In 1995, a professorship was advertised in a leading department in a leading Irish university. Twenty-two candidates applied; eight were short listed. All the short-listed applicants were men. Before readers conclude that this was just another example of sex discrimination, I should explain that all the candidates were men, all twenty two of them: not one woman applied. And this was not in some science subject with a long history of low participation by women: it was in a mainstream Arts subject, widely studied in primary and secondary education, as well as at university where it is taken by a preponderance of women students. The department in question is a highly-regarded, dynamic one: in other words, a department which one would expect to attract a host of dynamic, ambitious, highly-qualified applicants, male and female. It did attract a whole host of dynamic, ambitious, highly-qualified male applicants from four continents with representation from Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, North America, Poland, India, Botswana... with a wide age range from late thirties to early fifties: it's just that there were no women. When the applicants for the chair in question were undergraduates and young post-graduates twenty years ago, almost half the students in the subject in question, as in most other Arts departments, were women. So why did no women apply or, pace Hitchcock, why is the lady vanishing?
The statistics are eloquent and have hardly changed over the past twenty years: the vast bulk of women academics still teach in the lower grades; most part-time/temporary (and consequently low-status) academic posts are filled by women. Universities have been run, and continue to be run, largely by men. Most senior academics are men. This is the case not just in Ireland but also abroad: the statistics for the UK, North America and France that I have studied are not significantly different. We may think of North America as a place sensitive to the kind of issues I am raising. Yet a recent report in the New York Times would have us believe otherwise. Entitled: 'Rare in the Ivy League: Women on the Faculty', it states the following:
“The more prestigious the institution, the fewer women there are [among staff]. And the higher the rank, the lower the likelihood that a woman will hold it ..... In the Ivy League - an elite group of eight universities that presumably can have their pick of the most talented candidates - women make up 7 per cent to 13 per cent of professors, excluding those in the medical school.” [1]
Around us, the fact that the appointment of a woman academic to a senior position merits comment, analysis, even photos in newspapers, indicates how unusual this continues to be, how little things have changed. In this, universities are similar to industry, the civil service, the diplomatic corps, the police force and other bodies: the appointment of a woman to senior rank in these institutions is regarded as a breakthrough, nothing short of a miracle. The change in statistics from two full professors to three is hailed as an increase of 50% in one fell swoop, one small step for a woman, one giant leap for mankind. But why should we feel optimistic and even grateful for such changes: going back to the situation I mentioned earlier, if half the students in a university department are female, surely logic would suggest that half the staff might also be female, up to and including senior level. So where do all these women go and why are universities run by a group drawn from what is increasingly a minority within it, i.e. from its male population?
It may be objected that the kind of problem I am referring to here is, for most people, not a problem but a luxury: that at a time of high unemployment when people are often happy to get and to be allowed to keep any kind of job and when many people have major child-minding problems (they can't afford not to work but at the same time they can't afford the child-care they need in order to be able to go out to work in the first place), here we have, in the immortal words of a former Irish government minister, well-heeled and articulate women, people with permanent, comfortable, largely well-paid, stimulating jobs, looking for an even larger slice of the cake. `Is there no satisfying them?' 'They should count their blessings'. To say this would be to miss the point: if asked if women's access to the higher Èchelons of academia, to the control panel of universities, really matters, my answer would have to be a passionate 'yes', not just for the women in question but for society as a whole, men and women. Leaving aside major considerations like those of natural justice and the importance of providing role models for young women i.e. for half the population, I believe that it is inevitable, if the higher Èchelons of universities, banks, health boards, etc. are drawn from one minority group (largely middle-aged, middle-class and increasingly privately educated men), then the lower grades - the low status jobs - in those organisations will continue to be filled by their opposite: young, working-class women, educated in state schools.
I feel that it is particularly unacceptable that this should be the state of affairs at university. After all, banks and industry exist to enrich their share-holders but surely the whole function of a university is an altruistic one: to improve the society in which it finds itself, to act as a kind of social conscience, a secular church, a catalyst, in order to find solutions, in the widest sense, to social problems: if this is not the case, then why does it exist in the first place? In order to act as this kind of transforming agency, it needs not a thin diet of people with broadly similar life-experiences, background and outlook but the talents, imagination, experience and energy of the widest cross-section of people possible, the widest mix of religious, ethnic and social backgrounds......And that includes women too.
So why is this not happening and why are women academics so conspicuously absent from the upper Èchelons of universities if they are there in such large numbers at undergraduate [2] and, increasingly, at post-graduate level? Many studies have looked for causes and answers (since 1968, Yale University alone has conducted 18 studies dealing with either female or minority faculty members), many suggestions have been put forward. Among the problems identified are women's expectations and their vision of themselves and of their career, their speech patterns and the 'cloning' that sometimes takes place at interviews. Among the steps taken to try to counteract these forces are gender-balancing at interview boards and assertiveness courses for women, the idea being that if only women could be more assertive, more forthcoming, sing their praises more loudly, then things would begin to come right and we would rightfully take our place at the top table. But some might object that if a total personality makeover is necessary, then the price is simply too high, [3] or as Virginia Woolfe, put it:
“do we wish to join the (academic) procession or don't we? On whose terms? ....... Above all, where is it leading us, this procession of educated men?” [4]
or, to put it another way, maybe we have been focusing on the wrong issue: maybe the reason why women are still the foot-soldiers but not the generals of academia springs less from any personality 'defects' than from the job itself as it exists in its present form. So what is it about these jobs that might seem less than irresistible to many highly-qualified, ambitious women?
In a recent Guardian article on the proposal to call all university staff 'Professor', the journalist had this to say:
“The life of British academics, as everyone knows, is devoted to two things: the disinterested pursuit of truth and the pursuit of the title 'Professor'.” [5]
The senior academic positions under discussion in this paper are the kind that, traditionally, people would have died or, more accurately, killed for. The title 'professor' exudes power and prestige, it carries a decent salary and it impresses bank managers. But that is not the whole story. Many people outside universities (and many inside too) are convinced that academics have three months summer holidays and that when they work, if they work, this never amounts to more than a few hours a week. The reality of many academics' lives is very different. The very vagueness of our working conditions (teaching, research and administration but in what proportions, and when, is a matter of ongoing debate) that for some people are the very symbol of academic freedom mean that we are never quite off the job. The work is stimulating and important but the hours are long and often unsocial. It is not possible, in this day and age, to carry out effectively the functions of an academic, especially at senior level (with all that that involves in terms of research output or assessment exercises as practised currently in the UK, to take just two factors) in a traditional 9-5, 40-hour week. The people I am talking about take work home, work in the evenings and over weekends and count themselves lucky if they manage to get away from all this for three weeks in the Summer. In other words, the reality of many academics' lives - with long, unsocial and irregular hours - especially those who take the job seriously and are ambitious on behalf of themselves and their university, represents a life-style and life-choices that are, in my opinion, more difficult for women to assume than for men, and go some way towards explaining the absence of women from the inner sanctum, the inner groves of academe.
So let's start at the start. An academic is first a young post-graduate. Imagine the situation of a young post-graduate couple, Joe and Joanie, each highly capable, highly ambitious, highly motivated. Post-graduates are usually encouraged to move away from their home universities, to experience other ways of seeing and of doing things. They manage to get post-graduate placements in the same university in America. All goes well until they are offered jobs in different universities, in different cities, miles apart. What should they do? To them, it seems that they have three choices:
They decide that the last solution is the least painful. Then the supplementary question arises as to whose career will be put on ice, who will blink first? Faced with a 'his or her' type choice, it is a fact that it is usually the woman who blinks first, who relocates to another house, city, university and, sometimes, country, in order to accommodate the career of her ambitious partner. Or, to put it another way, how many young, ambitious, highly-qualified male academics do you know who have stepped aside in order to facilitate their wife's career? So will Joe risk everything and move in order to facilitate Joanie's career? Dream on. In a new city/university/country chosen in order to facilitate someone's else's career, Joanie will find herself on the outside, her career on the back burner. They both tell themselves that this is a temporary arrangement or, to quote a 1985 study of final year students at the University of California at Berkeley:
“when asked to choose between spending more time at work developing her career or more time at home with her children, she chose time at home. 'I don't see myself', she said, 'as being able to develop my career and raise children at the same time'. Her solution was to commit herself to some long, hard, and sleepy hours at work - in the hope that this would last only a couple of months.” [6]
Meanwhile, back in the real world, children cannot be reared in 'a couple of months' and careers cannot be put on ice: one may resume a job but not a career, just as jobs can be shared, though not careers. As anyone who has been on interview boards over the past number of years knows, the academic world is bursting with sharp, capable, hungry, aspiring young hopefuls with pocketfuls of scholarships, articles and ambitions, eager to blast their way up the academic ladder at the earliest possible opportunity. Far from being some king of cosy, gentleman's club, the academic labour-market is, as Ailbhe Smyth wrote in 1984, “fiercely competitive”; her description is all the more apt now. [7] Faced with an embarrassment of such riches, Heads of Departments and search committees succumb to their charms and pass over aspiring second-time rounders, the Joanies of this world, anxious thirty-five year olds with nothing to show for the past ten years other than three children who, in this context, are simply irrelevant. In this end, Joanie gives up: although she does not know it yet, she will spend the rest of her life teaching part-time in a community college while her husband becomes more and more closely wedded to his high-flying, time-consuming and stressful career. At least, since her job is part-time, it gives her the flexibility needed to deal with small children: after all, would Joe/could Joe take time off work and miss meetings in order to deal with sick children, parent-teacher meetings, the music run, etc.? The 1985 University of California at Berkeley study mentioned above states the following:
“undergraduate women (..) not only agree that they, as wives and mothers, should take primary responsibility for the care of the children, but they also feel that men, as husbands and fathers, should not. The men concur.” [8]
Apart from geographical difficulties, consider now the young academic's dilemma if she decides to have children. She cannot have children in her twenties: in her twenties, she will be finishing her Ph.D., looking for post-graduate/post-doctoral support and trying to get her foot on the bottom rung of the academic ladder. She cannot have children in her early thirties: in her early thirties, she will be trying to get established and trying to get tenure in an atmosphere of fierce competition where the domestic arrangements of many of her male colleagues/competitors are serviced by their wives (the Joanies of this world), leaving them free to write those major studies, those irresistible grant applications. She cannot have them in her late thirties because by now it is getting too late anyhow, biological clocks having begun to tick. So should she or could she have children at all? It is undoubtedly true that for many people children are not an issue simply because they do not want to have them. Most women do have children, however, so what are the childbearing patterns of female academics? The sub-title of a 1990 study carried out by two UCG academics, Anne Byrne and Nuala Keher Dillon, Academics Don't Have Babies, says it all. [9] In 1987, the HEA published a report, presented by Professor M·ire Mulcahy, entitled Women Academics in Ireland. [10] Part of that report was based on an Economic and Social Research Institute questionnaire that asked revealing (though now politically-incorrect!) questions on marital status and number of children:
“Data on marital status revealed that 77.5% of male respondents and 54% of females are married (...) Of married female respondents, 51% had children, while 75% of married males had children (...) On average, married males had more children than their female colleagues.” [11]
In other words, female academics are less likely to be married and are less likely to have as many children as their male colleagues. For women academics who, unlike Joanie, are determined to stay in the system, it is very difficult to reach the top on the job front while, at the same time, fulfilling the time-consuming demands of family life in which women, for all the reported sightings of the New Man, still have the major responsibility for those most time-consuming of occupations, child-rearing and home management. [12] So-called solutions to these dual demands are attempted. Many of the women I am referring to could afford good, round-the-clock child-care, full-time nannies etc. One may ask whether this is really a 'solution': we deplore men who expect their children to be reared by someone else (their wives) with minimum involvement by themselves. So how can we approve the creation of a new underclass, almost inevitably badly-paid female childminders, as a solution to responsibilities we have voluntarily created? We could send children to boarding school from an early age- but why have them in the first place if one never intends to live with them? And maybe children have wishes and rights too, like wanting to live in their own home. Or one could emphasise 'quality' time: the trouble here is that when parents are ready and organised for 'quality time', children often just want to watch the Simpsons. Or fathers could be made to bear their responsibilities. However, we are not here talking about 'the New Man': someone who would help with domestic arrangements or who would even do half the cooking, child-minding etc. What is needed by someone who wants to get to the top is a person who would take care not of half but of all - or almost all - domestic arrangements: a spouse who does not work outside the home or who does so only in a part-time capacity (i.e. who has a job but not a career) in order to leave his partner free to devote 60 hours a week to her job, someone who, unlike the partners of most working women, can relocate with relative ease to another city or country. And, actually, when you put it like that, it doesn't seem like a feasible solution after all. Or you just drop out of the race because daily life has become too tough. That is, finally, what many women do. What Ailbhe Smyth wrote in 1984 still holds:
“the cost to academic women of fulfilling their biological function of child-bearing appears to be extremely high in career terms.” [13]
It is true that one could always decide not to have children at all, which is another solution adopted by many of the women I am discussing. But it is surely depressing to think that at the end of the twentieth century - in universities of all places, these problem-solving institutions - we are still talking about women having to choose between career and family, for this is what it seems to come down to: the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, because as long as entry to the senior academic careers under discussion here means getting a Masters by the age of twenty-three, a Doctorate by the age of thirty, a book out by the age of thirty-five, and so on, then women are going to have to continue to make 'choices' that their male colleagues rarely have to make. At the same time, having to forego the possibility of having children for career reasons also represents a high price - a price extracted from few men (apart from Catholic priests, for instance, and even there, it is under discussion). [14]
Many of the senior academics I am talking about (like senior businessmen, diplomats and clerics) have from a young age been cushioned from the messy, time-consuming business of daily living with demanding others. Mothers and, later, wives take care of tasks like bringing up children and organising their lives. These academics are the very people who, in senior managerial jobs like those under discussion here, are expected to know how to manage teams of people for the betterment of the organisation and, in the case of universities, for the betterment of society. Take the case of a head of department: he (for it is usually he) could be in a position where, for every day of thirty years, he is expected to know how to get the most out of a team of people through all the highs and lows they have to navigate, all the experiences that affect the quality of their work: separations of all kinds, change, loss, deaths, illness, house-moving, stresses of various types and origins. Unless he knows how to deal with all of this, as well as knowing which dose of Chaucer or Balzac or Quantum Physics is best for third year minor repeat students, his operation will not be a success. Though indispensable, these skills are rarely valued or even looked for in academics. They are precisely the skills that anyone, male or female, who has major family responsibilities and has to spend long hours dealing with young children or elderly parents on a daily basis has to develop simply in order to survive: the ability to listen, to interpret words, silence and body language, the capacity to manage conflict, to prioritise, to compromise, effective decision making, quick thinking (because a lynch-pin in arrangements for that day has collapsed), lateral thinking, imaginative thinking, weighing up means and ends: indeed, the staple diet of all those expensive management courses that are so much the rage at the moment.
So is there a solution? Are we to be forever stuck in a system in which the careers of decision-makers require servicing by two people, while the few women who are still in the running are modelling themselves on these men or else are running ragged trying to deal with priorities at work and on the home front when everything seems like a priority. Or, to quote Adrienne Rich:
“It is difficult to imagine, unless one has lived it, the personal division, endless improvising, and creative and intellectual holding back that for most women accompany the attempt to combine the emotional and physical demands of parenthood and the challenges of work. To assume one can naturally combine these has been a male privilege everywhere in the world. For women, the energy expended in both the conflict and the improvisation has held many back from starting a professional career and has been a heavy liability to careers once begun. The few exceptions in this country have been personal solutions; for the majority of mothers no such options exist.” [15]
The ideal solution, of course, would be for all concerned to see the light and to share the power and responsibilities around in a fairer and more effective way. Yet if that is our only hope, we will be a long time waiting. To my mind, even to get what I have been describing recognised as a problem in the first place - a problem for us all since it impoverishes us all, men and women - would be a giant step forward. Even to get acceptance for the belief that organisations, especially those dedicated to the betterment of society, like governments, churches and universities, are best run by people with wide experience of different life-styles, would indeed be progress. The fact that women decide not to pursue senior status in academia is, according to a colleague with whom I discussed this some time ago, a private decision that has nothing to do with the public sphere, certainly nothing that any organisation should do anything about. Such commentators would also, it can be assumed, insist that if children from lower socio-economic classes or ethnic minorities do not go on to third level education, they should not be forced to: these too are private choices! In other words, it is not a problem. Or if it is, it can be turned to someone's advantage, for it should be admitted that the non-progress of so many talented women up the career ladder benefits the few people who remain on it. Hence the (apocryphal?) stories about male undergraduates in medical faculties who are delighted that most of their peers - and indeed many of the high-flyers - are female: they say that this will mean less competition for consultancies later on! Or, to put it another way, a male colleague in a medical department recently remarked with understandable satisfaction that 75% of his post-graduates were female. I wonder what those women will be doing in 15-20 years time when the time will have come for them to apply for Professorships: if present trends continue, they will be servicing the careers of the remaining 25% and of people like them.
To my mind, we focus too much on the candidates for these jobs and not enough on the jobs themselves. Instead of trying to fit the people to the jobs, why not try to fit the jobs to the people? Universities produce experts in all kinds of Management (Business, Heritage, Education), yet we are slow to look at how we manage our own business. Is the 60 hour high-stress week I have mentioned inevitable, does it deal with the task in hand in the best possible way? Does it have to be like that? Is an academic's time best spent trying to fit in the photocopying around the writing of mission statements on the role of the university in the third millennium? Anyone working in a university will surely agree that there is room for improvement. Some time ago, UCC set up a task force on university management, headed by a businessperson. The task force consulted widely within the university community and its report has been adopted for implementation by the Governing Body. This kind of exercise, along with the courses offered by the Irish Universities Training Network, could, I believe, result in some improvement for us all, especially those with time constraints.
We have a situation at the moment in which everyone wants to be Professor but no one wants to be Head of Department. In a university department in which I once taught in France, being made head of department was a punishment reserved for unpopular colleagues! In other words, people are beginning to ask whether the power and prestige attached to a headship is worth all the accompanying stress. Tony O'Reilly is reported to have said recently that he worked such long hours that his children were strangers to him as they were growing up. How high a price is that to pay for being listed in Forbes 100? UK universities now run regular courses in stress management, conflict management, time management etc. for their senior staff, clearly because these are needed. This is surely an indictment of how we manage ourselves, with highly stressed decision-makers on one side and a disenfranchised underclass on the other. If the situation is to improve, I believe that this will happen only when present decision-makers (mostly men) want it to, perhaps for reasons of self-interest, to do with the personal cost to them of such positions in terms of stress, loss of family involvement, ill health, etc. Perhaps if we went back to first principles and looked again at what it is we are trying to do and how best to achieve this, some of the problems addressed above might be eased. If there is to be a solution, I see it as a holistic one, involving all the skills and life-experiences of men and women, not in the 'victory' of one group over another which might result in the present situation being prolonged but by people with a different chromosome mix. In other words, I dream of a university which would cherish all its children - all its sons, all its daughters - equally and which would be a model and inspiration for society at large. Or, in Adrienne Rich's words:
“within and without academe, the rise in women's expectations has gone far beyond the middle class and has released an incalculable new energy - not merely for changing institutions but for human redefinition; not merely for equal rights but for a new kind of being.” [16]
[1] The New York Times; 24 January, 1993. pp. 1-23. Return to Main Text
[2] Current HEA statistics indicate that 52% of third-level undergraduates are women.Return to Main Text
[3] Charol Shakeshaft, “Barriers to Women's Advancement into School Administration” in Women in Educational Administration; Sage Publications; California; 1989. pp. 81-124. My thanks to Professor ¡ine Hyland, Department of Education, University College, Cork, for bringing this text to my attention.Return to Main Text
[4] Virginia Woolfe, Three Guineas; Harcourt Brace; New York; (1938). 1996. pp. 62-3.Return to Main Text
[5] The Guardian; 18 May, 1994.Return to Main Text
[6] Anne Machung, “Talking Career, Thinking Job: Gender Differences in Career and Family Expectations of Berkeley Seniors”, Feminist Studies, 15, No. 1, Spring 1989. p. 52. My thanks to Liz Steiner-Scott, Department of History, University College, Cork, for bringing this article to my attention.Return to Main Text
[7] Ailbhe Smyth, Breaking the Circle: The Position of Women Academics in Third-Level Education in Ireland, EEC Action Programme on the Promotion of Equal Opportunities for Women; Dublin; 1984. p. 18.Return to Main Text
[8] Anne Machung, op.cit. p. 47.Return to Main Text
[9] Anne Byrne, Nuala Keher Dillon, Maternity Leave among Female Academics - or - Academics Don't Have Babies; Social Sciences Research Centre at University College Galway; 1990.Return to Main Text
[10] Women Academics in Ireland: Report of the Committee on the Position of Women Academics in Third Level Education in Ireland; The Higher Education Authority; Dublin; 1987.Return to Main Text
[11] Ibid., pp. 22-2.Return to Main Text
[12] Among recent surveys to lead to this conclusion, see Social Focus on Women, available from the Central Statistical Office in the UK, published in August 1995.Return to Main Text
[13] Ailbhe Smyth, op.cit. p. 18.Return to Main Text
[14] A 1994 study of women in educational management by school principal, Mary Mullarky, discovered that 'while 78 per cent of the women principals surveyed were married, only 18 per cent had children under five years. More than 30 per cent said that they would not have been in a position to apply for promotion if they had young children'; (Irish Times; 5 December, 1995. Education and Living Supplement, “School Principals: Only Men Need Apply: Nothing but the Same Old Story.” pp. 1-3). Aspiring male principals do not feel similarly hindered if they have young children.Return to Main Text
[15] Adrienne Rich, “Toward a Women-Centred University” in On Lies, Secrets and Silences: Selected Prose 1966 -1978; Norton; New York/London. p. 147Return to Main Text
[16] Adrienne Rich, op. cit. p. 155Return to Main Text