Centre for Higher Education
and Equity Research (CHEER)
Knowing Women:
Gender, Power and
Research
Professor Louise Morley
University of Sussex, UK
(http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/).
28 June, 2016
Counting Women Into Knowledge Production
28 June, 2016
Sociology of Absences
• Women= 29% of world’s researchers
(UNESCO, 2010).
• Top Research Universities in League
Tables = low numbers of women
professors
 UK = 20%
 Oxford =9.4%
• Highest proportion of women in lowest
R&D expenditure countries e.g. Greece.
• Lowest proportion of women in highest
R&D expenditure countries e.g. Austria.
(European Commission, 2008).
• Research resources/opportunities:
 competitively structured
 replicate/reproduce gender hierarchies.
28 June, 2016
The Gendered Research Economy
Women less likely to be:
Journal editors/cited in top-rated
journals
(Tight, 2008).
Principal investigators
(EC, 2011)
On research boards
Awarded large grants
Awarded research prizes
(Nikiforova, 2011)
• Women in research =
representational space?
28 June, 2016
Representation = Happiness Formula?
(Ahmed, 2010)
Post-feminist cultural space =
• Equality reduced to quantitative
change.
• Feminisation crisis discourse
(Morley, 2011).
• Mathematical relationship
between one population and
another/ zero sum game.
• Essentialising e.g. women’s
advantage literature.
28 June, 2016
Keeping Women Out
•
Opaqueness in decisionmaking/lack of transparency
•
Institutional practices
•
Cognitive errors in assessing
merit, leadership suitability
•
Gender bias in assessment of
excellence/peer review.
(EU, 2011; Rees, 2011)
28 June, 2016
Women Cast as Unreliable Knowers
• Femaleness = devalued side of:
mind/body
nature/culture
reason/emotion
animal/human
• Women and their work = inferiority
and supplementarity.
• if the would-be knower is female,
then her sex is epistemologically
significant, for it disqualifies her as
a knower in the fullest sense of that
term (Code, 1991).
28 June, 2016
Women As Agents of Capacity
• Number of male students
globally quadrupled from 17.7
to 75.1 million between 19702007.
• Number of female students rose
sixfold from 10.8 to 77.4 million.
• Global Gender Parity Index of
1.08 (UNESCO, 2009).
• Young women’s assemblage for
productivity (McRobbie, 2007; Ringrose,
2008).
28 June, 2016
Gendered Knowledge
28 June, 2016
Innocent Knowledge
• Independence and purity of
academic inquiry questioned
(Wickramasinghe, 2009).
• Research performs cultural
work e.g. reinforcing normative
femininity (Yadlon, 1997).
• Knowledge production:
 never neutral
 always infused with power
 an invested process
28 June, 2016
Changing Identifications
• Knowledges now understood as:
• Embodied
• Situated socially, culturally, racially,
sexually, linguistically, and
politically;
• Knowledge claims informed by:
• Contexts that include the affective
and subjective e.g. personal
testimony
• Theories of inclusivity e.g.
southern theory, intersectionality
28 June, 2016
Transformative Research
• Knowledge =
X not legitimate in its own right.
 must be transferred into diverse contexts
and effect auditable/ accountable
change.
• What are the impact measures of gender
sensitive research?
• Is research only used/ heard when it
continues dominant narratives?
• If it disturbs and disrupts, is it dismissed
and disqualified?
• If gender research fails to transform
practices, does this mean that it has
failed as research?
28 June, 2016
Doing Gender in Research
28 June, 2016
Gender Sensitive Research?
• How to navigate between the
excitable speech of gender
sensitivity and the bloodless prose
of funding agency imperatives?
• How to research without reducing
gender to a demographical
variable?
• How to avoid successful
individualism and contribute to
capacity-building and social
transformation?
• How to intersect gender with other
structures of inequality?
28 June, 2016
Widening Participation in Higher
Education in Ghana and Tanzania
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/wphegt
Measuring:
• Sociological variables of gender, age,
socio-economic status (SES)
In Relation to:
• Educational Outcomes: access,
retention and achievement.
In Relation to:
• 4 Programmes of Study in each HEI.
• 2 Public and 2 private HEIs.
• 200 interviews with students
• 200 interviews with staff
• 100 Equity Scorecards
• Intersectionality
28 June, 2016
Equity Scorecard: Access to Level 200 on 4
Programmes at a Public University in Tanzania
According to Age, Gender and Socio Economic Status
% of Students on the Programme
Women
Low
SES
Age 30
or over
Mature
and
Low
SES
B. Commerce
32.41
8.59
1.13
0.16
0.32
0.0
0.0
LLB. Law
56.18
13.48
0.0
0.0
5.06
0.0
0.0
25.05
11.65
1.36
0.0
1.36
1.17
0.0
11.20
28.00
4.80
1.6
0.80
0.0
0.0
Programme
B.Sc.
Engineering
B. Science with
Education
Women
and low
SES
Women
30 or
over
Poor
Mature
Women
28 June, 2016
Steep Social Gradients
• Opportunity hording by
privileged social groups?
• Middle class capture of
affirmative action/ gender
equality initiatives?
• Is HE yet another object of
desire or commodity for middleclass consumptive practices?
• Are we now educating ‘doctors'
daughters rather than doctors'
sons’?
28 June, 2016
(Williams/ Eagleton 2008)
Researching Effects and Affects
Emphasis on numbers only can
disguise:
• How gender is formed/reformed in
the spatial and temporal contexts
of higher education.
• How micropolitical gender regimes
regulate women’s identities and
actions e.g. gossip, rumour.
• How certain embodied experiences
can produce feelings of intense
anxiety.
• Actual and symbolic gender
violence.
28 June, 2016
The Doxa Of Sexual Harassment/ The
Discursive Enactment of Hegemony
Tanzania
Being a girl costs
sometimes…There are some things
in which people can take
advantage of you because you are
a girl…There are corrupt staff…
Certain staffs like if you want help
they say you have to do this or
that, it is not your fault but he does
that so that he can get you… get
sex
(Female student, public university).
Ghana
Sexual harassment is a way of life
at this university … and people
don’t like to talk about it … the
female students are very
vulnerable to lecturers... and the
girls think that’s a legitimate way
to get marks. Boys think the girls
have an advantage because they
can get marks that way and the
men think if the girl comes to me
and she’s a grown up she’s asking
for it …
(Female academic manager Ghanaian pubic
university).
28 June, 2016
Grade-enhancing Capital
• 17 males and 9 females out of 100
students interviewed in Ghana saw
gender difference in terms of
preferential treatment for women.
• Women’s failure = evidence of their
lack of academic abilities and
preparedness for higher education.
• Women’s achievement = attributed
to women’s ‘favoured’ position in
gendered academic markets.
(Morley, 2011)
28 June, 2016
Sexual Harassment…
• Is sex discrimination because the act
reinforces the social inequality of women to
men.
• Is heterosexual male to female harassment in
the majority of studies.
• Creates hostile/toxic learning and working
environments.
• Involves spatial and cognitive justice, with
women having to reflexively self-minimise.
• Is rarely formally reported for fear of
victimisation, stigmatisation or lack of
confidence in procedures.
• Constructs women as unreliable narrators.
• Negatively impacts on women’s academic
engagement, health and well-being.
28 June, 2016
Shifting Conceptual Cartographies
X Entering research does not
Knowledge production can be a
mean that women have become site of resistance, change and
separated/ liberated from old
possibility.
inequalities.
More inclusive and embodied
X Democratisation is not access accounts can show how gender
to knowledge and knowledge
is enacted and reproduced.
production systems
monopolised by the elite.
Need to create knowledge that
X Gender is not simply a
demographical variable, but is
in continual production.
can shift the gender order/
undo gender.
28 June, 2016
CHEER
ESRC Seminar Series:
‘Imagining the University of the
Future’
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/esrcseminars
Special issue of Contemporary Social
Science (Volume 6:2, 2011) entitled:
‘Challenge, Change or Crisis in Global
Higher Education?’
28 June, 2016