The Academic Conference and the Status of Women: The Annual Meetings of the Israeli Geographical Society*

*We are grateful for Deborah Bernstein and Oren Yiftachel for their comments on earlier versions of this article. We also appreciate the helpful suggestions of four anonymous referees.

Abstract

The academic conference, a site of possible changes in professional knowledge and hierarchy, is an area of academic life rarely studied. Through three main concerns this article illuminates this point for the first time with respect to the status of women and gender research at the last thirty-two annual meetings of the Israeli Geographical Society. First, although men still present the majority of the conference papers, women have increased their share and now constitute one-third of all active participants. Second, women's appearance as chairs of sessions and keynote speakers is significantly lower in proportion to their overall participation in the conference, and they are consistently more involved in its less prestigious aspects. Third, the production of geographic knowledge as reflected in conference papers is gendered, but its pattern differs from that in academia in general. The findings reveal a new facet of the gendered construction of academic life in general, and of Israeli geography in particular, and offer new avenues to revealing the impact of social exclusion on academia.

Key Words:

• academia
• conference
• gender
• geography
• Israel

Notes

Source: Based on the books of abstracts of the IGS annual meetings.

Source: Based on the books of abstracts of the IGS annual meetings.

Note: In the missing years the books of abstracts do not include the conference program and the names of chairpersons remain unknown.

Source: Based on the books of abstracts of the IGS annual meetings.

Source: Based on the books of abstracts of the IGS annual meetings.

^aRounded figures.

^bSubfields associated with natural science, engineering, and technology.

Source: Based on the books of abstracts of the IGS annual meetings.

^aA figure midway between last two examinations: eight and nine women in 1998 and 1999, respectively (Kark 2000; Blumen 2002b).

Source: Israeli Geographical Society (IGS) conference papers are based on the books of abstracts of the IGS annual meetings.

^aCategories are determined by the data for 1995, as published in Alterman and Toren (1997) and Toren (2000).

¹Accurate statistics about the gender composition of research students in geography are not available. The proportion of female students for M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Israeli universities reached 50 percent and 41 percent, respectively, in 1989; today it exceeds 55 percent (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2004, Table 8.41). However, in 2004–2005 the proportion of women among B.A., M.A. (most of them not research students), and Ph.D. students in the geography department at the University of Haifa is 51, 58.1, and 45.8 percents, respectively.

²Prof. Ruth Kark, whose research mainly focuses on historical geography, is in the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Tovi Fenster, whose research mainly focuses on planning and gender, is in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University. Dr. Orna Blumen, whose research mainly focuses on gender geography and home-work relations, is in the Department of Human Services at the University of Haifa.

³Prof. Ruth Kark of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Prof. Nurit Kliot of the University of Haifa are two of the four women observed by Waterman (1985) in 1984; the other two have turned in other professional directions.

⁴There are no records of the numbers of attendees at the IGS conferences over the years. Based on the experience of some of the Society's secretaries and our own impressions, it is reasonable to assume that 300–400 people attend the conference each year. The academic staff and research students each account for about one-quarter of the participants, and high school teachers make up the vast majority of the rest of the audience; other participants are faculty and practitioners from neighboring disciplines.

⁵Accurate statistics are not available. See Note 1.

⁶Submission of full sessions greatly varies from one conference to another. Normally submitted sessions account for less than one-quarter of the sessions, almost always in physical geography and GIS. For example, the organizing committee of the 2004 conference at the University of Haifa received five submitted sessions, about 15 percent of the sessions, only one of which was in human geography.

⁷This information was delivered in confidential communication with senior geographers from different universities who were involved in organizing some of the past ten conferences.

⁸Since the IGS rules reserve these positions for members with geography education, and since many of the women in the departments of geography are nongeographers, the odds for gender changes at the top of the IGS in the near future seem to be low (unless the society modifies these rules).

⁹For example, since they first appeared in 1992, progress reports on gender in Progress in Human Geography have cited the work of Israeli feminist geographers four times (Blumen's articles cited by Bondi 1992, Rose 1995, and Longhurst 2002, and Fenster's article cited by Longhurst 2001). In addition to articles in other reputable journals, Israeli feminist geographers have published two articles in Gender Place and Culture (Fenster 1998; Blumen, 2002a). In 2000 the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University hosted the international meeting of the Commission on Gender and Geography of The International Geographical Union; some of the papers presented in the meeting were published in a special issue of Hagar—Studies in Culture, Politics and Identity (2004, Vol. 5, No. 1). Recently, Tovi Fenster was nominated chair of the Commission on Gender and Geography of The International Geographical Union.

¹⁰Two refereed geographical journals are published in Israel; each is edited in a different department and neither is an IGS journal. Yoram Bar-Gal (1999) analyzed the professional trends in these journals, unfortunately without regard to gender (see Blumen 1999, 2002b). An international English-language geographic journal is edited by Avinoam Meir of the Department of Geography and Environmental Planning at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

¹¹Academic staff in the departments of geography include only a handful of researchers who do not belong to the local hegemony. The realities of Others have rarely been researched by geographers, with a few exceptions (e.g., Shilhav 1984; Yiftachel 1996, 1997; Hasson 1997; Meir 1997,; 1998; Fenster 1998; Gonen 2000; Schnell 2001; Blumen 2002a; Amara and Schnell 2004). Stanley Waterman, Yoram Bar-Gal, and Orna Blumen are the only geographers who have studied the social makeup of the professional community of Israeli geographers (e.g., Waterman 1985; Bar-Gal 1999, 2000, 2003; Blumen 1999,; 2002b).

*We are grateful for Deborah Bernstein and Oren Yiftachel for their comments on earlier versions of this article. We also appreciate the helpful suggestions of four anonymous referees.