In this short contextualising chapter, I explain my reasoning and reflect on my emotional compulsion to unearth and share the stories of women casual academics in Australian universities. In particular, I discuss how, despite increases in the numbers of women in higher education over the last 40 years, they predominantly furnish lower academic staffing positions, and that it is likely to take 119 years for women to achieve equity in the professoriate. Relatedly, I consider that a lack of contribution by women casual academics to academic scholarship can serve to privilege the already advantaged masculine academic voice and concerns, and limit the celebration of a multiplicity of stories, storytellers, and story forms. This phenomenon, if left unchallenged, not only marginalises women in academia, but it stultifies the breadth and depth of what – and how – academia can explore and achieve.
The chapter therefore establishes the platform to harness stories that celebrate the courage and persistence of women causal academics.
The Elephant/s in the Room
There is an elephant in the room of academia
It’s a rather significant elephant
As elephants go it’s pretty impressive
The elephant is the casualisation of academia
And she’s not alone
Academia has quite a few of these large and imposing mammals
A second, sister/mother elephant, is the gendered stratification of contemporary academia
Let’s not pretend they don’t exist
Let’s name/shame them.
In addition, most casual academics are women, and the gendered nature of casualisations sits within an equally gendered stratification of academic employment. For, while the overall trend over the last 40 years has been an increase in the number of women in higher education (both as students and staff) in most countries, their presence in the senior and executive level positions remains disproportionately low (Machado-Taylor et al. 2008). For instance, despite the fact that women make up over 50% of graduates in Europe, the US and Australia, only 21% of full professors are women in Europe (European Commission 2016), 24% of professors in the US are women (Monroe et al. 2014), and less than a third of women academics in Australia are promoted to above Senior Lecturer, compared to 69% of men (Grieshaber 2016; Vernos 2013). Indeed, at the current rate of recruitment and promotion it will take 119 years for women to achieve equal numbers in the professoriate (Acker et al. 2016).At the current rate of recruitment and promotion it will take 119 years for women to achieve equal numbers in the professoriate (Acker et al. 2016).
- I gasp.
These statistics shock and sadden me.
I have a ten-year-old daughter, Eadie. Eadie and I talk about equal opportunities and affordances often, but with current rates of recruitment and promotions it is likely to take the birth of Eadie’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter (if this becomes a reality) before equal gender representation will exist in the academy. This reflects both a waste of women’s talent and ingenuity, and a discriminatory cruelty.
In addition, leaning into Lorde’s (2012) notion that there is no such thing as a single issue and we do not live single-issue lives, international data that demonstrates how women in academia are generally more likely than men to enter casual, fixed-period, short-term, part-time and contractual agreements (or precarious contractual arrangements), also upsets me. In particular, in the UK permanent full-time contracts were held by 61% of men compared to 39% women (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2017), and in the European Union the rates of researchers engaged in part-time work in 2012 was 9% for men and 32% for women (European Commission 2016). Similarly, Curtis (2011) established that despite the general trend in the last 40 years for both genders to be increasingly employed on a part-time basis across the US higher education institutions, the higher proportion of women in part-time employment has persisted. Concomitantly, precarious employment was lower for men than for women in the academy. In particular, in the US women have consistently been found to be more disadvantaged in terms of tenure, where a study of 106 cases of junior faculty at a US university found that as many as 92% of male academics were offered tenure compared to only 55% of women (Junn 2012). In Australia, while comprehensive public data is lacking (Andrews et al. 2016), individual studies have confirmed that the majority of academic staff who identify themselves as casual academics in Australia are women (Brown et al. 2013; Coates and Goedegebuure 2010).
Relatedly, there appears to be a persistent gender gap in earnings that favours men in academia across the world to such a degree that the U.S. Department of Education (2016) sets the average salary for male academics at 21% above that for females (2014–15) and, data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency shows that in 2015–16, women in the UK received an annual pay that was about 12% less than male scholars (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2017). In the European Union more generally, in 2010 women academics had average gross hourly earnings that were 18% lower than for men. Canada and Australia mirror these gender imbalances in pay, as women academics in Canada receive 89% of the average salaries of their male colleagues (Canadian Association of University Teachers 2011), and Australian female academics earn around 83% of male weekly earnings (Bailey et al. 2016). Thus, Hearn’s assertion that the academy is an ‘incredibly hierarchical gendered institution’ (Hearn 2001, 72) seems to be internationally borne out.
The Statistics Do Not Reveal the ‘How’ of Experience
However, even though this landscape of academic staffing is shocking, it only provides background to this study as percentages and numbers fail to detail or make known the ‘how’ of the lived experience of the casual academic. And the quantitative research instruments that are used to amass such data have been criticised for creating typologies that fail to humanise or individualise ‘the researched’. Such measurements have also been described as an ‘essentially masculine way of interpreting’ experience’ (Stanley and Wise 1983, 40). More specifically, there has been criticism that data derived from large-scale survey designed and disseminated by people outside of the casual academic experience (Brown 2010; Pocock et al. 2004) has been privileged over first-hand accounts of the actual experience. This privileging has meant that my human experience of being a female casual academics (the largest cohort of academic staff) was ‘yet to be voiced’ (Arnot and Reay 2007) and so remained unknown (Coates et al. 2009).
As an academic employed on short fixed term contracts (in the same academic role since 2012, at the point in writing that’s five years) I live in a state of un-ease and lack any assurance that I will be employed next year. I am one of many. In fact, I am one of a majority minority in the contemporary academy.
I found, and still find, it an unfunny irony that women casual academics constitute the largest demography in most contemporary universities, yet our scholarship ra...