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Academic Women: An Oppressed Minority

Contributed

In June, 1974, the VUW Professorial Board set up 'a committee on the status of women members of academic staff; this committee has just issued its report, and if you want a copy, ask your favourite woman member of staff (as I did), or badger Lindsay Wright (University Information Officer) in the Stout Building. The committee was composed of I.D. Campbell, Deputy Vice-Chancellor as chairperson of the committee, D. Beagle-hole (Professor of Physics - not Ruth Beaglehole's husband), Ms Dorothy Brown (English Language Institute), Ms Janet Holmes (Lecturer in Linguistics), Ms Thora Blithe (Dean of Science), and Professors Robb and Barber (Sociology and Physics respectively). The token student representative was Pip Desmond.

My first impression of the report was that it was a sell-out. Our academic sisters had been snared by a web of fine, liberal-academic sophistry woven by Campbell and Co. The gut issues of creche facilities and maternity leave were given three sentences at the bottom of page 37, and were relegated to Recommendation 9 of the Report. The proposal to have a Dean of Women (more of this later) was sidestepped, in fact, killed, with smooth argumentation (see pages 32-33).

The first recommendation should have been at least 4 months of maternity leave at full pay with no loss of seniority - this is the case in British universities. There is an analogy with women students; recently there was a case where a woman was not given an aegrotat pass although she was in an advanced state of pregnancy and had a medical certificate. All women students should have the right to an aeogrotat pass if they are going to be in an advanced state of pregnancy before and during the exam period.

The second recommendation should have been that full creche facilities up to school age should be set up on campus. The committee did not examine the question of creche facilities in any detail. Firstly, the creche facilities should be of high standard (i.e. low children-adults ratio, so that one-to-one relationships can develop); highly motivated women will not generally tolerate inferior environments for their children. Secondly, the facilities should be comprehensive enough to enable mothers to spend a working day at the University, i.e. the principle should be that mothers should sacrifice their eight leisure hours to the care of children (remember the principle of 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours leisure in a 40 hour week?), so that an academic mother might spend 5 hours working at the office (teaching, administration etc.) and 3 hours working at home when the child is asleep. Thus a creche should be orientated towards caring for a child for 5 hours a day, some of which time he/she might be asleep. Thirdly, the creche should be on campus. Children should be integrated into the University. A greatly expanded creche should be used by both student and academic mothers.

The third recommendation should have been that a Woman Dean be appointed. She would therefore sit on the all-powerful Vice-Chancellor and Deans Committee, where promotions are made. A Dean of Women would be the Chairperson of and be elected by, a women's caucus of academic women in the University. This caucus would organise the representation of women on all committees of the University. As with all classes being discriminated against, women need organisation; the report in smoothly rationalising why there shouldn't be a Dean of Women, ignores the political reality and the need for organised anti-discrimination (see pages 32 and 33). A Dean of Women would fulfil the function of academic counsellor to women students, as is suggested in the Report (Recommendation 6 and page 32).

Having said all this, and having looked at the Report more closely, I realise that in fact it's not as bad as all that. Part II of the report looks at staff salary scales and promotions: "The discrepancies disclosed in Table III are large and very consistent, and lead to the conclusion that the academic achievement of women has been seriously impeded." (page 6) The Table referred to shows the relative rates of progress of men and women up the promotion ladder, and the story told is a shocking one indeed. Part V gives some equally illuminating statistics - whereas 37% of students are women, 31% of demonstrators are women, 26% of Junior Lecturers, 12% of lecturers, 11% of Senior Lecturers, 6% of Associate Professors and Readers, and 3% of Professors are women. Among students, 38.2% of first year enrolments are women, and there is a significant drop to 32.3% of graduate students being women. However the biggest drop is to 19.6% of Postgraduate students being women. Although there is a suggestion that the wording of the PhD Regulations might have something to do with this (page 30), the survey carried out by the Science Faculty indicates that the so-called "Under-Achievement Syndrome amongst Women" is responsible for this (see Appendix III). As the Report indicates in its introduction, an analysis of such factors was beyond the Committee's resources.

Part VII deals with the results of a questionnaire sent to all members of academic staff who are women, and it is pretty miserable that only 45 of the 89 questionnaires were returned. Shame! This meant that any conclusions were pretty restricted, however what did emerge was that there is a strong feeling of patriarchal prejudice against women in the University. This would have a long term effect of deepening the 'under-achievement syndrome', which only long-term structural change can remedy (see below). Suffice to say that Part VII merely summarised the material, and did not come up with strong conclusions.

So far as surveys go therefore, we can say that the Report is a pretty good one, but as you can gather, it does not come out strongly on the important issues. This brings me to the question of the Committee's discussion of making academic positions more flexible, which occupies the major proportion of the Report (30 pages out of 55, and Recommendations 1-3). Basically (to summarise what's pretty turgid reading) what is being proposed is that a proportion of academic positions in the future might be on a part time basis. Although the report clearly says that the positions would be permanent, with promotion (but half as quickly) and superannuation, and that these positions would involve teaching, research and administration (half of each), the Report assumes there is some existing norm as to the teaching, research and administration load of the average junior lecturer, lecturer, senior lecturer and Professor. Of course, this is not the case, as anyone can see from the large number of slothful, and the small number of hard-working academics in the University. So unless they solve this problem and establish work norms, what could well happen is that women will do full-time work for half-time pay, and be faced with the prospect of promotion twice as slowly. In addition there might well be pressure on women to accept half-time positions, whereas they might well be in a position to do full-time work. So what is required to make sure that this does not become another vehicle for discrimination, and a means for the University to stretch its budget at the expense of women, is: (a) explicit guidelines on required research, administration and teaching by academics at every level; (b) a Women's Dean and Women's Caucus to police the whole business.

As I have already said, the amount of time spent by the Report on this question very much detracts from the gut issue of maternity leave, creche facilities and a political organisation to protect Women's interests. However I don't think it is intentional. What has happened, I think, is that the Committee has realised that the structure of the University, like all institutions in this society, is geared towards free men, and repressed women and children dependent on the men. It is particularly important for those middle-class feminists among us to realise this, because one can only fully grasp the implications of the Committee's apparent tangent or red herring if one grasps what Juliet Mitchell last year called "the inter penetration of feminism and socialism - without the other, the one can only make small progress." Here the student position coincides with that of women. Apart from the coincidence on gut issues (as I have tried to show above), students want greater democracy in the University (not the tokenism that exists at present) and a destruction of the oligarchical professorial elites which run the show; in the wider sense, students also want a breakdown of the gap between academic and student. The fact that the Report realises, however fuzzily, that the rigidity of the academic structure must be broken down in the interests of women is a lesson to us as students - any progress that is unaccompanied by significant structural change is reformism and hence only of small value.

So, with this in mind, Sisters and students, we shall await the results of the learned deliberations of the Professorial Board on the Report, but I can tell you now, that if our academic sisters don't organise themselves, they won't get very far on any issue.