Clare Burton Memorial Lecture 2003 Report
Sounds, Silences and Contradictions: Gender Equity in Commonwealth Higher Education
In September 2003, Dr Louise Morley from the Institute of Education, University of London, gave the 2003 Clare Burton lectures, the fifth series to be held around Australia. The lectures commemorate Dr. Clare Burton, a leading researcher, public sector administrator, academic, consultant and writer on employment equity, who passed away suddenly in August 1998. The lectures are hosted by ATN WEXDEV, an executive development program for women in the five universities of the Australian Technology Network: Curtin University of Technology, Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, University of South Australia and University of Technology, Sydney, all of which host the lectures, while a sixth is hosted by all universities in Canberra. The lectures are supported as well by the Australian Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA), whose director Fiona Krautil spoke on current initiatives at all lectures, and the state advisory bodies for women.
Dr Morley spoke on Gender and Higher Education, an abiding concern of Clare Burton.
The lecture drew on Dr. Morley's current research project, a partnership with gender scholars in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania. The project is based on the observation that gender, higher education, and development have rarely been intersected, leading to a silence in terms of policy, literature and research studies. The aim is to map and evaluate interventions for gendered change in access, curriculum transformation and staff development across these Commonwealth countries.
Photo: Dr Louise Morley, centre, with Dr Susan Tiffin, Chair, WEXDEV Management Committee and Robyn Kemmis, founding Chair.
Among the points raised by Dr Morley were that although the political economy of higher education is rapidly changing, women are still concentrated in the care giving and service areas and are a minority in the areas in higher education where power is exercised and decisions are taken. While there have been some equity gains in higher education - particularly in relation to women's access as students - the past and present look strikingly similar. Mapping the terrain has been one strategy for change. In the 'developing' world, gender equity is rapidly becoming encoded in national targets, supported and promoted by the international donor and policy context. Yet progress is also extremely slow. Women's under-representation in senior and decision-making roles is not merely symbolic. It can be described as a form of status injury.
The project's first step has been to undertake a search of the published and 'grey' literature in low-income countries. The transcripts of women experiencing higher education, both as students and staff in the Commonwealth, remain relatively hidden. Lack of published literature does not imply lack of activity or lack of cultural capital. The results will be published in 2004.
Dr Morley highlighted the context within the Commonwealth, as elsewhere, of new competitions, markets and new sites of learning including the workplace and the community are emerging. She looked at contradictions with the access agenda and also with Gender Mainstreaming, focusing on organisational and curriculum change. She asked whether feminism is no longer seen as a disruptive challenge to patriarchal organisations, but has been diluted to become yet another tedious example of new managerial regulation.
She raised the problematic question of traditional female roles, which favour teaching but not research. Research was seen as insecure in terms of funding and requiring fieldwork, which would not be compatible with the roles of wife and mother. Yet she noted that many of the explanations for the gendered division of labour build upon domestic and private domains utilising norm-related discourses of heterosexuality.
Dr Morley asked whether entry into management was both an opportunity and a form of exploitation of women. Were women were being allowed to enter management to take responsibility for the domestic arrangements - eg of audit - leaving male colleagues free to focus on their research. She asked whether women managers were necessarily gender sensitive or politically committed to representing women's interests?
In a powerful section on violence and sexual harassment, she suggested that power imbalances in the academy are both structural and played out in micropolitical struggles. What appears trivial in a single instance acquires new significance when located within a wider analysis of power relations.
Her analysis of the literature also suggested some major silences in terms of what was not discussed or what was not applied as explanatory frameworks; the concept of masculinities was rarely problematised. Another silence or undertheorised area was that of backlash. Further, in some UK studies, questions were posed about the correlation between women's increased entry in higher education and declining fertility rates. There were also some major contradictions, tensions and unresolved dilemmas. One was whether it was possible to 'do' gender work without a feminist analysis. A further question is, whose feminist analysis? Gender work in low-income Commonwealth countries was not always informed or sympathetic to feminism - particularly to western feminism.
Photo: Fiona Krautil, Director, EOWA, Dr Louise Morley and Dr Colleen Chesterman, National Director ATN WEXDEV.
So what is the way forward? Morley suggests that advocacy needs to be accompanied by inquiry. Producing data and critical discourse legitimates women's lived experiences in higher education. The lack of sustained qualitative data in virtually all the studies analysed means that the complexities of alienating organisational cultures are not always recorded.