ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the making and the implementation of a gender equity policy at a historically black South African University1, and the impact of this policy on academic women in particular. Importantly, any policy is constructed within a particular social, political and historical context and prevailing lines of power; the forces that make for inequalities in South Africa lie within, but also without the educational terrain. Universities in South Africa, no less than elsewhere in the world, do not stand apart from mass social relations, in particular the subordination of women to men. Instead, universities are deeply imbued with the norms and values of a society structured through difference and hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity and class, so that institutional cultures are marked by cumulative customs, rituals, symbols and practices, established over time by the dominant white male social group. Thus universities produce and reproduce practices of exclusion, although the specifics of local contexts also shape the particular trajectory of such exclusion.
