A Journey From Artful Feminist Politics to Senior Administration: Different Strategies for Dealing with the Intolerable, Different

Ways of Transforming Cultures.

Professor Terry Threadgold

Cardiff University

Some Context: Statistics in Higher Education (SHE) Reports 2009-12

• On average in the EU-27, women represent 37% of all researchers in the Higher Education Sector, 39% in the Government Sector and 19% in the Business Enterprise Sector, but in all three sectors there is a move towards a more gender-balanced research population.

SHE Cont.

• Women’s academic career remains markedly characterised by strong vertical segregation: the proportion of female students (55%) and graduates (59%) exceeds that of male students, but men outnumber women among PhD students and graduates (the proportion of female students drops back to 48% and that of PhD graduates to 45%). Furthermore, women represent only 44% of grade C academic staff, 36% of grade B academic staff and 18% of grade A academic staff.

SHE Cont.Horizontal Segregation

• The under-representation of women is even more striking in the field of science and engineering: the proportion of women increases from just 31% of the student population at the first level to 36% of PhD students and graduates but then falls back again to 33% of academic grade C staff, 22% at grade B and just 11% at grade A.

• The proportion of women among full professors is highest in the humanities and the social sciences (respectively 27.0% and 18.6%) and lowest in engineering and technology, at 7.2%.

SHE Cont.

• The official measure of the overall gender pay gap covering the entire economy stood at 25% in the EU-27 in 2006, a slight improvement from 2002 when it stood at 26%.

• On average throughout the EU-27, 13% of institutions in the Higher Education Sector are headed by women and just 9% of universities have a female head.

• On average in the EU-27, 22% of board members are women.

UK Equality Challenge Unit Statistics 2009 - 2011

These are much broader because of the nature of UK Equality and Diversity Legislation.• Across all types of staff within HEIs, women were in a

slight majority at 53.2% in 2007/08. In 2010/11, 53.7% of all higher education staff in the UK were women. Slight variations existed across the nations.

• Over the eight years to 2011, the proportion of female staff has increased by 1.3%, from 52.4% in 2003/04 to 53.7% in 2010/11.

• The increase was largely among academic staff. While men still comprised the majority of academic staff, the proportion of academic female staff steadily increased from 40.0% in 2003/04 to 44.2% in 2010/11 (a 4.2% increase).

ECU Cont.

• Representation of women varied markedly between different occupational types. Highest levels of representation existed within the support and administration occupations whereas lowest representation was seen within the technician, manual and craft areas.

• In contrast to academic staff, the gender profile of professional and support staff remained largely static, with only a 0.2% difference in 2010/11 to the proportions in 2003/04.

ECU Cont.• Women were much better represented among part-time than full-time

staff. In 2007/08, 46.0% of full-time staff were female compared with 67.6% of part- time staff. In 2012 Women comprised the majority of all part-time staff, making up 78.6% of part-time professional and support staff and 54.6% of part-time academic staff.

• Representation of women was lower in senior academic-grade groups than in less senior ones. Women made up 18.7% of staff at professor/head of department grades in 2007/08 compared with 45.4% for other grades. In 2012 84.9% SET professors were male.

• Women were less well represented within science, engineering and technology (SET) departments than in others. In 2007/08, only 25.4% of staff in SET departments were women compared with 49.0% for non-SET departments. In 2012 the SET figures had decreased with the proportion of women between 13.8% and 16.8% depending on discipline.

ECU Cont.

• Men were much more likely to be earning higher salaries than women. In 2007/08, 22.8% of male academic staff were earning more than £50,000 compared with just 9.4% of female academic staff. In 2012 31.9% of men were earning over £50,000 compared to 16.9% women (almost double)

• This pattern is on the whole replicated for BME and disabled staff.

• Pay gaps were much wider between male and female staff than between the other equality categories of ethnicity and disability. Across all staff types in 2007/08, the median pay gap between men and women was 18.2%. The equivalent pay gap between BME and white staff was zero, and between disabled and non-disabled staff was 3.4% in favour of non-disabled staff.

Policy Implications

• The SHE and ECU figures find some changes over the past 10 years but no evidence of any spontaneous movement towards equality (e.g., no indication that it is consistently easier for younger women or that the gender pay gap is adjusting over time)

• This is despite a huge range of attempts to increase the representation of women over this and earlier periods and globally.

What has been done?• From 1970s affirmative action and equity agendas in Australia, Canada, USA, UK and

Europe as well as China and other Asian countries.• Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (LFHE)• Athena Swan for SET/STEM schools (competitive accreditation and funding

implications)• The Gender Charter Mark for HSS.• Aurora: women-only leadership program (LFHE). Fewer senior women than ten years

ago.• Research Councils UK – gender focus in research and funding imperatives.

Concordat on research staff.• REF EDAP 2014. Recognition of differences in gendered experience: REF EDAP

recognising maternity/paternity/adoption and quality versus quantity of research output due to personal circumstances (UK specific)

• League of European Research Universities (LERU) working with the Russell Group in the UK, the Australian Group of 8, China and etc.

• OECD, UNESCO etc..

LERU Guidance: Strategies for Change

• Leadership, vision and strategy• Structural change – gender-specific career

development and work-life balance measures.• Gender dimensions in all research.

Note: all of these agendas can be and have been characterised as ‘managerialism’ and as part of the ‘commodification’ of academic work. This is not the way that women and other minority groups have seen them.

Histories

• I will come back to the radical potential of affirmative action and equity as quality agendas within managerialism. The possibility of changing cultures here is very real: QA in Australia was appropriated by women as a mechanism for what Yeatman (1990) called equity-oriented change management. Current agendas here in the UK can be used in the same way.

• First I want to explore some parallel histories – on the other side of the world – as a way of understanding how we got to where we are today – and to explore what an artful feminist politics within the academy might (and did) look like in Australia in 70s, 80s and 90s.

• Then I will come back to the UK – or at least to Wales.

The Dawkins Revolution

• 1987-91, Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Hawke Government. 1991-93, Treasurer, Keating Government.

• Expansion of Australian HE sector, mergers (of CAEs and universities – accused of ‘dumbing down’), internationalisation, introduction of fees (and HECS).

• Accountability: strategic plans, profiles, management statistics required to justify teaching and research.

• Accused of increase in ‘corporate managerialism’: requirement to bring in grants, to publish.

Surveillance and Accountability vs. Emancipatory Effects

• Neoliberalism, managerialism, marketisation and quality discourses can and do have negative affects on women’s careers (increased part-time and contract labour, lack of tenure, masculinist criteria and principles defining quality, performance, productivity) but they can be harnessed to promote women’s career opportunities.

• These things have been seen as tampering with the certain knowledge of ‘reasonable men’, a ‘collegiality’, ‘pastoral pedagogies ‘ and administrative systems- which were and are inimical to being managed or being made transparent and accountable.

• For many women, and other minority groups within the academy, there is no nostalgia for a golden past when there was plenty of time, when you were not overworked, when you could feel secure in your discipline. The past was tough and often ungenerous. The very systems that are lamented here were those that excluded

Affirmative Action and Quality in Australia

• In Australia, equity principles have been structured into national education and employment agendas since the early 1980s.

• Higher Education: a policy statement (1988)integrated equity as a central policy agenda in tertiary education.

• In 1992, the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) imposed a focussed investigation and implementation of equity policy across the university sector, as part of Quality Assurance (QA) mechanisms to assure quality of performance and output across the sector

• 1992, Higher Education: Achieving Quality,recommended regular reviews and audits, first conducted 1993-5.

• Quality here was seen to equate to equity: i.e., equality of opportunity, participation and outcomes for students (women, aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, students from remote areas, with disabilities or with socioeconomic disadvantages) and for female general and academic staff.

Results

• Gender imbalance in the academic sector remained significant in relation to other public service sectors. In 1988, women accounted for 7% of full-time, tenured professors and associate professors. However, this, increased to 9% in 1990, 13% in 1996, and 14.4% in 1998 (DETYA 1999). By 1998 a more visible ‘femocracy’ – i.e., senior women in positions of power - had become apparent.

• The addition of discourses of implementation, monitoring and evaluation (requiring targets and empirical indicators of success) to the equal opportunities legislation and policies, made it impossible for universities to ‘do’ equity without making some progress.

• The whole process brought marginalised groups into the view of the panoptic/disciplinary gaze (Foucault) – systems of open management and accountability can have positive outcomes - e.g., collection of data (about women’s promotion and tenure, or areas of study) generates knowledge about women that women can use in their own interests. The importance of statistics.

Criticisms

• Johnson 1990, Baldwin 1990, critiqued these equity agendas as being based on a ‘feminine deficit’ model – women as the problem. E.g., we move women into science but not men into the Humanities.

• By the 90s in the UK and elsewhere, it was recognised that the whole structure needed changing and that training men was key to changing outcomes for women. See REF 2014 below.

Turning the Numbers into the Pain of Women’s Realities and Stories. (1) Education

• ‘I came to Australia in late 1984 with no job but managed to secure a six-month contract in the university in early 1985. Although I had a book under contract and had published my Masters thesis with SUNY Press, I was appointed at the lowest level in the lowest lecturer classification. … For two years, my department head refused to call me by my name referring to me instead as the ‘Smith replacement’ … I don’t recall ever being addressed as Dr. Luke … but I do recall the belligerent twist the department head and his mates would put on pronouncing Foucault (Foo-coll) or poststructuralism in reference to the work I was publishing out of my thesis’. (Professor Carmen Luke, 2001, xv)

(2) Philosophy

• ‘There is a deep well of rage inside me. Rage about how I as an individual have been treated ; and rage aboutm the conditions that I am sure affect many women and minorities in Philosophy, and have caused many others to leave. Most of the time I suppress this rage and keep it sealed away. Until I came toMIT in 1998, I was in constant dialogue with myself about whether to quit Philosophy, even give up tenure, to do something else. … Whatever the numbers say about women and minorities in Philosophy, the numbers don’t begin to tell the story.’

(2) Philosophy Cont.• In my year at Berkeley and in the two years ahead of me and

behind me, there was only one woman each year in a class of 8-10. The women ahead of and behind me dropped out – so I was the only woman left in five consecutive classes. In graduate school I was told by one of my teachers that he had ‘never seen a first-rate woman philosopher and never expected to because women were incapable of seminal ideas’. I was the butt of jokes when I received a distinction on my prelims … they said ..’I should get a blood test to see if I was really a woman.’ Professor Sally Haslanger, Hypatia 2008.

• There are many similar stories from women in SET/STEM disiplines but they are not unique to these places.

Some additional Tales: University of Sydney in the 70s pre: affirmative action.

• Elizabeth Grosz, Feminist Philosopher at Sydney University, denied promotion and tenure for 9 years, until a new Head of School broke confidentiality on the promotions committee and enlisted the faculty’s support in petitioning for her promotion. Traditional and Modern Philosophy Departments split over the refusal to recognise feminist work.

• Carole Pateman’s (The Sexual Contract) departure for Political Science, UCLA in 1990 after unsuccessful attempts to be promoted to a chair at Sydney University. She had been in the Dept. of Government from 1972 and left as a Reader.

• Margaret Power, 1995, Australian Feminist Studies, 12,25: 14 years of unrecognised, unfunded labor involved in getting institutional recognition for the subject ‘Political Economy of Women’ at the university of Sydney.

Why the Opposition to Feminist Work?

• The period from the 1970s to the mid nineties in Australia saw an extraordinary series of changes in the Australian academy. In the 70s, under the impact of both affirmative action and globalisation and internationalisation, the university opened its doors to women and others who had never had access to it before.

• The postcolonial Australian context was especially disrupted by this new diversity, still connected as it then was to Oxbridge, the UK and the colonial past. The generation of Australians who graduated from the universities in the sixties and seventies were among the first to actually complete their PhDs in Australia.

Opposition

• this period also saw the arrival in Australia of ‘foreign theory’ - from the early 80s, poststructuralism/postmodernism, ‘invaded’ a range of social science and humanities disciplines.

• Feminist and critical scholarship was deconstructing the intersections between knowledge and power, exploring the ways in which disciplines had been constructed and discovering that they could be constructed differently, that research models could be re-thought, that the white, masculine definition of merit and success was subject to challenge and rewriting.

• Opposition was inevitable but it often took harsh and intolerable forms.

How were the disciplines affected?

• The work with theory began in French departments – and was connected with Semiotics.

• This intersected for me with work in Hallidayan Systemic Linguistics and critical discourse analysis.

• And it linked in to local, indigenous work on feminist theory in Education, English Literature, Philosophy, History, Law and ultimately a whole range of inter-disciplines and the sciences.

The Impact on the Disciplines (cont.)

• 1970s and 80s – work on gender equity in Education, curriculum reform to include women and girls (in Maths, Science, Geography), challenging masculinist knowledges.

• Diversity began to speak: women of color, older women, lesbians, married and single women with children, women with disabilities – both stafdf and students - began to speak about institutional marginalisation.

• Theory threatened the status quo.

Responses• Readings (1996: 120); links between ‘Culture’, nation-state and universities gone,

nothing left but ‘Excellence’ – ‘a principle that allows the maximum of uninterrupted internal administration.’ Note his language was about ‘penetration’ and ‘invasion’.

• Parallels the journalistic and publicly mediated perception of the Humanities in 1992-7 (see below).

• 1992 -1997: ‘yoked together in Australian journalism are the twin contagions of post-structuralism and deconstruction – related image of foreign, often French intellectual contagion… [but it was] Part of a world wide project to make cultural difference a category in critical analysis akin to race and gender.’ (Gunew 1991)

• Constant need in these years to write back to the media, as an individual (NSW and Victoria). No PR/marketing machines in the universities. New Humanities (1998) – ‘mickey mouse subjects’. 1984: Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 22 – my response in letters to the editor to attacks on the teaching of `semiotics.

Responses Cont.

• BUT: feminist scholars were already finding the bureaucratization and accountability that came with measurements of Excellence and Quality singularly helpful in challenging patriarchal structures within the university (Yeatman 1990; Luke 1996; Threadgold 1998) and scholars of ethnicity were turning conservative government and corporate diversity management agendas to radical use (Gunew and Rizvi 1994; Theophanous 1995).

Back to Gender In the Academy

• In 1998, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, undertook an investigation of its own activities and research strengths. This included, finally, an account of the then institutional location and research and teaching strengths in what by then were established centres of Gender and Women’s Studies (Threadgold 1998).

• The Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism was also being written and soon to be published.

• Postgraduate work in Women’s and Gender Studies, especially in PGT Masters programs grew apace in the 1990s.

• By 1998, I was able to write that ‘gender is now on the agenda of all the Humanities and Social Science Disciplines.’ (138)

Recession: All Change?• And yet, by 1997, the economic recession in the region was beginning to

produce the ‘downsizing’ which would lead to the loss of a great deal of this success, as formerly independent units were incorporated into larger schools: e.g., Women’s and Labor Studies in Adelaide, Women’s and Cultural Studies at Sydney University. These restructurings had very uneven and mixed results.

• They may have led to the loss of the strong women’s networks which I believe had sustained many women through the changes of the previous thirty years.

• But the equity and QA agendas that replaced these, although very different, are not necesssarily negative outcomes.

• Note: Women’s Studies had just been closed when I reached Cardiff in 1999.

The Success of Women’s Work

• The Australian Journal of Feminist Studies, set up in 1985 with an editorial board of 34 members. By 1997, 20 of these women were full professors, in either Women’s studies or the disciplines.

• The Australian Feminist Law Journal, set up in 1990, with a board of ten, six of whom are full professors in 1997.

• We should not forget how much of the work involved in setting up women’s Studies and other Centres outside the masculine dominated disciplines, was actually voluntary, unfunded, and in an odd sense beyond surveillance, occurring in the gaps and interstices of capitalist and corporate activity. These were not opposed by now because they allowed universities to meet E and D targets.

Success and Impact• It did provide management experience, and experience in curriculum

development in ways which offered women real opportunities for senior management activity. Men, isolated in the disciplines and bemoaning the managerialism which now beset them were often in no way as ready to take up the challenges of the new global HE sector environment.

• The number of chairs does mark the success of these women, working within managerialism and corporatisation to act as equity-change agents in transforming the disciplines and the structures of the academy.

• These new interdisciplines were also the first sites of engagement with communities, seeking research partners in industry, the arts, government and so on – what we now call ‘impact’. They transformed the learning experience for students.

Stories of Ageing

• The Stories of Ageing Project – ARC funded – women and ageing in multicultural Australia – involved life writing workshops, the making of video diaries, a community theatre led performance text collaboratively written from the life writing and performed by the women subjects and drivers of the research – aged from 70-85. Had policy implications and real impact on the lives of the Anglo-Celtic and Vietnamese women involved. These were really inspirational women!

The Accidents that make a Careernote: the sheer ambivalence of support, benign neglect, and outright discrimination – plus the excitement of teaching, learning about the international (Chinese scholars), constructing networks, transformation from medievalist to feminist critical theorist and discourse analyst - progress and change. • Third year Honours experience – ‘been trained wrongly’, ‘cannot do

Honours with me.’• Being supervised at Sydney University in the sixties. The MA Hons degree,

the postcolonial (Englishmen in the colonies, the need to do the PhD in the UK) and the Medal (from London and Wisconsin). ‘Just go away and write the thesis’.

• Being pregnant at Sydney University in the sixties. ‘We’ll miss you’. Working with small Children at Sydney University in the 1970s – no childcare.

• Promotion guidance? Training in teaching or research?

Accidents cont.• Publishing, attending conferences??• Appraisal, probation??• Training in research or teaching??• These absences and attitudes were called ‘collegiality’ – they often still are.

Intellectual attacks and the refusal of the new as opportunities:• Being the butt of published criticism from senior men. , Prof. David Stove in Quadrant in 1973,

‘Farewell to Arts’ quoted essay questions I had set for a second year honours class in order to ridicule them and set them up as the reason for the downfall of the Humanities. The Philosopher, Professor Elizabeth Grosz (then an untenured lecture like me) and I were both targeted. Supported by senior male colleagues whose advice was to remain silent! 70s.

• Attacks in the media with some opportunities to reply – gave our work the sort of coverage you would never be able to buy! 80s.

• The excitement of being able to work with the Federal and State Education Departments in curriculum development and training for high school teachers - this was about shaping a generation – or two. Changing a colonial English Curriculum into something fit for a multi-cultural, newly diversifying Australia and its young people.

• The fact that students found this work so exciting – at Monash, when I was Head of English, Drama and Cultural Studies, a national student survey named the department as the best place in the country to study these things.

Accidents and Slippery Ladders.

• Promotion to SL – no research at all.• Promotion to Ass Prof. – CV developing – my

children were growing up and I was learning the writing/publishing/research game.

• Application for chairs: the curse of postmodernism - an offer withdrawn, a disgraceful interview – and then accepting the offer - the importance of networks, men and women, not all feminist. Learning how not to do it.

Support and Networks

• Sabbatical and/or leave to attend the International Summer School for Structuralism and Semiotics in Bloomington Indiana and in Toronto, Canada.

• Curriculum development and setting up structures within which to work: the Centre for Women’s Studies, The Centre for Performance Studies, the undergraduate degree in Semiotics in the English Department. All radical changes.

• Running conferences. • Learning how to get feminist and theoretical work published:

Semiotics, Ideology, Language, Feminine, Masculine and Representation. Deals with publishers, changing the possibilities.

• Attending conferences run by feminist women, systemic linguists. Learning to write and to publish.

The Good and the Bad

• Learning to supervise postgraduates. Helping to construct new knowledges,. to support others to change the ways in which we ‘knew’. Being awarded ‘Supervisor of the Year’ by PGR students at Monash.

• Struggling with feminist knowledges and theory within systemic linguistics – issues with orthodoxy and being ‘in the true’ of the discipline (Foucault). Opposition from women but support from senior men.

• Working to change knowledges, curriculum and practice with women in Education and in Law – and in the UK after 1999, in Journalism and the Media.

On Not Being Trained to Lead and Manage

• Learning to be a Head of Department/school, then Associate Dean, then Acting Dean, then Research Professor, the Head of School in a new country.

• The green garbage bag syndrome and the contrast of the Australian Senior Womens’ Advancement Scheme, and later in the UK the Top Management Program with the LFHE.

Colonies, Migrations and Change?

• Completing my PhD at the age of 55 before I left Australia. I had by then supervised some 35 PhDs and examined 40 – but I did not have one of my own.

• Transnational migration to Cardiff in 1999. The complexity and difficulty of migrations: encountering real female mysogny, and cultural incompatibility.

• Examples from the USA and Canada very similar at the time. Prof. Penny Pether (2001), who died very recently, theorized her experiences in law in the USA, telling stories from the 90s which are entirely reminiscent of the story of feminist philosophers in Sydney in the 70s, and in 2006 (see below). ‘… an academic year in which I struggled with the anger and distress attendant on teaching fundamental legal skills in the US academy’ (p. 127).

Uneven Progress

• Becoming a PVC and being able to really change life for the better for women and men because I had the senior support, and the E and D Agenda had now kicked in in the UK (The Equality Act 2010). As there had been in Australia, there were now targets, Key Performance Indicators, Strategic Equality Plans and Equality Impact Assessments (at least in Wales, and in the REF).

• The System in which I landed in Cardiff in 1999 was a long way behind then in terms of equity/quality and management. It has now progressed beyond where the Australian academy is currently at on these issues. Australia invites me back to tell them what the UK is doing.

What do our Policies and Practices do to the disciplining of the docile bodies and habituses of

our staff? (Pether 2001)• Suffice to say here that the body is the site where attempts to reconcile the multiple

and often conflicting demands of the paradigm changes in the Australian academy in the period 1970-2000 were regularly played out (Barcan 1996) and are still being played out in the UK and Australia in 2014.

• This hybrid body is hard-pressed – as it is constantly spoken by, and speaks, new and different discourses and demands. It is of different generations, different genders, different races and ethnicities.

• The university is a place, like the metropolis, where people connected by different imperial histories are thrust together in unpredictable assemblages, still regulated by constructs of difference and privilege (Jacobs 1996) - it is a geography which struggles (Said 1993) - in which categories of Self and Other, here and there, past and present, constantly solicit one another (Jacobs 1996)

• The habitus produced in these engagements requires therefore much more support and direction than was ever the case previously. This was so in 1970, in 1999 and is even more the case today.

And Despite Progress, the Issues have not gone away

• I return to Philosophy. In 2006, a report was published in Australia by the Australasian Association of Philosophy on: ‘Improving the Participation of Women in the Philosophy Profession’. It, like Prof. Sally Haslanger’s report in Hypatia in 2008, reports a continuing situation of male dominance and aggression and hostility towards women.

• This is evident in: data that suggests that there is a gendered evaluation bias even in the peer-review process (women’s work is underrepresented in the top journals); Cv’s are judged differently by referees for promotion; a rejection of feminist work still by these journals; women in related disciplines being published in much larger percentages.

• This needs more data and more research but it means, as do the figures for the representation of women in SET, Pether’s (2001) very similar work on the legal academy in the USA, and the issues emerging around REF 2014 in the UK, that we still have a great deal of work to do.

A Different Language, Hard-pressed Bodies and An Artful Politics

• I want to suggest here that the opportunities for leadership and change in the academy now are less about an ‘artful politics’ in the interstices of old models of collegiality – ‘disciplinary cabals and middle-aged, white , male professors, protecting their ‘academic freedom’ against ‘management culture.’ (Martin Stringer, Birmingham) – and more about using the tools we have available from at least three sets of very different discourses to take the power to lead, to intervene and to change as we take responsibility for the future now.

Tools • The ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec) of the academy now, a

wonderful and privileged place to work.• Research and teaching and learning in the disciplines always

having a gender and inclusive focus. • Human Resource and Management Discourse (organisational

development, managing, developing, valuing, recognising people and their work) – dealing with the hard-pressed body of the academic and with the harm the failure to do that causes – not just to the individual academic but to the professions and institutions which they in turn serve and construct.

• Equality and Diversity Legislation and Practice embedded in all activities and policies and enabling the equation of quality and equality.

Actions

• We have to deny the ‘freedom’ to bully and harass, to discriminate, and we cannot allow the unmanaged ‘freedom to fail’ to continue.

• Some determined souls succeeded anyway – we will never know how many did not.

Using Management/HR Discourses for Change

• Leadership and Management Training at all levels for both men and women.• Gender specific career development programs, networks and mentoring.• Probation, Appraisal and Performance Management must be linked to data on

university populations and to workload management and allocation.• Transparent academic workloads management: across all activities and including

research leave and Innovation and engagement Activities as well as good university/school citizenship. Recent LFHE Report on women and workload.

• Transparent career pathways, recognising the super-diversity of possible contributions (Teaching and Scholarship, Teaching and Research, Research) and generational differences (PGR, ECR, MCR, Senior staff).

• Clear and published role expectations at every grade on every pathway.• The possibility of changing pathways: flexible careers.• Transparent and well communicated promotions and re-grading procedures: requiring

referees, assessors and internal panels to benchmark. Disrupting the old boys network. Recognising circumstances which may reduce quantity but not quality of outputs as in REF 2014.

• These can all be replicated in relation to student experiences

Research excellence Framework and Change: supported by E and D Discourse

• REF 2014, Equality and Diversity Codes of Practice and REF EDAP to determining reductions of outputs on Equality and Diversity, but also much wider employment and contractual grounds (e.g., ECR status, part-time working, periods of secondment and etc.). NB: powerful tool for change because there are funding implications and because the ECU, HEFCE and the funding councils and the research councils are all behind it .

• Requirement to train all REF selecting staff and more generally to train all staff to understand the equality and diversity issues around research and research careers and to behave with ‘dignity, courtesy and respect’ in the workplace.

• 2014 Equality Impact Assessment nationally of the impact of these new processes.

• This was a struggle but it is the beginning of major change which must be carried forward into the next REF iteration.

• Crucially it begins to break down the walls of the strongest bastion of gendered activity: Research and research funding.

Conclusion• We must then continue to deconstruct and rewrite the knowledges we work with, ensuring that

quality and equality for under-represented groups, are central to our teaching and learning and to our research.

• But we must also work to change the structures within which the academic and the student labors to deliver the results we need and to ensure that gender bias is made visible through transparent processes and practices so that equality of access, participation and outcomes comes closer to being a reality.

• The artful politics of working in the gaps and fissures of masculinist knowledges was a good training ground for senior administration and becoming an equity change agent. That politics matters because of the way it affects lives, and embodied experience of the world, as well as the world itself. It affects the students who move in and out of the academy – bringing and taking knowledges and beliefs with them – and the staff who labor within – and struggle - or who move about the globe taking knowledges and practices with them.

• It matters to all of us. To continue the struggle is our promise to the future. I hope none of you, men or women, will ever give up the struggle – but I also hope that the changes in the academy which I have been talking about will give you the greater support you need to take that struggle for better futures forward.