Misogyny Posing as
Measurement: Disrupting
the Feminisation Crisis
Discourse
Professor Louise Morley
Centre for Higher Education and
Equity Research (CHEER)
University of Sussex, UK
(l.morley@sussex.ac.uk)
28 June, 2016
Closing the Gender Gap
• Number of male students
globally quadrupled from
17.7 to 75.1 million
between 1970-2007.
• Number of female
students rose sixfold from
10.8 to 77.4 million.
• Global Gender Parity
Index of 1.08 (UNESCO, 2009).
28 June, 2016
Women as Pollutants
• In 2004, Dame Carol Black (then
President of the Royal College
of Physicians):
• Increasing numbers of women
in medicine might lead to the
profession losing status and
influence.
(Lurie, 1993; Whitcomb, 2004)
• ‘dominant position of females’
(HEPI Report, 2009:3)
28 June, 2016
Post-Feminism/ New Gender Regimes
• Narratives of crisis used to justify a
return to values perceived as being
under threat.
• Declaration of crisis reads facts/figures
to become a declaration of war against
the source of threat (Ahmed, 2004).
• Young women’s assemblage for
productivity/ phallic girls/ vengeful
patriarchal norms reinstated (McRobbie,
2007).
• The duality of sexual difference is reconfirmed.
• Gender norms are re-consolidated and
re-stabilised (Blackmore, 2010).
28 June, 2016
Crisis Discourse of Feminisation
• Reinforces gender dichotomy/
binary frame/ seesaw;
• Is about fear of the ‘Other’/
disparagement of difference;
• Underpinned by essentialism;
• Reduces gender to quantitative
change/ confusing sex and gender;
• About hyper-visibility i.e. women
as dangerous;
• Suggests a breach of social norms.
(Leathwood and Read, 2009)
28 June, 2016
Whose Academy is it Anyway?
• Male Academy = Hosts/ Victims
• Female Students = Abusive Guests
• A woman’s place is in the minority
• Newcomers not knowing their
place
• A ceiling on women’s
participation?
• Reminiscent of immigration
discourses (invasion fears).
28 June, 2016
Feminisation=
Damaging/Emasculating Men?
• Dominant group reconstructed
as victims;
• Assumption that women’s
success has come about by
damaging men;
• White male injury now read as
the same as subaltern injury.
• If atmospheric oestrogens don’t
get them, women’s education
and economic independence
will.
28 June, 2016
Decontextualised, Common-sense nonAnalytical Understanding of Gender?
• Fails to challenge wider
gendered power relations;
• Fails to increase women’s rights
in wider civil society;
• Allows women to succeed in HE,
but not in labour market.
• Positions women as (turbo
charged) consumers, but not in
powerful positions as knowledge
producers/ gatekeepers.
28 June, 2016
The Higher Educated (overperforming)
Woman is Responsible for...
 societal destabilisation;
 a crisis in masculinity;
 devaluing of professions/
academic credentials/
institutions;
detraditionalisation.
28 June, 2016
Undoing Gender (Butler, 2004)
Feminisation =
• Resistance to distributive justice
• Subversion of gender equality
• Individual, not collective rights
• Re-doing of gender.
How to build on the momentum of
women’s increased participation:
• to undo gender in the academy
• transform knowledge production
• imagine a different future for
higher education?
28 June, 2016
Centre for Higher Education
and Equity Research (CHEER)
• ESRC Seminar Series:
‘Imagining the University of the
Future’
• http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/esrc
seminars
Special issue of Contemporary
Social Science (Volume 6:2, 2011)
entitled: ‘Challenge, Change or
Crisis in Global Higher Education?’
28 June, 2016