Gender and the Restructured University

Citation

Jones, A. (2002), "Gender and the Restructured University", Women in Management Review, Vol. 17 No. 3/4, pp. 190-192. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2002.17.3_4.190.1

Over Christmas, I set myself the task of reading three books: a new novel by Anne Tyler, an account of events in Taranaki around Parihaka in the 1860s and 1880s (the brilliant The Fox Boy by Peter Walker), and Gender and the Restructured University. The first two were finished quickly, and with pleasure, in a damp tent on the Thames coast. The last book was a more difficult prospect for this time of the year. The topic was interesting enough, but my patience with academic texts seems to diminish in the summer. However, when I abandoned camp and returned home to a drier and more solid abode I persisted with Gender and the Restructured University, and was rewarded.

Once I might have read books like Gender and the Restructured University not so much for pleasure, but “for work” – to glean quotes and ideas for articles or for teaching university students about gender and education. But my fascination with the powerful changes we are experiencing in the university meant I approached the book with a pleasurable desire to find out more about the changes in my workplace, and their rationale. I have become intensely interested in university structures partly because I have watched my job as an academic metamorphose dramatically over 15 years, and partly because, for the last 12 months, I have been an Acting Pro Vice‐Chancellor (equal opportunity) at the University of Auckland. Among many other things, this latter job has offered me a chance to view the operation of the management of New Zealand’s top research‐led university, and to experience the relationship of senior managers to the “restructuring” which is impacting on all those working and studying in the contemporary university. I thought this book would be useful because it is written largely by Australian academics, with one or two pieces by authors from New Zealand and the UK. In its pages I sought irony, humour, comfort and political insight – and maybe a strategy or two.

In many ways, this book is about the redefinition of a profession. The now‐idealised “collectivism” of academics of a decade and more ago (who tacitly “agreed” to be a group of individual intellectuals in an environment largely sheltered from external demands) has been almost entirely eroded. The new “performative” university is shaped by an external environment whose interest in ideas is seemingly limited by their immediate saleability and by the accountability demands of the government and other funders. As increasingly thinly‐spread funding must come from a range of sources, academics are forced to become entrepreneurial individuals who are assessed constantly for their quantifiable “outputs” and research income, and whose teaching must appeal to the greatest number of EFTS or “equivalent full‐time students” (read: funds). It is not a matter any more of teaching what one thinks is most important for an educated scholar in one’s field; most of the paying students are looking for employable skills in bite‐sized chunks rather than critical thought and serious intellectual work, thanks very much.

This relatively new situation makes particularly complex demands on those who must work with the contradiction of the traditional ideal of the research‐ or ideas‐led university within a market‐led environment. There is much in Gender and the Restructured University about this new educational order, with an emphasis on its impact on women.

How is the restructured university gendered? Not very differently from the old university, it seems. But one author maintains that while feminist researchers (who called for participatory organisational structures, non‐patriarchal management practices, etc.) were optimistic in the 1990s, “As we enter the twenty‐first century that optimism has considerably diminished” (p. 111). Some consider that the innovative, competitive, performative university inevitably disadvantages women by its focus on outputs rather than process, by demanding prime institutional loyalty and by the normalisation of long work hours. Others point out that the areas where women have been traditionally attracted in the largest numbers (the arts and humanities) have suffered some of the greatest hits in the new environment which increasingly values the “quantifiable” and apparently saleable subjects such as sciences, technology and economics.

Overall, the book indicates that (Western, academic) women struggle with the same issues as ever: the work‐family tension, the self‐promotion anxiety, the risk avoidance, the unfashionable interest in relationships, detail, and quality processes.

But mostly, and predictably, academic women in the book (both authors and research subjects) experienced the contemporary university in contradictory ways – some argue that the spaces opened up by competitiveness, innovation, and output‐focus offer opportunities for women that did not exist in the old, opaque, grace‐and‐favour environment. Some welcome accountability because it generates more transparency and fairness; some praise quality assurance because it foregrounds quality pedagogy and student satisfaction.

Much emphasis remains, as it has in the past, on the lack of women at senior levels in the university – in both general and academic staff structures. It is pointed out that, despite the increase of women workers in higher education in the last 20 years, there is still a relative paucity of women in senior positions. The global pattern is that men outnumber women at about five to one in middle management and at about 20 or more to one at senior levels. In some countries, women hold fewer senior posts than they did a decade ago, and the pay gap between academic (and general staff) women and men at comparable status levels remains significant. Many researchers have argued that the major factor accounting for women’s continuing relative scarcity at management level is the culture of the top table (management’s “own masculine styles and practices” including long work hours) rather than domestic and family responsibilities, merit or women’s disinclination to advance their careers. The prevalence of “masculine styles and practices” is inevitable with the prevalence of men, perhaps. It is interesting that about half the senior general and academic women surveyed recently at the University of Auckland believed that women were disadvantaged at the university. There seems to be quite a strong division between those who understand their work experiences in terms of gender disadvantage and those who consider that the university is a fairly neutral space as regards gender.

All of the authors in this book would disagree with that latter assessment. For instance, one of the chapters (by Margaret Allen and Tanya Castleman, from the University of Adelaide and Deakin University, respectively) offers a critique of what they call the “pipeline fallacy” – that the situation for women academics will naturally improve “over time”. An analysis of payroll data for over 14,000 academic staff at 11 Australian universities in 1993, showed that academic men had higher levels of tenure than academic women with comparable length of service; at senior levels, recently‐appointed men held more continuing positions; of those under 30, more men had tenure; and, despite the argument that lack of academic qualifications are the reason for women’s slower progress to seniority, the patterns of distribution of women and men in general staff were similar to those of academic staff. Comparisons with more recent employment data indicated that not much has changed in the last few years. The authors maintain that the pipeline argument assumes incorrectly that promotion and recruitment are rational processes, and that gender discrimination is an outmoded practice. They warn against the complacency suggested by the idea that the status of women will inevitably iron out over time.

Some authors in Gender and the Restructured University seem to hold the dubious assumption that more women at senior levels in the university is necessarily a “good thing” because (I assume) it will temper the negative excesses of the performative, corporate university. But women, of course, are just as politically diverse as men, and some make excellent foot soldiers and leaders for the restructured university.

Given it contained nothing really new (and certainly nothing ironic, or humorous), what was my reward for reading this book? I felt enormously comforted by the fact that many women (as researchers, academics, managers) in universities in Australia feel as I do, and are experiencing many of the same daily contradictions. The comfort of recognition and shared experience is remarkable. Many of the restructuring changes have led to loneliness and confusion. We have been largely unwilling participants in the dramatic changes to our jobs – which have altered significantly, even though we still do the same three main tasks: teaching, research, and administration.

I did note with pleasure that phrases such as “empowering environments”, “emancipating structures and visions” and “the need for commitment”, were not particularly visible in this text. A book which suggests that empowerment and institutional commitment are the answer is precisely not what we need. That kind of fuzzy language, unconnected to practice, or to the interesting range of compromises which must be made in the oxymoronic corporate university, is the bane of the life of those working for opportunities for groups traditionally excluded from real success in the university. There is also a merciful lack of fantasy about the good old days of collegiality and cooperation, when universities were glowing centres of social critique and intellectual ferment and freedom. The tone of most of the chapters (with one or two notable exceptions) is pragmatic and insightful, with no shirking from contradiction and ambivalence.