ABSTRACT
Sandra Acker, the internationally renowned sociologist of education, writing about the position of women academics in British universities in 1980, found as others had before her that women held a minority of academic posts (12 per cent in the late 1970s), and were disproportionately concentrated in the worst-paid, lowest status and least secure positions. When she returned to write on this theme in 1993, Professor Acker found women still to be a small minority of teachers
and researchers. The 12 per cent may have increased to 22 per cent by 1991-2, but there had been little change in the sex composition of senior staff: women still comprised under 5 per cent of professors, for example, in the ‘old’ university sector (see below for an explanation of this distinction) (ibid., pp. 135-6). What the outside world sees still, she writes, is that:
Nearly all professors in Britain are men; men also hold the vast majority of other senior positions. The impact of the imbalance on British academic life is extreme, especially when combined with tendencies towards hierarchy and elitism still found within many of the universities. Professors in British universities are the people who head departments, represent the university to the government, serve on working parties, act as external examiners, make hiring and promotion decisions. In many universities, the number of women professors can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand, while the men number in the hundreds. When I left my British university post, in December 1990, only two women there were professors. The number has since increased to six. (…) What needs to be explained is why we find women academics so relatively disadvantaged and men so firmly in control-why we have a man-centred university with some women in it. (ibid., p. 137)
This book is an attempt to look in more depth at some women academics’ experiences of being in ‘a man-centred university’ during the post-war period in Britain, compared and contrasted with some women’s experiences in higher education in other countries of Europe and the USA. We chose to edit the book because of our own experiences of working in academia for the last quarter of a century as academics and latterly mainly as managers. We wanted both to document and illustrate some of the changing patterns of women’s lives in higher education during this time, which is also a time of massive social change within higher education itself, as in women’s lives outside higher education. We also wanted to point out that the changes which may have occurred have been hard won and not without consequences for the women involved. Thus we have carefully selected women whose lives span the generations of women in academia in the post-war period. However, we also chose to do so as part of the growing developments in both feminist academic work and social science in particular. Moves towards personal reflections and evaluations of work and careers have been a continuing development in the last five to ten years within the social sciences. Indeed, some sociologists have now argued the importance of ‘reflexivity’ as part of the key changes in social life generally towards the end of the twentieth century (Beck, Lash and Giddens, 1994). Thus our own academic interests and involvements have become part and parcel of broader moves within the social sciences in higher education and more widely in social and professional life. It is difficult to distinguish or to separate out their origins. Although we ourselves are social
scientists, we want to map a broader picture of change within academia and women’s roles within higher education and its management, situating these within the even wider context of socioeconomic and cultural change. Our aim, moreover, is to provide some critical reflections on senior women’s positioning within higher education as we move towards the millenium and to draw future possibilities from that.
