Women in Academia

Women in Academia

Sue (Fulham) McPherson 1994

On October 1, 1993, men and women from thirty-five Canadian universities gathered at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), Status of Women Committee. The theme was Visions of the Inclusive University, and the intention was to examine issues of discriminatory harassment, develop strategies for change, and explore a variety of visions of the inclusive university. As Keith Fulton (1993) states, "A university that is not educating for equality is educating for privilege" (p.11). The term "inclusive university" was defined as:

an institution in which a population of faculty, staff and students reflective of the population in the community outside may engage in the pursuit and diffusion of knowledge in a climate that respects the dignity, integrity and human rights of all members of the university community, regardless of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, handicap, age, marital status, family status, record of offence, political ideology or affiliation, membership in the union or union activity (Golden and Breslauer, 1993:11).

This statement, and the conference itself, reflect the growing concern that many have toward effecting positive change within academia; the concerns are widespread and encompass many different issues that affect many different groups of people.

In this essay I will examine these concerns and changes that are being made as they relate to women professors on campuses. I intend to focus on three levels: on the broad level of Canada as a whole, on issues within the field of sociology in particular, and finally, on female faculty within the University of Windsor. This essay includes information gathered from interviews with three female professors at the University of Windsor: Dr. Mary Lou Dietz, head of sociology department; Dr. Pamela Milne, professor, department of religious studies; and Dr. Veronica Moguorody, professor, department of geography. The relationship between academia and activism is an important one to note. Unlike men, women professors not only have to perform their roles as members of the teaching academy, but also must become active in working towards equality with men within the university.

The goal of employment equity in universities is that men and women be hired, trained, promoted and paid on an equal basis. The problems across Canada are "inequities of hiring, pay, training, support and promotion, all of which stem from a male model of work force participation and the production of knowledge" (Trofimenkoff, 1988: iii).

The term "employment equity" encompasses a range of measures designed to remove barriers to women in the work force. The measures include equal pay for equal work, the provision of workplace childcare and affirmative action in hiring, training and promotion. Procedures and policies have to be changed, and must be structural to be permanent and effective. Each university itself has to carry out the process of establishing employment equity. Newsletters, campus media, employment orientation sessions and workshops are used to inform employees of the university's equity policies and activities. Inequities within the system should be documented and barriers to equity should be addressed.

Women are making substantial gains within academia but still have a long way to go. According to Statistics Canada (1989-90), of university teachers with a doctorate, forty-nine percent of men compared with twenty-one percent of women were full professors in 1989-90 (p.13). Thirty-four percent of women with doctorates were at the assistant professor rank, compared with fourteen percent of men with doctorates. When we examine the percentage of women in the full-time teaching force of Canadian universities, we see that the percentage has increased from eleven percent in 1958-59 to almost twenty percent in 1989-90 (p.12). Within every rank, the median salary for women was lower than for men, with the largest difference occurring at the full professor level (p.15).

Women are discriminated against, not only by inequity in hiring practices, but by the actual experience of working in an environment hostile toward women. An "active" education begins from experience, an understanding of the mediations which structure it and culminating in political action. The Canadian Federation of University Women set out last year to examine the status of women on Canadian campuses, and the result was a 54-point checklist of items a "woman-friendly" university should offer (Lougheed 1993). It invites each university to assess its own circumstances and is intended to assist those who are ready to take action. The report, entitled Women in Universities: A Survey of the Status of Female Faculty and Students at Canadian Universities, included a survey of forty-five universities. It defines a woman-friendly campus as "a place where every woman feels comfortable in living, studying, working and playing; a place where she can reach her full academic and personal potential" (Lougheed, 1993:10).

CFUW admits that change comes slowly, the greatest problem being the lack of women professors, which results in a lack of mentors for female students, underrepresentation on committees, and a lack of "female" scholarship in the curriculum. Tudiver (1982) argues that, as a result of the women's movement, women have begun to understand how formal educational institutions have failed to meet our needs (p.277). What we need are new learning and teaching methods, and research and resources about the history and nature of women's experiences.

A new degree program in midwifery is one example of change within the curriculum of universities. It is being offered at three universities in Ontario: Laurentian University in Sudbury, McMaster University in Hamilton and Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto (Vale, 1993:16). The program is the first of its kind in North America, the culmination of a decade's work. The program at Laurentian offers studies for francophone and distance education students, providing accessibility to a wide variety of students. The entire program is being coordinated and taught by women from diverse academic fields.

Debates and dialogues among women in academia are ongoing across Canada. In 1990 the Canadian Women's Studies Association (CWSA) began to assemble research of those presenting at the CWSA conference "Women Changing Academe". The CWSA, an interdisciplinary organization, was formed in the 1980's to provide a network of support for those doing research by, for, and/or about women (Kirby, 1990: i). Now, at the beginning of the second decade, it is publishing the first edition of the proceedings of their annual conference. Besides publishing new feminist research and providing a network for feminist academics, the CWSA contributes to the development of international women's scholarship. For example, it joined with the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) to send representatives to the 1991 Canadian Studies conference overseas. Thus the CWSA provides a diversity of services to feminist academics.

Despite substantial women's studies/feminist development within academia, Rhonda Lenton (1990a) questions whether feminist studies continue to serve as a tool for social change within Canada or whether they have been co-opted by a patriarchal university system (Lenton, 1990a:58). On questioning feminist intellectuals regarding the amount of political involvement, she discovered that they continued to be strongly committed to the feminist movement, but defined the movement differently than did members of older generations. Rather than focusing on feminist research, they appeared to be somewhat more conservative, perhaps because they rely on government funding for most of their resources. Veronica Moguorody (1994) agrees that there is a strong network of women, but also states,

there are women who are very strong and active in this, and supportive of each other; there are others who deal with their own work and don't necessarily want to be involved with it, and then there's another group who want nothing to do with it, are not supportive of it, and see it as inappropriate.

In addition to fragmentation within the university, intellectual ghettoization occurs when feminist scholars have fewer and fewer contacts with groups outside academia. Feminists inside and outside academia may begin to work at cross-purposes, creating a risk of fragmentation within the feminist movement (Lenton, 1990a:58). In this statement, Pamela Milne (1994) suggests that there is little or no time for community involvement:

Academia absorbs all your time and energy. The demand for research publication from women seeking tenure is astronomical. The problem for women in academia is that often we have families, and for most women that means taking on more than fifty percent of childraising responsibilities or home responsibilities. On top of that, part of our equity policy is that there must be at least one woman on every promotion and tenure committee...In a department that has only one woman...that woman is committed to death. In addition, most of the equity assessing is done by women.

However, there have been attempts to bring academia and the community together. For example, the Women's Studies Certificate Program offered by the Part-Time and Continuing Education Department at the University of Western Ontario includes a Women's Studies Practicum, which is designed to bridge the gap between academe and the community. The group's task is to formulate and carry out a project in the community to benefit women, while creating at the same time a network of concerned feminists.

The field of sociology is devoted to the study of society and social behaviour. The book, "Fragile Truths: 25 Years in Sociology" (1992), is devoted to explaining the methods and paradigms of sociologists, to covering the Canadianization and feminization of sociology, to explaining changes within academia and to considering the contributions of Canadian sociologists to government policies and royal commissions.

The struggle within the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA) appears to have been, on the one hand, one of changing women's status by organizing mainstream and disengaged activism. Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale and Janice Drakich (1992: 43), use this framework to describe the process of women's changing status within the CSAA and the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. With mainstreaming, the content of activism is directed at redressing concrete experiences of inequality and oppression, by working within the structures of the institution.

Strategies of change are focused on eliminating barriers to women's access to existing positions. However, women's agenda is subject to cutbacks, redefinition, and subversion in favour of concerns that are considered more important. In disengagement, the locus of feminist activism is most often outside existing institutions, or at least outside established institutional structures.

The second area of struggle is over the ascendency of one bias over another. Dorothy Smith, (1992), in "Fragile Truths", provides an account of how a researcher's perspective of the discipline may change as she begins to recognize the biases (both male and non-Canadian) that she accepted in graduate school. Her experience was that learning to work as a feminist in sociology resulted in her relating to society in very different ways and caused her some anxiety at having to fit in to the accepted male-defined ways of doing research (p.132). Sylvia Hale (1992) also sees knowledge as being presented from a particular standpoint, and suggests presenting sociology as observations yielded by the theory one holds, rather than absolute facts or truths (p.152). She advocates encouraging students to challenge and debate competing theories and to search for alternative explanations.

Smith and Hale are just two of the women who are questioning the ways in which sociological knowledge are constructed. Women have been organized within the CSAA since 1970, at first concentrating on mainstream politics until 1974, and then making steps towards disengaged activism, until in 1979, many activist women disengaged from the Association itself. However, activism within the Association has been revived, and there is now a positive working relationship between the Committee on the Status of Women working within the system and the Women's Caucus, the main disengaged organization.

The Committee on the Status of Women formed in 1970, and addressed such issues as "the effects of nepotism rules on women's access to employment, recruitment policies that discriminated against women as students and professionals, and the ghettoization of women in the lowest paid, least secure positions" (Maticka-Tyndale and Drakich (1992: 45). Since then, over twenty years of women's activism in the CSAA has produced research and changes that have advanced the status of women in academia. Feminist theory is now entrenched within the discipline, although the representation of women in sociology and anthropology departments has not increased as much as in the proportions called for in 1971. Systemic discrimination is still a problem with hiring and promotion decisions.

Within the University of Windsor, statistics gathered on the status of women reflect changes in hiring practices. According to the Second Annual Report of Employment Equity at the University of Windsor (1992), twenty-seven percent of the professional category, which includes both faculty members and librarians are women (p.2). Compared with universities across Canada, in which approximately twenty percent of faculty are female, the University of Windsor is above average.

Interviews with faculty members from three departments at the University of Windsor support this data. Dietz (1994) reports that there are seven women and fourteen men in the sociology department this year, and that the department will be approaching its goal of fifty/fifty by the year 2000. For a period of ten years she was the only woman in the department. From the geography department, Moguorody (1994) reports that there are now four female faculty members, up from two last year. Similarly, within the department of religious studies, Milne (1994) states that there are now three female and nine male professors, adding that "each one of those [female] appointments has been a major battle".

In order to achieve its equity goals, in 1985 the University of Windsor formally adopted a policy committing itself to undertake a plan of affirmative action. In 1991, the Employment Equity Work Plan was implemented. The plan's intention is to make both "symbolic" and "structural" changes within the university. The plan identifies seven objectives in order to reach its equity goals, including recommendations on educational programs, dealing with discrimination, increasing under-representation, creating a safe work environment and using gender-free language. Last year was a transitional year, from developing an equity program to implementing the plan. A comprehensive workforce analysis will be available following the release of the 1991 Canada Census. When asked her opinion on equity, Dietz (1994) responded,

Equity is important, because no matter how much or how good feminist research is, I think that if women are not in the positions, do not get the same compensation, are not at the top, they will always be disadvantaged.

She also adds that, when equity measures are put into effect,

there are people who have done no harm - white males - who are going to be disadvantaged temporarily ...they are going to have to be placed, for a while, in the same position as the disadvantaged.

The representation of minority groups is another problem. Milne asserts that

women come in visible minority forms too, and women come as aboriginal forms, and women come in disabled forms, and this is what has not been recognized on this campus...As of last year we have managed to transform our equity action plan to include all the designated groups.

Advertised positions now state that "people from visible minorities, aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, especially women, are encouraged to apply" (Milne, 1994). Moguorody believes that changes need to be made in the individual departments. She states,

I think a lot of the departments feel that what has occurred has been foisted on them. It creates what we call a "chilly climate" in each of the departments. They begrudgingly interact with individuals or women who do not fit in with a framework of their own.

Another university office, that of the Ombudsperson and Race Relations Officer, Subhas Ramcharan, has also been involved in improving the status of women. In 1991, the office announced a proposal for the development of a Degree Program in Women's Studies, to be implemented in the near future. This is encouraging news, and reflects the growing awareness of the administration toward issues concerning women. This office also deals with complaints of sexist bias, prejudices and discrimination on campus, and according to the 1993 Fourth Annual Report, received a total of twenty complaints from faculty and students during that year.

These structural processes indicate that the university environment is improving for women, but "Nag for Equity" describes just how difficult this struggle has been. "Nag for Equity" was born in September, 1991, for the purpose of working toward the establishment of equal status for females on the Windsor campus. This newsletter describes some of the struggles, both in the past and the present, that women at the University of Windsor have pursued. Early struggles for equality, in the 70's, were extremely difficult. With issues such as affirmative action, unisex pensions or pay equity, the "male faculty association closed ranks and most of the women voted right with them against these issues" (p.1).