Globalization and Women in Academia

North/west-south/east

Carmen Luke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135655426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this cross-cultural exploration of the comparative experiences of Asian and Western women in higher education management, leading feminist theorist Carmen Luke constructs a provocative framework that situates her own standpoint and experiences alongside those of Asian women she studied over a three-year period. She conveys some of the complexity of global sweeps and trends in education and feminist discourse as they intersect with local cultural variations but also dovetail into patterns of regional similarities. Western feminist research has established that relatively few women hold senior positions in universities and colleges. Using the now common metaphor of the "glass ceiling, " this research has developed a range of social, cultural, and institutional explanations for women's underrepresentation in academic life. International studies show that women in non-Western countries are also underrepresented in higher education. Yet do Western explanations and strategies for change hold for academic women working in non-Western universities? The very diversity among women's experiences calls into question many of the analytic tools, terms, claims, and solutions formulated by Western feminism. This is the first study to show how cultural differences figure into the institutional dynamics of "glass ceilings." It raises important theoretical and practical, strategic, and tactical questions about issues of cultural difference and institutional power.

Women, Education, and Equity: South/East

Women in Academics: Views From the South/East

This chapter provides a context and overview of the research presented in the next four chapters and examines sociocultural and political issues related to women and education in Southeast Asia. I investigate locally authored research and UNESCO and census bureau statistics on women and education to provide a backdrop against which to discuss women’s underrepresentation in higher-education management. Where data is available, I present brief country profiles of women’s participation and outcomes in higher education and tie these to local political contexts, cultural politics, and state regulations that converge to construct variable educational opportunities for women. Throughout I draw illustrative links to the women in my studies to contextualize the cultural politics underpinning discourses of “Asian values,” “Asian femininity,” and “Asian family values.” My discussion of local, indigenous research remains framed in the local globalism issues I have raised so far, but in this chapter, I take a closer look at the politics of difference and standpoints raised by so-called “third world” feminists. I look at epistemological issues about local theorizing that have been raised by local feminist scholars, some of whom argue for adaptation and translation of western theory and others who argue for “indigenization.” I begin and close with reflections on my fieldwork in the region to contextualize local contingencies, the messy and chaotic nature of research in which this study and the women’s dialogues were situated.

I began in Chapter 1 with mapping the historical trajectory of western feminist research on women in academics. In this chapter, I present views from the south and east. However, to foreshadow, my attempts to locate research on women in Southeast Asian higher education were generally futile. Gender issues or gender equity in educational contexts is not a high priority in the educational literature in any of the four countries. Higher education in Southeast Asia is not addressed in the western or “Asian” organizational and management literature. Research in the politics, history, economics, or sociology of education draws heavily on development theories and arguments, but here too, women and women in higher education, whether as students or staff, are largely excluded from analysis and debate. Education ministries, census bureaus, and state statistics divisions rarely provide data on women in education, whether at the level of teachers in schools or women in academics. In short, I have searched far and wide beyond the standard texts on education and “Asia” to find women. Women are in the development literature, but there the persistent focus is on girls’ schooling, women’s literacy, and to a lesser extent, women’s tertiary education participation. Women’s invisibility as an analytic category thus mirrors one more aspect of local globalism: a global invisibility in local academic and research discourses.

SETTING UP THE STUDY

The case studies I report in subsequent chapters were conducted in 1997 and 1998. I began in Thailand, where I had already spent considerable time with senior management personnel, academics, and students observing and learning about institutional protocol and national and local issues related to schooling and higher education. On numerous previous visits, I had already been observing and making mental notes on women’s role, status, and the gender politics in academic contexts and engaging women in discussions about the kinds of glassceiling issues that had always interested me. Site visits are “total immersion” experiences. After a 9-to-5 teaching day, evenings are almost always taken up with formal and informal dinners and related social amusements such as karaoke. Weekends usually consist of packing the “foreigners” into minivans and heading off to do the local sights. Along with hosting staff representatives, a few students invariably accompany us as interpreters and to practice their English with us. In other words, these are full-on academic and social encounters and relationship building blocks with steep learning curves. I was feeling relatively comfortable in Thailand, despite my lack of Thai language skills, and so Thailand seemed an obvious first choice for me to get started on a larger regional study on women in higher education.

I already had an established network of friends and colleagues in Singapore and Hong Kong and felt confident that I could negotiate these three sites with relative ease. Culturally and socially, my choices were based on the need for me to have a sense of security and relative control in countries where I would be traveling on my own and in charge of fieldwork logistics without the help of research assistants. My site choices were also limited by financial constraints. I had received a modest university grant in 1997, which was just enough for one return overseas airfare and about 10 days of accommodation, meals, and related costs. To remain fiscally prudent within my meager budget, I decided to add the Thai and Singapore fieldwork to one of my teaching seminars in Thailand and to schedule Hong Kong as one separate trip later in the year. Hong Kong accommodations are among the most expensive in the region, and 7 days of interviews consumed as much accommodation costs as airfares. Since my department covers all travel, meals, and accommodation associated with off-shore teaching programs, I was able to save my grant funds by remaining in Thailand for another two weeks after my teaching commitments there. I added the Thai and, later, the Singapore fieldwork onto this “prepaid” research trip. Singapore is only an hour by air south of Bangkok. I managed to stretch my modest research budget to cover accommodation and incidentals in Singapore, accommodation and domestic travel to various universities in Thailand, and a separate, very expensive, trip to Hong Kong later in the year. In other words, counting pennies on a small budget certainly shaped the scope and sequence of my study.

In 1998, I received another small departmental grant of AU$4,000, and at the end of that year, I conducted the Malaysia study. Malaysia is usually cheaper than Singapore and Hong Kong, but at the time of my trip, the Australian dollar had deteriorated to an all-time low, and the Malaysian ringgit had just been pegged to the U.S. dollar, which meant that my initial grant had suddenly lost a fair amount of spending power. In Thailand a year earlier, the situation was reversed, as the Thai baht was just starting its downward spiral at the time of my fieldwork. The scope and trajectory of research can be as much about personal choices as it can be about unforeseen external contingencies.

The case studies are organized chronologically to reflect both the sequence of political events in the countries visited and the chronology of my research journey. My Thai study was conducted just months before the currency meltdown, when an atmosphere of crisis was already in the air. I visited Hong Kong eight weeks after the historic July 1, 1997, handover of the colony to China, when a sense of optimism and anxiety was evident everywhere. My visit to Malaysia in November 1998 occurred during the prolonged political crisis surrounding the dismissal of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and his imprisonment on corruption and sexual misconduct charges. This same period also saw the first major civil “reformasi” protests since independence, staged in the civic center and on university campuses, in response to the Anwar affair. My visit coincided with these protests and occurred only weeks after the APEC summit, during which U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s comments about the “brave people of Malaysia” engaging in prodemocracy reformasi demands raised the ire not only of host Prime Minister Mahatir but other leaders in the region, who are very sensitive about external meddling into internal affairs. In short, it was a tense period, and everyone from cab drivers to academics were very much thinking and talking politics, although academics’ comments were usually in “off the record” conversations. Besides anxieties about my own security and mobility, the politically charged atmosphere also enabled me to raise political issues that would be seen as acceptable questions from an outsider. Research is always imbued with personal histories and choices, and for me, the selection of fieldwork sites had to do with financial resources, with where I felt I could negotiate the situation and feel relatively safe and comfortable, coupled with where I had established core networks from which I could fan out and snowball my sample.

When I started this study, therefore, I relied on my colleagues in the region to help network me into further contacts, to be on the lookout for local research on women in academics, and to provide any links or sources that could be useful for my study. Our international students also helped with contacts, advice, and information. When I began, I knew very little about the educational histories, current contexts, and issues in higher education in these four countries. I had a general but limited knowledge about colonial histories and some “on the ground” knowledge and experience from having taught in Thailand, having given seminars and presentations over the years in the region, and learning mostly from the academic colleagues, administrators, and students I encountered. Local newspapers, TV, and English-language books bought locally also added some insights into current political and social issues. Armed with this eclectic stock of knowledge, experience, anecdotal and popular media information, I set about researching Southeast Asia in earnest and from several disciplinary areas, all new to me: revisionist and narrative history, locally authored postcolonial and cultural studies, comparative and international education research, development studies, political science and economic research, NGO reports and data.

(RE)SEARCHING WOMEN

Research on women and higher education was easy enough—there’s plenty of it, all of it western authored and focused on western higher education, and most of it I had already collected over the years for previous research. But locating research on women in higher education in Southeast Asia was very much a needle in a haystack search. The categories “gender” and “women” are often not even entries in book indices. Mainstream development research focuses on education and occasionally segregates for gender on educational outcomes but, as with economic, comparative, or international educational research, the focus is consistently on educational participation at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. Theoretically this work is based in human capital theory and its relationship to economic development and socioeconomic mobility, the politics of nation building and maintenance of state legitimacy. Women appear in these accounts conceptualized primarily as a reserve labor force and, in accounts of the postwar period, as a quantitatively increasing cohort at all levels of education. In this literature, nobody seems to be noticing or querying the historical or contemporary politics of gendered control and authority over the educational enterprise: from the management and administration of knowledge, students, assessments and credentialing, or policy, whether in ministries or departments of education, in schools or higher education. Other than an occasional observation that primary teachers are mainly women, that girls’ education and women’s tertiary participation has increased in the postwar period, in this literature there is no substantive view and no comment on women’s role in educational decision-making, administration or management.

The literature on women and management has contributed significantly to western research on women and glass ceilings, although the focus tends to be less on the public sector such as universities, and more on the private, corporate sector. Organizational theory guides this research, which has provided insights into the patriarchal workings of formal and informal organizational cultures. With few exceptions, however, analyses of workplace cultures have not been transposed to investigations of organizational and gendered cultures in management or different industry and service sectors in cross-cultural contexts (Adler & Izraeli, 1994). Women’s educational participation, outcomes, and subsequent professional opportunities figure significantly in this literature, but again, women’s role in higher education (as managers or teachers and mentors of future generations of women managers) is generally neglected. However, this research supports findings from educational research on women in higher education. Both claim that women’s increased investments into education coupled with enhanced professional opportunities through various kinds of equity legislation in many countries, has not translated into “significant breakthroughs into executive ranks…women in every country remain only a tiny fraction of those in senior positions” (Adler & Izraeli, 1994, p. 7).

The literature on women and development also tends to focus on compulsory and postcompulsory educational participation and outcomes (Mak, 1996). Southeast Asian women are often the object of inquiry in western-authored research on women and development but as immigrants to the United Kingdom, the United States, or Canada (Marchand & Parpart, 1995). Highly regarded, internationally refereed, and locally published English-language journals such as Hong Kong’s Education Journal, Singapore’s Asia Pacific Journal of Education and Soujourn—Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, or South Korea’s Asian Journal of Women’s Studies also failed to provide any research or reference links to higher education or women in higher education.

As I noted in Chapter 4, my research is limited to English-language publiccations. But as I discovered in short order, regionally located sociologists, economists, educationists, postcolonial scholars, and cultural theorists are publishing in English, on European and American presses, in overseas and local English-language journals. Moreover, on checking with all the women in this study who are in education faculties, the resounding response has been that “women in higher education” is not a research area or priority. In fact, a few women commented that this was a peculiar research topic and seemed surprised that a university would be funding such a project. Others said that it was high time somebody was investigating this topic, that “maybe now we can know more about what is happening with us and other women and why,” and were keen to know what I was finding out in other countries. In any case, efforts to find locally authored research didn’t lead me very far. A few women did find a few local reports and some conference presentation papers, and some had saved newspaper clippings on issues related to women and education that they gave me at the interviews.

In Hong Kong, for instance, I received newspaper and news magazine clippings on items profiling senior women in the public service sector. In Singapore, women had saved me several weekend newspaper editions that focused on International Women’s Day and featured accounts of high-profile women and government progress on women’s issues. Several women in the Singapore sample were members of the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), which proved an invaluable source for numerous publications, although none specifically dealt with women in higher education as students or as staff. Some of the Malaysian women also brought a few local publications to the interviews and provided addresses and sources to pursue, one of which was the Women’s Affairs Division. This government-funded unit publishes working papers and monographs on women’s issues in English and Bahasa Malaysia, but the publications focused principally on women in the workforce (excluding women in education), women and development, fertility rates, changes in household composition, and so on.

Searches of university Web sites failed to locate any annual university reports in which I thought I might be able to find data on gender distribution in academic staffing and classification levels. Web sites for ministries of education all have links to universities or higher education, but here again, data was inconsistent on academic staffing in terms of total numbers, position classifications, and gender distribution. Departments of statistics do not all provide educational data, and those that do generally do not differentiate for gender, levels of enrollment, or graduate rates. UNESCO’s Statistical Yearbook provides country data on percentage of female participation in third-level educational participation but does not disaggregate for public and private institutions, diploma and degree courses. Only Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee, the funding body for public universities, provided data on sex distribution in academic staffing. In short, the search for a body of academic research on women in higher-education management, a position and view from the south and east, has been an arduous journey of picking up bits and pieces here and there across a vast range of data sources and disciplinary and analytic orientations. Occasionally, I would stumble onto a line or paragraph in a journal article or monograph mentioning women’s role or status as academics in higher education, and this was always a big find worthy of multiple Post-it notes and yellow highlighter marks.

“Women in Higher Education Management,” a UNESCO-commissioned report published in 1993, remains the one anthology dedicated specifically to analyses of women in higher-education management in 12 countries. Although by now somewhat dated, it provides locally authored country case studies that include several Southeast Asian countries, and as such, it has formed a useful backdrop to this study. I was able to interview one of the contributors to this volume, and her involvement was a useful introduction to other women. Editor Elizabeth Dines’ position on the authors’ contributions is that despite the cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity among the countries represented in the volume, recurring themes within that diversity reveal universal dimensions beyond cultural difference. Dines identifies two themes that match the glass-ceiling explanations many women in my study provided. First are pipeline theory effects, which suggest that lack of girls’ access to schooling translates into reduced tertiary participation and outcomes for women which, in turn, produces a trickle rather than a flow of qualified women suitable for senior appointments. Second are the institutional barriers or glass ceilings that confront women once they ascend the career mobility ladder. Given that this is a UNESCO report, the links between education and development remain at the core of arguments for improved gender balance at all levels of schooling and tertiary education including women’s access to senior decision-making positions. Indeed, any discussions on women “and” or “in” education are consistently linked to local development histories and politics, whether authored by local or western scholars.

WOMEN, EDUCATION, AND DEVELOPMENT

“The unifying theme of education as a tool for development” (Mak, 1996, p. x) is common among all international or “global” feminist studies of women in management (e.g., Adler & Izraeli, 1994) and women and education (e.g., Conway & Bourque, 1993). Reform to improve girls’ and women’s access to education is a long-standing and global issue, particularly in the postwar period. Educational access and participation and government commitments to reform differ country by country in relation to religious, ethnic, and class differences, urban and rural differences, legacies of colonial regimes and postcolonial development, and the various educational models implemented by postindependence governments. Yet Hong Kong and Singapore are among Asia’s wealthiest and most westernized countries with near gender parity of primary, secondary, and tertiary participation. The adult literacy rate in Hong Kong is 88% for men and 96% for women. In Singapore, the rate is 86% for men and 95% for women, and in Malaysia the rate is 78% for men and 89% for women (UNESCO, 1998). In Malaysia, more girls than boys complete secondary education (equivalent, as in Singapore, to the British GCE “O” level), although in 1990 this combined female/male cohort represented only 19% of the 17- to 18-year-old age group (Sidin, 1996). Women are underrepresented in vocational education but comprise about 45% of university undergraduate enrollme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Women, Education, and Equity: North/West
• Women, Education, and Equity: South/East
• Postscript
• References