RECONNOITRING THE FEMINIST MINEFIELD OF ACADEMIC WORK.Presented by Carol-Anne Croker, Faculty of Education, Deakin University.

ABSTRACT:

This paper will focus on one aspect of my PhD. and address itself particularly to the difficulties and dilemmas faced by feminist agents for change in universities. To be more specific it will look at the different feminist ways of working and the issues they address including the flexible and transitory positions of feminism. This study draws from a perspective which sees the feminist persona as multiple and which sees the different feminist identities determined by the tolerance levels within the politics of place. The inherent tensions between feminist practices will be examined in my Ph.D., as experienced by feminists located in a range of different areas within the university system.

( For the presentation a cartoon has been inserted here. It shows a power-dressed mother asleep with an unopened briefcase on the floor. On her knee is a female child reading from a bedtime story book. The child's lunchbox complete with spent banana peel lies at their feet.)

BACKGROUND FOR PAPER:

With the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act by Federal Parliament in 1984 and the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women Act) of 1986 working women hoped to obtain equal access to, and acceptance in the workplace. Despite the requirement to establish AA policies and implementation plans in both the public and private sector women still have not achieved equal participation or access to employment. Women are still numerically underrepresented in careers described as non-traditional with Australia's workplaces still highly sex segregated in comparison to other OECD nations.

Table One:

THE LABOUR FORCE JULY 1993.

Labour force: Females Males

Labour force 3,603,900 5,041,800Percent of labour force 42 58Participation rate 51.2 73.7

Table Two:

INDUSTRY MAY 1993.

Occupation Female number Females % share

Community services 980,800 66.7Recreation, personal and other services 347,800 54.6Finance, property and business services 405,300 47.5Wholesale and retail trade 745,500 45.2Public administration and defence 155,600 41.4Communication 34,600 29.8Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting 113,600 29.1Manufacturing 308,300 27.8Transport and storage 77,800 20.8Electricity,gas and water 14,600 14.9Construction 72,900 13.2Mining 7,800 8.6

Sources: ABS The Labour Force ,Australia, Februaury 1992. Cat.No.6203.0 and ABS Labour Force Status and Educational Attainment, February 1992. Cat.No.6235.0.The massive labourforce restructuring of the eighties and the technological advances adopted by business and bureaucracy to enhance productivity have not been benign forces for the betterment of women's employment prospects. In the so-called traditionally female fields of endeavour women are still grossly underrepresented in management and decision-making positions. Technological change has seen many job categories re-defined in terms of base skills, with a consequential rise in pre-requisite educational levels and qualifications.

Table three:

OCCUPATION MAY 1993.

Occupation Females number Females % Share

Clerks 993,700 77.6Salesperson 784,300 64.3Para-professionals 209,900 46.8

Professionals 449,200 43.4Labourers and related workers 396,100 34.6Managers and administrators 222,900 25.2Plant, machine operators and drivers 84,800 15.6Tradespersons 123,700 10.7TOTAL 3,264,600 42.3

NB: Occupations classified according to the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations (ASCO) 1986. (1222..0)Source::: ABS Labour Force Status and Educational Attainment, February 1992. Cat.No.6235.0.

As successive federal governments have actively encouraged young people, especially women, to aspire to higher and higher levels of education (in this era of high levels of structural unemployment), credential creep has ensured that many jobs are now beyond the reach of the traditional female practitioners. Australian women have taken up the Government's challenge and since 1975 have completed their secondary schooling in equal numbers to men. 1992 saw girls outnumbering boys in all Australian states and territories with a year twelve retention rate in NSW of 92.7%, Queensland with 85% and Victoria 81.1%, The lowest rate was found in the Northern Territory with 56.7%. This attitude is common to government schools,as well as schools in the private sector. Government schools demonstrated a 44% increase in school retention rates since 1992, compared to a 26% increase in the independent school sector. By the year 2000 the retention rate is predicted to make the 100% mark. This will of course have a flow on effect to our tertiary institutions.

As more and more girls complete their secondary studies they continue looking forward to tertiary studies with total numbers from year to year surprisingly constant. Despite the recession there has been less than 1% drop in tertiary attendance over the last five years. With respect to choice of field of study little has changed over this period, inspite of a marked drop in percentages since 1987, (-6.3% and -3.8% respectively) Education and Arts still remain the preferred field of study for female tertiary students. As the table below demonstrates sex segregation is still accute across disciplines in our tertiary institutions.

Table four:

HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENTS BY FIELD OF STUDY AND SEX - 1992 (per cent).

1992 Difference (%) Females Males 1992 to 1987.:

Arts 28.4 15.4 -3.8Education 19.0 8.2 -6.3Health 16.7 6.6 4.2Business 16.7 25.8 3.9Science 10.8 18.6 1.3Law 2.8 3.7 0.4Engineering 1.7 14.8 0.7Architecture 1.4 3.0 0.0Agriculture 1.3 2.7 0.1Veterinary science 0.3 0.3 -0.1Non-award 1.0 1.1 -0.6TOTAL: 100.0 100.0 -0.6

Source::: ABS Labour Force Status and Educational Attainment, February 1992. Cat.No.6235.0.

With the steady growth in female student enrolments since 1975, female postgraduate enrolments have increased accordingly, leading to an increase in the number of women in the qualified labour pool from which academics can be drawn however the sex-segregation of these students within the various disciplinary areas will in time exacerbates the existing sex-segregation within our universities staffing statistics.

Figure 5:

DISTRIBUTION OF FEMALE STUDENTS AND STAFF OVER SUBJECT GROUPS (1), 1992. A concurrent worrying trend in our universities is that even in the "traditional female" disciplines, health sciences, social sciences, humanities and education, women are still found employed at the lower ranks of the hierarchies, in predominantly part-time, contract and sessional positions which lack job security and comparable remuneration to their male colleagues.

The response to this situation by institutions usually in accord with the 'seventies liberal feminist agenda has not been universally accaimed by women academics. Many feminists believe that quotas and other EEO initiatives do little to alter the notion of women's 'wrong' professional choices. The call from feminist academics in the nineties has increasingly been to critically examine the academic workplace itself and the interrelationships valued and priveleged by the men at the top of the ladder; especially the unarticulated quest to maintain the status quo in power relations thereby ensuring continued male domination and exclusion of women academics from equal representation within the hierarchy.

Table si x:

FEMALE ACADEMIC STAFF IN HIGHER EDUCATION - SOME KEY STATISTICS, 1985-1992.

Above Senior Senior Below Lecturer Lecturer Lecturer Lecturer Total

(Number)1985213652230212474414198622770225751199470319872407892829128951471988(1)3059443256244069451989358972353725057372199043211244249272385281991510145949163065920219925471459491630659987_______________________________________________________________________

(Proportion of staff who are female -%-)

19856.010.828.245.221.619866.311.530.245.522.519876.612.631.947.423.91988(1)7.014.132.649.926.819897.914.434.351.027.819909.116.237.651.230.119919.817.838.551.230.8199210.119.139.951.331.9________________________________________________________________________

(1) A break in the series occurs in 1988 when a new collection methodology was introduced.

Source: DEET Higher Education Series Report No.18. August 1993 on Female Academics.

With the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act by federal parliament in 1984 and the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women Act) of 1986,working women had hoped to obtain equal access to, and acceptance in the workplace. Despite the requirement to establish AA policies and implementation plans in both the public and private sector women still have not achieved equal participation or access to employment. This is especially true of the Higher Education Sector to date. This is my personal gut feeling based upon working in six tertiary institutions. Each time I held a contract or a sessional posting at very junior levels only once being recognised at Lecturer level. This mini-biography served as the hypothesis for testing my theory of women's tenure track paralysis. What's the summary of the real story according to the bureaucracy? If we turn to the paper which provides the data in Table 6 we are told the "highlights" in summary form on page one. These are:

Since 1985 there has been a stready increase in the number of female staff at all levels.

Female staff are still predominantly at lecturer level and below.

The age profile for female staff tends to be younger than that for males.

Fewer females have tenurable terms than males, but the percentage is increasing.

Female staff are concentrated in the "traditional female" areas such as Health, Education, Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and are under represented in the Sciences, Engineering, Architecture and Agriculture.

Females make up less than half of the academic staff in all but two higher education institutions. (Australian Catholic University,&Batchelor College) .

What occurs to me is that each of these "highlights" require a rider of some description. For instance, undoubtedly there

has been a numerical increase in the number of women employed in our education sector but to what extent is this a highlight? Given that female students only outnumbered males students since 1975 there would be bound to be a subsequent flow on effect to female academic staff numbers within ten years. These young women gained access to postgraduate study and joined the qualified labour pool. However, the most significant increase in the academic labour force took place in the heady days of the sixty and seventies when the tertiary sector was expanding at a rapid rate. The beneficiaries of this expansion were predominantly male and remain firmly advanced up the hierarchical ladder to their female colleagues. This in turn would be reflected in average age of academics in each level of appointment, hence women's apparent youth (see "highlight" number three). Younger age would similarly have an impact on the level of appointment held by women and the lesser number holding tenurable terms. However the full story is revealed not in the raw numbers but in the percentages.

I am going ignore the early statistics shown in Table 6 because of the footnote to the 1988 figures pointing out that direct correlations with more recent figures should be made cautiously as the methodology changed in this year. I intend to discuss the years 1990 through to 1992. This is because in 1990 when I began my Masters study I sought to uncover any gender blindspots in the DEET staffing data published annually. I began to examine the data published in 1991 for the preceding year and I found that the tables provided by DEET did includea minimal gender breakdown of the academic labourforce buti nterestingly did not illustrate gender dimensions of academic rank or of faculty, making it impossible to see the "true" story of where the women were actually represented. Similarly Table 6 is not adequate in this regard today.After many months of telephone negotiations with the DEET stats manager (who could see no problem with the published gender breakdowns) he sent me four floppy disks containing the complete raw data sample in archived form.

From this source data I generated 2000 pages of crosstabulations using SPSSX on the mainframe which opened up an analysis of women's employment with respect to the variables of rank, tenure/contract status, institution, state/territory, diciplinary field or faculty as defined by DEET's category AOU ( academic organisational unit) and age. I looked only at the institutions classified by DEET as a university (which inevitably limits the usefulness of this work today in the era of post-amalgamation and dis-amalgamations.) However my raw numbers do not correlate

precisely with the numbers cited in the current DEET report.

What my cross-tabulations did not adequately show was the number of women holding contract or indeed sessional appointments, needless to say these employees are predominantly women.

The DEET figures did not show the precise number of part-time contract employees as the fractional staff both tenured and contract employees were aggregated to represent one whole person. So one scenario where three women constitute a full-time position on say .5, .3, & .2, these three women would appear numerically as one woman. This problem is even more apparent with the hourly employment patterns of sessional employees. So the only thing my numbers can confirm is thatn women are disproportionally underrepresented in the academic labourforce especially in career areas currently described as non-traditional for women. Women do hold higher percentages of appointments in Arts, Education, and Social Sciences. Where adavances have been made the percentages are quite small and can even be described as insignificant in numerical terms.

If we look again at the DEET numbers for 1993 which seem to show an overall improvement in the numbers for women we find that since 1990:

Women in positions above senior lecturer have increased by 1% .Women in positions of senior lecturer have increased by 1.3%.Women in lecturer positions have increased a massive 2.3%.Women below lecturer have increased all of 0.1%.So of the total academic labourforce women represent 31.9%, an increase of 1.8% in the last two years.

To my mind the more interesting data can be seen on pages two and three of this years report in the following tables.

Table seven:

ACADEMIC TENURED STAFF, BY SEX AND LEVEL, 1992.

| Lecturer Lecturer Lecturer |

|___________________________________________________________________ |

As this table clearly demonstrates women are comparatively worse off in all ranks of tenured staff except in the most basic appointments, those below lecturer level. The higher the rank the smaller the proportion of women appointed to it. We can see that women have not been appointed in sufficient numbers to claim that equality of opportunity and indeed career outcomes have been achieved within the academy. In fact women comprise only 24% of all tenured staff.

If these figures alone do not indicate career track paralysis or stalemat we need only to examine the percentage of women staff with a primary responsibility for teaching ( especially at the undergraduate level). It is noticeable that (in DEET's own words) "most academics engage in both teaching and research activities, and a minority in other mainly clerical, functions...however females were more likely than males to perform straight teaching or straight research rather than a mixture of these." (DEET HES report #18 p.2) And as we all know that since the introduction of the unified nationl system pressure is being applied to staff in the previously CAE faculties to boost their research profiles. As this sector of higher education brought larger numbers of teaching only staff into the newly amalgamated universities the number of women said to have teaching only functions have increased dramatically.

With fewer men in this position and under this publish or perish pressure it can be adequately demonstrated that the

academy functions to preserve it's existing androcentric bias which the EEO legislation has done little to alter. Another area for concern is the phenomenon dubbed"contagious effeminancy" with the inherent downward spiral in prestige and often accompanied by a salary drop when women enter an organisation or disciplinary field in great numbers.

Table eight:

DISTRIBUTION OF MALE AND FEMALE ACADEMIC STAFF, BY FUNCTION, 1988 AND 1992.

Function 1988 1992__________________________________________________________________________

Teaching only43.330.514.79.8Research only8.07.811.59.8Teaching & research47.559.971.778.3Other1.11.82.12.1Total100.0100.0100.0100.0

Recently we have seen the Victorian universities shedding large numbers of undergraduate education students and also the education academics who would have taught them in order to maintain a more "responsive" profile as dictated by so called market forces which claim an oversupply of teachers. Many of the redundancies have been forced upon junior women contract staff. The debate has thus far not focused on gender merely economic imperatives and fiscal restraint. I've lost count of my female colleagues who have been "Jeffed" ( a colloquism refering to the State premier and his governments downsizing of the public sector) and who have no job for 1994 InVictoria education is definitely seen as the poor relation of the more prestgious faculties. Needless to say these are the traditionally male-dominated faculties

U.S. academic Angela Simeone in her book Academic Women comments on just such a phenomenon; "Once women enter a field in large numbers the focus turns towards questions of content. "To what extent will the central issues and questions within fields shift as women enter them, bringing their own interests, experiences and perspectives?" Will women alter the "style and substance of the academy" - no longer "male-dominated in it's policies, practices, epistemologies, values, methodologies and structures"? (Simeone 1987.)

It would be interesting to study the impression of pretige and reputation attributed to Australian universities to determine whether or not the more gender-equitable universities are accorded high value. With this in mind we need only to look at another DEET table and locate the "big seven" research institutions and see that they do not feature prominantly at the top of the list thereby effectively avoiding "contagious effeminancy" and having

their VC's leading the content debate in the popular press. EEO legislation has no impact on such forms of systemic discrimination.

Any gains made by women in individual institutions within the academy must be viewed as part of the overall picture

where power and privelege remain vested in the hands of males.

Returning to the DEET publication we need to examine the classifications used to rank the institutions in order of percentage female labourforce. in Table 9.An interesting aspect of this "official story" is that faculty and subject areas are grouped under a classification called A.O.U's academic organisational units. There seemed to be less clear gendered distinctions between AOU's at first glance. Health Sciences for example covered medecine as well as nursing studies, and pharmaceutical studies. Law appeared to be subsumed under the classification, Administration, Business, and Economics. To my untrained eye this seemed to point to a kind of smoothing out of the gender segregation possible within any given faculty.or indeed institution.

After many feminist enlightenment sessions with my mentors at Deakin I should have learnt not to rely on numbers to tell the real story as these very tables and instruments are constructed.They tell only one story albeit the more conventionally acceptable one. After three years playing with such types of quantitative data I can now question the notion of inherent scientific validity. What needs to be done is to problematise the conclusions drawn from such data and begin to investigate the other multiple stories and readings possible.

(For the presentation a Tandberg cartoon has been inserted here. It shows a factory production line turning out graduates. Their gender is clearly perceptible prior to their gowning. Once the product has been packaged they appear unisex and genderless as they are packed into a box. The two workers, both males are questioning, "where are we going to put them all?")

This seemed an appropriate image given the increase in female graduates in the qualified academic labour pool and the continued lack of access to tenured employment. The academy seems to have found an answer to the workers

question, the creation of a revolving door giving access to lower ranked academics in contract, part-time and sessional appointments thereby keeping the production line feeding the institution as many fall by the wayside after having outlived their use-by date.

Table nine:

PROPOTION OF FEMALE ACADEMIC STAFF IN SUBJECT GROUPS, BY INSTITUTION, 1992 (%):ArtsAdmin Hum.MathsBus.SocSci.Eng.HealthEcon.InstitutionSci.Educ.Comp.Process.sciencesLawotherTOTAL

Aust Cath Uni49.350.080.0(3)83.016.725.057.5Batchelor Coll0.063.6(3)(3)(3)(3)0.052.5UWS41.856.728.8(3)82.424.035.443.9Uni of Canberra51.750.838.7(3)(3)36.721.941.2LaTrobe Uni37.240.025.55.977.136.745.641.0Deakin Uni38.042.623.4(3)80.228.325.038.9Edith Cowan42.333.326.90.074.627.535.138.7Uni of S.A.38.051.311.23.379.231.639.438.3Flinders Uni32.331.08.20.040.931.772.836.2Macquarie39.673.121.90.055.628.158.336.2Curtin U.of T.42.936.423.25.670.727.017.935.7Uni of Sydney42.044.526.63.551.730.626.035.5Qld U. of T.42.342.818.52.667.940.434.535.3Vic U. of T.47.756.315.410.1 74.331.140.933.9Monash Uni(2)39.537.125.74.547.333.249.633.8Uni of Melb.41.247.330.45.338.335.020.733.3N.T. Uni26.639.520.5(3)80.030.641.232.1Total Australia37.542.021.34.753.829.427.531.9RMIT45.251.423.73.361.525.027.031.6Griffith36.728.118.04.533.332.059.531.6Murdoch45.352.015.20.0(3)28.628.231.3U. of T. Sydney51.741.519.09.179.226.715.630.8Uni of Central Qld33.325.021.14.088.927.331.8 30.8Uni of Southern Qld37.941.015.81.9(3)28.848.6 29.9Uni of Wollongong29.734.722.67.175.030.620.828.3Uni of New England27.738.211.80.062.319.314.4 27.9

Uni of Qld38.634.122.67.140.132.317.927.7Avondale Coll0.027.5(3)(3)47.416.70.027.6Uni of Newcastle35.134.017.80.041.021.414.027.4James Cook Uni36.223.316.04.463.230.231.126.2Ballarat Uni Coll29.940.713.00.066.721.636.425.9Uni of Tasmania25.040.416.80.041.125.315.425.5Uni of Adelaide(2)35.129.217.31.831.030.418.3 24.8Charles Sturt Uni24.326.318.10.061.520.89.124.6Uni of W.A.31.034.818.52.929.325.313.423.2Swinburne Ltd32.1(3)16.86.3(3)44.427.322.5Uni of N.S.W.(2)41.827.515.47.129.729.514.722.4A.N.U.(2)27.2(3)15.00.0(3)17.517.619.2Aus. Def Force Acad.20.8(3)12.92.4(3)18.80.0 13.2Aus. Maritime Coll.(3)(3)6.50.0(3)5.60.0 3.8(1) Other includes Built Env and Agric and Renewab;le resources as well as a small number not in an AOU. (2) More than !0% academics were not allocated to an AOU. (3) No staff allocated to this AOU.

A MORE DETAILED APPRAISAL OF THE CURRENT SITUATION.

Jessie Bernard in her introduction to Angela Simeone's 1987 book; Academic Women parallels the current feminist change work to the revolution in intellectual thought of the rennaissence. She sees our current struggles and journey as the "Feminist Enlightenment". She goes on to point out that "theeffect of these words, shaped and sharpened by the mastery of research - itself one of the most important arrows in the feminist quiver, was like the storming of the Bastille or the shot heard around the world." She goes on to inspire the curent generation of academic women to maintain their rage as the male canon can no longer be defended as unimpeachable. As we all know women in the academy are indeed "creating new paradigms, producing new data, especially the use of qualitative data...and generally expanding the boundaries of knowledge. It is my goal that my Ph.D. thesis will do expressely that. As we have seen already the inadequacies of quantitative data at work masking the fundamental process of protecting male power by selectively screening out the position of their female colleagues. Only those given the academy's stamp of approval register in the official story; those that have been rewarded with tenure.

Equality as a governing principle of EEO is totally inadequate as it implies commensurability. "Where there is a

criterion of commensurability, comparisons of greater than, equal to, or less than may be made." (Thornton 1986). Those women academics listed in Table seven are both equal to, if they hold tenure, and less than if untenured. No where is the possibility of greater than positioned with respect to women. The senior academic males are positioned as greater than by the mere fact of their numeric dominance. They in fact are the archetype of an academic.

Career channelling obviously occurs early in a junior academics career. Women students are frequently channelled towards Masters degrees than the more prestigious and tenure track research Ph.D. Once admitted to the academy women are more usually channelled into (undergraduate) teaching rather than nurtured into the more prestigious area of research. Throughout the nineties the significance the market has played within our universities can not be underestimated. More than the high-powered marketing of our education to overseas "consumers" both here and off shore, the orientation of the university sector is industry and market driven.

As Ann Junor points out in her 1988 paper, The Academy Incorporated: Higher Education and Structural Adjustment, the administration of higher education has been restructured along corporate mangerial lines complete with down line mangers and measures of accountability enforced to ensure that faculties toe the line of the all important global

mission statement. The language employed is no longer that of the intelligensia but that of the market. Givernment intervention has ensured that there will be a more visible meshing between higher education and industry with the imperatives decided by economics. Education itself is redefined as training and skill formation, with our instituions held responsible for Australia's deficiencies in world competitiveness. Our human capital has been seen as not up to scratch. The Hawke governments creation of the Employment, Education and Training portfolio in the late eighties and the current Australian Business/ Higher education Round Table (1990) has cemented the linkages developed between the two sectors. Any funding increases are directly tied to "national priority disciplines" and allocated according to " a negotiated growth profile based strictly on national priorities" (Junor 1990).

The determination of these national priorities takes place at the Round Table meetings. As I have consistently drawn from

warfare metaphors throughout this paper, it seems to me highly apt to point to the quest for the holy grail at this point. Nationally the holy grail will be found by these "knights of the round table" by adhering to the imperatives dictated by yet another corporate mission statement.

"It is a forum where leaders of Australia's business and academic communities can jointly examine important educational issues of mutual interest, for the purpose of developing and presenting recommendations for improving the interaction between Australian business and higher education institutions, and the future direction for higher education." ( BHERT, 1992).

The universities have responded to this redirection by valuing certain disciplines by moving more of its staff into prestigious graduate schools and research centres aspiring for the corporate dollar and earning cudos from the government and the market.

By harnessing our "human resources" through seemingly neutral, "technical mechanisms of management information systems, performance appraisal, programme bugeting and performance indicators [which] ignore structural indicators of the 'concentration of power and powerlessness; privelege and hierarchy'" ( Blackmore 1992) the management models of the nineties ensure the continued disenfranchisement of women in the academy as their voices are heard less frequently and less forcefully within these forums. Indeed we have witnessed the shrinking of the academic labour market at an unprecedented rate with the current practice of "downsizing".

More women have indeed been hired under EEO principles hoever the appointments are predominantly at the lower ranks, on lower salary scales, in mostly short-term jobs. Few of these

appointments go to serious tenure track contenders thereby rendering these women more vulnerable to retrenchment, redundancy ( voluntary and forced), and downsizing made easier by non-renewal of contract. (At my own institution many of these contract non-renewals have fallen within the so called traditionally female disciplines with Education being hard hit in recent weeks. Most of my departing colleagues are women. This would not be atypical.)

How have these women been rendered so vulnerable? Two studies seek to understand the contributing a factors within career advancement in our institutions. One completed by Ray Over

from LaTrobe university uses the conventional tools of quantitative analysis after administering a questionnaire to two cohorts of academics who had obtained what he terms a leadership role a lecturership in the expansionary days of the 1960's and those from the 1970's. 308 academics responded to his questionnaire which were then analysed to determine the correlation if any between sex, scholarship and research productivity, publication rates, discipline to career advancement and promotion.

What he found was that of those who were promoted (and were presumably safe on the tenure track) differed in their "rate of publication in referreed journals, level of citation, research grants applied for and obtained, and the number of Ph.D. students under a person's supervision." ( Over 1993). In discussing his findings he has made no reference to any biases inherent within these measures. He clearly views the academy as a meritocracy with "objective" criteria determining success or failure, in this case employment security versus vulnerability.

The whole ethos of the academy is undergoing a revolution. Collegiality is fine so long as it is confined to policy advice and policy monitoring of educational outcomes. In thge nineties we can finally lay to rest the myth of the academy as an autonomous self-governing body free from value laden selection criteria and promotion procedures requiring governmental legislation. As Burton (1991) correctly points out "many of the supposed objective criteria permit the mobilisation of masculine bias" and perpetuation of the gendered institutional culture. The challenge is for feminist academics to work within this mutating structure to ensure the new university to emerge encompasses both genders. It will fall to feminists and other activists the lot of emancipation.

All emancipatory work by academics concerned not simply with gender but also giving voice to different races, sexualities and (dis)abilities are inevitably position on the margins and is perceived in an oppositional relationship with the mainstream/malestream. The time has come to move beyond the construction of binaries. "When these movements 'stand

outside looking in' they act to confirm these interpellated identities, not to challenge them." (Yeatman 1993). Postructural reconstructive work allows the movement of emancipatory voices into the political domain of policy work. The goal is to " show how its particular interest in

contesting oppression links into and supports the interests of other movements in contesting different kinds of oppression." (Yeatman 1993). For those of us working within the academy there is an expectation that we work at a practical level to ensure "an acceptance of an inclusive politics of voice and representation" emerging from the feminist politics of difference and to manoevre to bring this voice to be heard by the established institutional discourse. The concern is how far the "custodians of feminism... [can go before being] affiliated with these new movements without simultaneously appropriating their voice." (Yeatman 1993).

Table 10: Senior Lecturers in 1978: Correlates of career advancement in Australian universities by Ray Over as illustrated in Higher Education Vol.26. pp 313-329, 1993.

Academics were asked to describe themselves across a number of variables. The results of which I will now list.

(Variables he included)

Demographic variables Performance in academic rolesAge at completion of PhD (years) Articles published (N)Current age (years) Level of citationPersonality traits Manuscripts in preparation (N)Ambitious Grants obtained (N) Meek Grant applications (N)Dominant Number of p/g studentsAggressive Difficulty level of researchAuthoritarian Chapters in books (N)Affiliations PhD theses examined (N)Extent of network outside Australia Conference reports (N)International conferences Other MeasuresLeading researchers as friends Job satisfactionWork habits Scholarly reputationTime to p/g supervision Would continue beyond 65.Time to scholarly writingTime to own researchStart day with objectivesCommitment to researchTime with familyWork ethicTime to administrationHours/week as an academic.

WORK IN PROGRESS UP TO NOVEMBER 1993:

My research will identify the way feminist academics are working to redress the inequality, male dominance and power imbalances at work in universities in Australia today. I will now briefly describe my plans for my PhD thesis due for completion in 1994.

I have decided to document the work feminist academics are doing within the academy using oral historys. I now know, thanks Linda Nicholson (1990) that its useless to tell one meta discourse, even a feminist one given the poststructuralist imperative to speak of multiple discourses and differing stories. There is no one feminist story in the academy or one "true" or valid feminist experience. As feminists we use the multiple theoretical tools in our professional armoury as befit the immediate circumstances. Our working lives bespeak the multiple feminisms and positionings we hold, full of our contradictions and inconsistencies. If I ignore these multiple positionings and resort to a liberal feminist analysis of obstacles and barriers to equal academic rank and status for women I inevitably ignore the successes and most importantly the failures experienced by these women.

With AA and EEO legislation measuring the standard forms of compliance, i.e. numbers, salary, tenure and rank, the nineties sees the emphasis on activism falling back onto the women themselves. "You now know the 'whys', so it's time for you to adapt and make the grade." To challenge this presumption would require a second type of story. The it's not us, it's the systemic discrimination and hidden barriers type of story told validated by women's voices instead of stats,

however this is simply a response to the blame the victim style of oppressive discourse generated in the nineteen seventies.

Liberal feminist discourse has had little impact on altering the situation but has a critically important corollary, one of women's empowerment through access to new discourses articulating women's oppression. Angela Simeone(1987) pointed out that "Justifications ( for women's under representation) are often listed as women's own undercutting of themselves include; the so called feminine crisis of confidence, role anomalies causing confusion in the workplace, the impact of domestic and family responsibilities( which women seek not to relinquish because of biological determinism), the objective choices made by women of their field of study, disciplines and activity ( teaching), and differing graduate paths.

This blame the victim approach also neglects the societal pressures, expectations and perceptions which are in built and biasing these factors. It conveniently neglects the fact that women are victims of institutional and societal discrimination. No allowance is made for the lack of or lesser supports for women who wish to pursue particular careers, especially if those careers happen to be constructed as "non-traditional".

Academic fields are in themselves constructed as masculine and feminine. One cannot ignore the reciprocity; because faculties are perceived as feminine, women enter them and because women enter them, they are therefore feminine. Also the assumption that women are more "people oriented" than "thing oriented", ( Carol Gilligan 1982) women exhibit a preference for teaching, ignores the possibility that the choice of teaching is a rational career decision which recognises the obstacles that stand in the way of a successful career in more 'prestigious' endeavours.

For me to write such a set of stories illustrating how individual women have encountered and demystified the systemwould be to replicate work done years ago in Australia, notably by Felicity Allen, Bronwyn Davies amongst others. What seemed to me a logical progression was to add my voice and those of academic women I interview, to the emerging feminist canon of more radical work from the eighties. The general tenet of this work, if I am permitted to oversimplify it,seems to have concentrated on the

deconstruction of the existing androcentric classification systems. and criticism of the malestream control of language. Sophie Watson,,Sabine Willis etc have mounted strident criticisms of patriarchy and gendered power differentials.

What I am setting out to do is to case study four universities, two from those cited as exemplary in accordance with the liberal feminist agenda as listed by the Business Review Weekly in their list of 1993 Affirmative Action Award winners. The winners were descided upon the following criteria: promotion on merit schemes; award restructuring improving career paths for general staff; professional development programs recognising family responsibilities; provision of on-site childcare and out of school hours care; flexible work practices such as job sharing; creation of women's networks; consciousness raising programs; integration of AA principles into teaching programs; developing a more skilled employee pool for university appointments; and women in leadership development programs.

The six nominated winners in ranked order were

Queensland University of Technology

University of Western AustraliaUniversity of New South walesUniversity of CanberraJames Cook UniversityEdith Cowan University.

I'm sure not all these institutions could tick all the boxes for the above criteria. One interesting question to investigate is the differences between the post-Dawkins universities and the older universities. To contrast these approaches to women's empowerment two further universities will be selected those that could be described as tolerating the operation of alternative feminist agendas, specifically using the notion of individual women's reputation as a determinant of successful feminist ways of working.

From the selected universities a list of interviewees will be gathered specifically women who describe themselves and their work as feminist. I will be drawing up a typology of different feminist ways of working in order to look at this range of feminisms and analyse how these feminists perceive their work. What are the dilemmas posed by each and how is

their work regarded within the institution and outside at the grass roots level.

One strong weapon in emerging within this current school of feminist discourse is poststructuralism, which is by far the most effective theoretical tool for us researchers. It enables us to open up for study the multiple positionings and feminist personas used by women confronted by the gendered bureaucratical cultures of our universities and to add this knowledge to the existing body of writing, hopefully to hasten the demise of gender stratification and indeed any other marginalised grouping including (dis) ability, race, class, or sexuality. Malestream power and privelege in the workforce is not a new phenomenon but at least now the system is rendered overt and open to be challenged for change. Feminists need to share their knowledge and experiences in order to give recognition to their change work and to encourage them to theorize their own work.

What my research is aiming to discover is the answers to many pressing questions . When the femininist academics are speaking to me, what are they actually doing? Are they telling feminist narratives or realist tales? To what extent is their story a positioned truth? If so where is the positioning located and for what purpose?

I will be engaging in an active reading of these stories in order to understand and speak from my position as reader of this story. When this is clear I will be able to describe my role in the research process as either a rewriter or interpreter of these narratives through the lens of my own

lived experience inside the academy. Will my voice be their voice? Is my truth their truth? Am I able to locate any contradictions that are presented by these deeds and tales.

At this point I will not confine myself by laying down a theoretical framework for my research. The data itself will illustrate what theorizing is to be done. The women themselves will inevitably theorized their own life histories and politics. The construction of my thesis will take place at the end of the research process to avoid the seemingly scientific imperative to test a (theoretical) hypothesis in order to discern it's validity or truth. I will not be using the interview transcripts as hard data but treating the life histories as a constructed fiction, a series of narratives and perhaps even discover what is a

feminist life history or indeed the range of life history that can be deemed feminist in its construct. The notion of authorship, mine and theirs will be central to the analysis stage of the research. I will use narrative analysis techniques to determine what the knowledge is that I am in the process of producing An understanding of this will allow me to write myself in to the thesis to illustrate where I have come from epistemiologically and determine the usefulness of the thesis in documenting feminist change work. In the end we will not be reading of a closed era but of an ongoing quest, a quest from which it is hoped that equality is no longer the goal but the acceptance of difference within our universities.

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