Why do more?
What does an independent service offer more than what you’re doing already?
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Universities are already doing a lot.
They get training in gender equity
They develop strategic plans with operationalised targets and quotas
They liaise with unions
They establish equity/diversity steering committees that include staff from all levels
They offer peer mentoring and women in leadership programs
They ensure there are multiple and experienced panel members thoroughly assessing each application for promotion
They ensure there is gender balance in the panel members assessing applications for promotion
They get assessed and certified as ‘a choice university’ for women, and
They really want to recognise all their staff’s achievements because they know a happy workforce is a productive one
But, decision-makers are likely to use the same schema used on them.
This is true of women also, who finally get the recognition they deserve (‘if I had to play the game this way and this hard, why is anyone else different?’). The pain of their story is under threat of being minimised. They also cross a ‘co-opted’ threshold, suddenly privy to new information, combined with a surge of power and agency, that reduces their empathy for the plight they trod. The new ‘speak’ they learn, which everyone around them is speaking too, works to rationalise and legitimate the status quo of social injustice; reasons for why it needs to remain (even unintentionally) are affirmed over and over by the language and emergent priorities of people with power.
Being hostage to history is a ‘pain point’ for us all. But with all our strength, courage, disappointment, and struggle, we still need to get passed it. We also can’t forget. Stark discrepancies in representation at the top feed false stereotypes and expectations that a man’s expertise is more valued and valuable than a woman’s. Women internalise their ‘lower worth’, feel helpless to strive, and are blamed for not dancing the delicate balancing act between grace and grit to ‘make it’ [4]. The behaviour of individual women comes under spotlight, and the structural barriers she navigates blur away.
It is the independent nature of this service that has a chance to disrupt this.
The in-depth assessment tool used in this service looks closely at the barriers encountered in the process of career progression, because a focus on outcomes keeps missing the real problem. It is not the criteria for promotion that are under question, but the degree to which unequal access to opportunity is truly taken into account. Women do not have the same power or privileges as men, so their hard-fought hard-won achievements and their value have a completely different meaning.
It is impossible not to essentialise in this conversation. But generally speaking, systems that value quantity of output benefit men, systems that value quality benefit women. As alluring as money is to universities (coming from all things numeric and easy to measure and benchmark, such as number of publications, number of citations, number of PhD supervision completions, amount of external funding attracted, high teaching evaluation scores, impact factors of journals, etc.), quality is equally essential. You can only claim you really value both when the proportion of women and men who are Associate and Full Professors, and their rate of progression through each academic level, are the same. Until that’s true the mismatch between rhetoric and reality needs deep honest examination: she is bringing in money to the university, in less tangible ways, and she wants to be seen for that.
There are also many disgruntled staff (rightly so) told to wait another one or two years to apply for promotion, after having waited decades already and mustered all their might to finally flag their desire for overdue recognition commensurate with their qualifications and professional and life experience. Engaging the services of an independent consultant helps build trust and transparency of the process.
The current ways of doing things are cursory and conservative, which is why the numbers are not really moving. Be bold! Do it differently.
Women bring to research their intellect, innovation, and creativity; to teaching their knowledge, communication, and interpersonal skills; and to leadership their wisdom, kindness, and strength. She does all this against the odds. But the system cannot keep helping her stay there so long as she acts like a man. No one can pretend to be what they are not. When dreams, passion, and capabilities are repeatedly thwarted and dwarfed because assessment of their worth is held to one standard (‘how many direct dollars did you bring?’), and the system is rigged at every turn with power not in your favour to reach that standard with reasonable effort and equitable ease (a fact the system likes to leave centrally unacknowledged), it will eventually make you ill. You will run out of puff. When migrants are free to be themselves and are not expected to assimilate - with unconscious assumptions of superiority faced, fear of loss put away, and control of power not wielded - harmonious co-existence, equitable power sharing, and deep regard for one another show up. As with race, so too with gender. If you have just a sliver of readiness to be uncomfortable and are willing to push through it, the gains on the other side are immeasurable for everyone.
If you are looking for a refreshing change - a mix of kind benevolence and unapologetic honesty - then you are in the right place. This mix will move good intention into good action.
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Some people think that when 50% of leadership roles in every discipline are held by women we then have gender parity. Striving to reach such blanket absolute targets are problematic because they invite irrelevant harmfully stereotypic conversation about what women and men are presumed to be good at and therefore should stick to.
In an effort to appear that gender is being taken seriously, high-level roles are being given to women in traditionally male-dominant fields such as mathematics, economics, and engineering. The tokenism creates resentment among the clustered mid-level men and the woman works even harder to prove her worthiness for the job.
Healthy numbers can mask unhealthy stories. Shifting the focus to relative targets helps ensure that desirable outcomes are not reduced to a check-box activity, heavy with navigating accusations of ‘political correctness’. The number of women and men within a disciplinary leadership team should proportionately reflect the number of women and men disciplinary graduates.
Men who graduate in traditionally female-dominant fields such as nursing, social work, and education have an important gendered story to tell, but it doesn’t escape attention when a disproportionate number of men have occupied the top role there. Periodically rotating members of the leadership team is a good thing for any organisation, but the need for a proportionately representative gender profile remains. Men in female-dominant fields can make excellent leaders. Women in male-dominant fields can make excellent leaders. To think otherwise is to harmfully stereotype. But patterns over time do tell a story and need to be paid close attention to.
Encouragement of ‘unboxed’ and ‘unushered’ capability and confidence starts in early childhood. Investment here will eventually change the number of graduates and managers across disciplines. We are different, and these differences will show up in what we choose to study. The question is: was it really chosen?
It’s easy to think this conversation is about biology and natural diversity, especially by those whose denial of opportunity is so rare that when it happens it feels outrageous and unjust. For those who live with these feelings because denied opportunity is the norm, access to the exception is their shock.
Some universities actually employ more women academics overall, which they can flaunt as evidence of being a gender equity supporter and implementer (“…See!”). But if you look closer at the level they are most frequently employed at, they might find that the average range of the salary of women and men differ in unequal ways. It’s not just the head count that matters. Dollars are a sign of their value (that is, power and privilege). Perhaps there’s more women because they’re cheaper. Universities keep salary costs low because they also know women are unlikely to ask for their proper worth, and have less bargaining power in those conversations.