, particularly women, to encourage them to enter and establish careers in research in Australia’. Applicants for these fellowships ‘are required to address an additional criterion targeted at mentoring and capacity building’. While this has the potential to be a valuable initiative, several things strike us as worthy of comment.

First, there are no parallel mentoring intensive fellowships for male applicants whom we must assume are not required to undertake such work at this distinguished level. This is surely an excellent example of what Lynch (2010) identifies as the male privilege of ‘care-lessness’ in contemporary higher education. Second, there is the fact that mentoring is work and thus these candidates are being required to take on extra labour and this labour is profoundly gendered. It is labour, moreover, that extends the slippage between gender, women and mothering that is present in the gender equality discourse here and elsewhere (see O'Brien 2007). Why is it assumed that women are uniquely well-equipped or well-disposed to mentoring and what is the cost to those women applicants who do not opt to be considered for these fellowships? To what extent are they then guilty of a failure of femininity? Does this scheme not expose the sexual contract of academic labour in this country?

Worse, why is it assumed—as this scheme does—that it is primarily women ECRs who need special help to ‘enter and establish research careers in Australia’? What deficit model of career development for women underlies this assumption? That is, why, if women are not progressing in the current system is it assumed that the solution still lies in the fixing up/skilling up of individual women? In short, the aims of the scheme return the focus of attention to women who are problematised in ways that their male counterparts and the wider system are not. On this model, mentoring—especially when proffered in isolation from any critique of the circumstances which might structure women's continued isolation or marginalisation—not only suggests that women are never good enough but that it is the responsibility of other women to address this ‘problem’. And there is little room for considering precisely how mentoring functions in such contexts. After all, there is an argument that ‘through the uptake and practices of mentoring, women academics self-regulate to develop the appropriate attitudes and dispositions required of academics in contemporary universities’ (Devos 2004, 67). This means that rather than achieving any type of change mentoring can in fact serve to consolidate the status quo.

The ARC under the leadership of Margaret Sheil made a genuine attempt to address the question of gender equality, particularly through the introduction in 2011 of the Research Opportunity and Performance Evidence (ROPE) Statement. The ROPE is intended to facilitate the accurate evaluation of ‘an Investigator's career history relative to their current career stage' and give due regard to the impact of any career interruptions. The ROPE is a definite step in the right direction, however, it brings with it the risk of focusing on family responsibilities (and assuming that it is women rather than men who will carry such responsibilities) rather than wider systemic issues as having the greatest impact the shape and development of women's academic careers. Indeed, given the very great policy improvements (around promotion, maternity leave, etc.) across the Australian higher education sector in recent years, it is all too tempting at this point in time to default to explanatory frameworks that privilege family responsibilities and individual women's ‘career preferences’ over any other possible factors when seeking to understand why women may not be getting ahead in research.² This is the equivalent of arguing that women academics are simply failing to ‘lean in’ (Sandberg 2013). Bracketed here are organisational and labour market considerations which over many years feminist scholarship has shown to be critical to performance outcomes across all employment sectors (Walby 1984; Acker 1990; Cockburn 1991; McDowell 1997; Adkins and Dever 2014). Indeed, individualised accounts of women's career progression fail to recognise an enormous range of factors that are likely to be just as critical to the shaping of research careers. The ARC touches on this in their Gender Equality Action Plan when they refer to investigating ‘options for unconscious bias training for ARC College of Experts and/or assessors' which suggests an awareness that women's success or failure in its schemes cannot be explained by reference to women's preferences or family issues alone. Here, the ARC gestures towards sector-wide organisational practices which are currently not addressed by either its own or broader higher education policy instruments. It suggests tentative steps are being taken towards recognising the extent to which the reorganising higher education sector is providing the conditions for the emergence of both renewed and new cultures of everyday sexism.³ This is a difficult conversation to have in universities that believe they have perfectly adequate policies and schemes in place and have done everything possible to ‘help’ their women staff. However, feminist and sexist practices may operate concurrently (Douglas in Meyers 2013) with women's achievements simultaneously affirming the success of previous feminist-inspired workplace initiatives and nullifying claims to sexism hindering women's progression in the now. It is this that both the ARC and the higher education sector as a whole need to recognise. We can only speculate about what a Gender Equality Action Plan that did tackle this might look like, but it certainly would not focus attention primarily on actions targeted specifically at women.⁴ It would have to confront the resurgence of sexism made possible by precisely the same environment that celebrates the successes of women researchers.

Notes

1. The 2010 press release announcing the new fellowships contained the following statements characterizing the decision:

Professor Sheil [then ARC Chief Executive Officer] said the new fellowships are specifically designed to address the current low proportion of applications to the scheme by female researchers. ‘Since the inception of the Australian Laureate Fellowships scheme administered by the Australian Research Council, only 12.8 per cent of applicants in 2008 and 17.5 per cent of applicants in 2009 were female.’

2. See Probert (2005) as an example of this argument.

3. For an analysis of how, despite decades of equal opportunity and affirmative action policy reform, the sector is in fact reproducing the conditions for women's marginalisation in research, see Dever et al. (2008).

4. As Dever and Morrison (2009, 49) highlight, ‘the wider institutional context in which staff operate may determine their options and opportunities with respect to research just as much as factors such as personal motivation, quality of training and individual scholarly practice. This suggests that while support programs addressing the specific needs of women researchers (e.g. mentoring schemes) certainly have a key role to play in enhancing research participation, focusing attention on larger questions of workplace culture and practice may be just as important’.