Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education

Challenges for the 21st Century

Gillian Howie, Ashley Tauchert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351934367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education presents new insights and research into contemporary problems, practical solutions, and the complex roles of teaching and learning in the international academy. Drawing together new research from contributors spanning a range of international and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book discusses topics of particular importance in the UK, USA, Australasia and South Africa, including: curriculum, boundary disciplines and research assessments, the Higher Education institution, educational practice, authority and authorization, teaching and counselling. Discussion of quality audits, curriculum modifications, teaching certificates and other key topics, add to this book's value in informing current debate and providing valuable research aids for education into the 21st Century.

PART I
WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Chapter 1

Gender Audit

Erica Halvorsen

Introduction

Academic women have long known that they are not promoted as much or paid as much, and do not, in truth, have equality with their male counterparts. From the early 1900s there has been ample evidence to support this fact, but it has not appeared to be of sufficient consequence, or importance, for steps to be taken to eradicate the discrimination that has caused it. This chapter will look at the evidence to support the argument that women academics are disadvantaged in terms of pay and promotion prospects, analyse the position of women academics now, and assess the short-term prospects of their situation improving.

In the academic year 1998/9, 130,534 academic staff were employed in Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the United Kingdom, 45,367 (35 per cent) of them were women.¹ Half these women were on fixed-term contracts, and were therefore likely to experience the job insecurity and broader life restrictions, such as difficulty in obtaining a mortgage, that result from that kind of employment. This compares with 38 per cent of men. Of the remaining women, 3.5 per cent were employed on ‘other’, e.g. hourly paid, terms, which leaves a minority in permanent, either full-time or pro-rata, positions. As 60 per cent of men have permanent posts the quantifiable over-representation of women on fixed-term contracts is 6 per cent.

14 per cent of all academic staff were employed part-time, the majority of whom (53 per cent) were women; and the majority of all part-time staff were on fixed-term contracts: 57 per cent of women and 58 per cent of men. But, interestingly, even though the proportions of male and female academics who worked part time on fixed-term contracts is roughly the same, women were more successful than men in securing the few available permanent part-time posts.

The statistics

In June 1996 the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) published the first set of data through which all the universities and colleges of Higher Education in the United Kingdom could be compared. Previous to that date the Universities’ Statistical Record (USR) had published statistics relevant to the ‘old’ university sector, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) had produced similar, but not always comparable, data for the now ‘new’ universities and colleges of Higher Education. HESA was established to collect data from the whole of the recently unified Higher Education sector and disseminate it accordingly. In the first volume it published, Resources of Higher Education Institutions, information about the academic staff employed in Higher Education in 1994/5 was available, so there continues to be an approximate time lag of one year between the collection of this data and its publication.² This is obviously disadvantageous for anyone who may wish to use that data, because it never reflects the real, accurate, current situation. Also, the readily available information in the Resources volumes is too broad for any but the most general of comparisons to be made. Supplementary data may be obtained from HESA, however, and it is this that has given the clearest picture of the representation of academics recently; at least, that is, until the publication of the Independent Review of Higher Education, the Bett Report.

In May 1999, that report identified an average pay gap between male and female full-time non-clinical academics in the ‘old’ universities of £4,259, and an average gap of £1,524 in post-1992 institutions in England and Wales. These figures were as at March 1998. In the Bett Report, less than a quarter (24 per cent) of the academic staff in the pre-1992 sector were reported to be women compared to 43 per cent in the post-1992 institutions; and the average pay for all full time academic staff was £31,163 in the pre-1992 sector compared to £27,061 in the post-1992 one. In November 1999, the National Association of Teachers in Higher and Further Education (NATFHE) requested salary data from HESA by institution, which was aggregated to show that, in England, academic women in both pre- and post-1992 institutions were paid £4,126 less than their male colleagues; in Wales £5,236 less; in Scotland the difference was £4,978; and in Northern Ireland £4,307. And, in April 2000, NATFHE returned to the same data set to produce an analysis of the male-female pay gap by subject area, which showed that even in ‘woman-friendly’ subjects, such as Health and Community Studies, which employs the largest number of women (38 per cent), there is still a £1,960 average pay gap between the genders.

These averages can be explained in a number of ways. Since they are of the pay of all academic staff, from Lecturer/Lecturer A to Professor, both the proportions of each gender on each grade and their position on the salary scale within that grade will weigh the averages in favour of one sex or the other, if the representation is disproportionate. Since 1992, when the first league tables to rank schools by their pupils’ GCSE grade results were published in The Times, the press has had an increasing propensity to rate all the UK’s educational establishments using as much of the information that is publicly available as it can. Tables are produced for schools and Further Education colleges on the basis of their A level results, and for HEIs by, among other things, the Research Assessment Exercise and Teaching Quality Assessment ratings of their departments, the grade of degree their students are awarded, and the amount of income they generate from external sources. Rankings of the different HEIs vary slightly from newspaper to newspaper due, presumably, to the weightings accorded to each of the factors in the equations each uses, but when a table is produced that presents the statistics in their baldest form, there would appear to be little room for their disputation. League tables which have been published by the Times Higher Educational Supplement for the last five years show the proportion of female professors, as defined by HESA’s broad grade bands,³ in individual institutions, and. They are constructed by using the HEIs’ generated, and HESA supplied, data about the grade on which staff in every returning institutions are employed, and they show two things: over the five-year period, the overall proportion of female professors employed in Higher Education institutions has only increased by 2.6 percentage points, and in the academic year 1998/9 women comprised only 9.8 per cent of the professorial complement in the UK’s Higher Education institutions. This figure may be, and has been, vigorously disputed by some vice chancellors of post-1992 universities, and principals of colleges of Higher Education, which have awarded certain of their staff, and not only women, the title of professor without the attendant remuneration. A ruse that holds no sway with inputters of Hesa returns who regard professors who are paid on Principal Lecturer scales as Principal Lecturers.

By applying a linear regression model to the percentages of female professors in the UK’s HEIs in the five-year period from 1994/5 to 1998/9 (Table 1.1), it is estimated that, at the current rate of growth, it will be 68 years before half the academics in this position are women.

Table 1.1 Percentage of female professors in UK HEIs, 1994/5 to 1998/9

Academic Year	Female Professors (%)
1994/5	7.2
1995/6	8.0
1996/7	8.3
1997/8	9.2
1998/9	9.8

Source: HESA Individualised Staff Returns.

However, relatively small proportions of either sex become professors (7.7 per cent of all academic staff in 1997/8), yet 16 per cent of all academic staff were categorised as senior non-professorial staff (i.e. Senior Lecturers and Researchers) in 1997/8, and it is from this rank that most of the next generation of professors will be drawn.⁴ Some will be recruited after demonstrating their excellence outside the Higher Education sector per se, but the majority will be promoted from within it. Table 1.2 shows the percentage of women in senior positions over the same five-year period as that shown for professors.

Table 1.2 Percentage of non-professorial female senior staff in UK HEIs, 1994/5 to 1998/9

Academic Year	Female Professors (%)
1994/5	17.0
1995/6	18.6
1996/7	20.1
1997/8	21.1
1998/9	21.9

Source: HESA Individualised Staff Returns.

When compared to the percentage of women professors the figures are consistent in showing that the proportions of women professors are approximately 55 per cent less than the proportions of senior female non-professorial staff in each of the five years; whereas the position is reversed for men; the proportions of professors who are men increased from 11.8 per cent to 15.5 per cent greater than the proportions of male senior staff over the five year period.

If, for example, the same ratio were applied to the percentage of non-professorial senior women in 1998/9 as the one for men, then the percentage of professors who are female would rise to 25.3. That a quarter of professors are not female could suggest that women do not apply for professorial positions; that they apply and are not successful; or that there is a culture of institutional sexism in the UK’s universities and colleges of Higher Education, and, this last, without even considering the proportions of women on the lower grades. The evidence to support any theory of institutional sexism is largely anecdotal due to the (purposefully?) obfuscatory practices adopted by the institutions. The statistics prove that there is a disproportionate number of women in the higher positions, but it is not something the heads of — at least some of — these institutions appear willing to acknowledge, as witnessed by this observation: ‘some vice-chancellors of top universities offended the Department for Education and Employment’s Permanent Secretary at a private dinner by pooh-poohing his concern about the lack of women in senior university jobs’.⁵ It is re-enforced by the introduction of the publication of criteria by which candidates are judged and the provision of information regarding the reasons for their failure at the University of Cambridge, only after an unsuccessful legal challenge relating to the selection of professors in 1998.

Evidence to support the contention that women are on lower scale points within each grade is provided by the Bett Report’s tables of average salaries for nonclinical academics on national pay rates, which are summarised in Table 1.3.

Table 1.3 Average salaries by grade for non-clinical academics on national pay rates

Source: Independent Review of Higher Education Pay and Conditions.

Table 1.3 shows that the discrepancy between male and female average pay within each grade is marginal, and does not appear to support the finding of the same report that there was an £4,259 average pay gap between men and women in the ‘old’ universities. However, the average discrepancy over all grades serves to underline effectively that women are not in the higher paid posts and that they are not promoted in the same proportions as their male colleagues. That women have been paid less and promoted less than their male counterparts has long been recognised and been the subject of more thorough analyses than a stark league table, or report into pay and conditions of all HE staff can provide (McNabb and Wass, 1997; Brooks, 1997), but the obsessive publication of such tables by the press, and very existence of the Bett Report, serve to focus attention and provoke debate beyond the academic community

The RAE

Since its inception the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has played an increasingly dominant role in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Introduction—Gillian Howie and Ashley Tauchert
• PART I: WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION
• PART II: MODELS OF HIGHER EDUCATION
• PART III: FEMINIST PEDAGOGIES
• PART IV: ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION
• PART V: OVERSEAS PERSPECTIVES
• Index