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GHANA RESEARCH AND ADVOCACY PROGRAMME YOUNG PROFESSIONALS GENDER FORUM THEME: Gender Mainstreaming for Professional and National Development: Ensuring Relevance, Intervening Holistically and Gaining Traction.
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GHANA RESEARCH AND ADVOCACY PROGRAMMEYOUNG PROFESSIONALS GENDER FORUM THEME: Gender Mainstreaming for Professional and National Development: Ensuring Relevance, Intervening Holistically and Gaining Traction Promoting Women’s Participation and Bridging Gender Gaps -Achievements, Relevance and Prospects – Focus on Academia Mrs. Deborah Atobrah, Research Fellow, IAS, UGDr. Olivia A. T. F. Kwapong, Senior Lecturer, ICDE, U.G.
outline • Defining Gender Mainstreaming (GM as in academia) • Interventions for promoting gender mainstreaming in Academia • Impact so far • Persisting challenges • The way to go
Gender Mainstreaming as in Academia • GM is defined as "the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in any area and at all levels. It is a strategy for making the concerns and experiences of women as well as of men an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally, and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality." • Mainstreaming includes gender-specific activities and affirmative action, whenever women or men are in a particularly disadvantageous position. Gender-specific interventions can target women exclusively, men and women together, or only men, to enable them to participate in and benefit equally from development efforts. These are necessary temporary measures designed to combat the direct and indirect consequences of past discrimination. ILO http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/gender/newsite2002/about/defin.htm • Looking at the definition of GM, it is expected that there are relatively equal /proportional number of males and females among faculty, students and administrative staff etc
Interventions – Global & Ghana Interventions have targeted students, faculty, adm staff: • Female enrolment/appointment policies • Affirmative Action • Conscientisation/sensitisation/advocacy • Research grants/scholarships • Conscious appointments • Gender centres e.g. Centre for Advocacy & Gender Studies (CEGENSA) • Teaching gender as a discipline in most Depts. • Research in gender/Gender Studies • Expansion of facilities/gender sensitv. infras’ture
Figure 8 Enrolment Statistics from Basic to Tertiary Level for 2007/2008
Governing Structures, Professorial Ranks and Administrative Representation
Trends in the Representation of Females as University Professors (1960s-2000s)
Case of UG • The trends in students admission from 1991 – 2010 shows some increase from female percentage of 22% in 1991 to 40.54% in 2010. • in a period of almost ten years the admission of females into the University has only doubled but has not reached the 50:50 male-female ratio. • Female enrolment has increased from 9.1% in 1961 to 41% in 2010. • Having 9.1% females to start with is refreshing. But the pace at which females enrolled over the period is NOT all that appreciable
So far – UG Case – 2010 Data • Graduate enrolment is not any better, for the 2009/2010 academic year, male enrolment was 64.95% while females formed 35.05%. • 229 PhD students for the same period, 176 were males with 53 (23%) being females. • Female performance is however very exciting, records of December 2009 showed that 12.51% of the females and 10.53% of the males made a first class. • On-campus residence has been favourable to females. While only 25.84% of the total males had residence, 32.61% of the females had residence.
Persisting challenges • The domestic baggage: • The assumption is still that women are responsible for childcare and the domestic side of things, which take time away from one’s career.” • “I get quite a lot of help from my husband, but it’s not just about help, it’s about responsibility. If you are the one who has to organize all the meals and shopping and cleaning and holidays and bags for childcare and whatever, even if you can delegate those tasks and get help, it still falls on you to be responsible for it.”
The Flexibility misconception and its implications • Having flexibility meant one could work at all times. “You really are not bound to your desk here. …you can work at home or in a coffee shop. …don’t have strict 9-to-5 set of hours, …I don’t actually have to ask permission to go.” • The good thing about being an academic is that I have more flexibility around my schedule. I go to my office Monday to Thursday. Fridays, I stay home. But doing that means I work every single night and weekends. • The challenge of flexibility is the mental switch from work to family and back again, and the strain that accompanies it. • If I’m thinking about work when I’m being with my son, that’s not fair to him - it’s the other way around also.
The Glass Ceiling • Women suffer biases in recruiting, selection, and promotion efforts, esp. in the sciences. Those in male-dominated depts. have few networkg, collab. Oppors • “You can’t just do this [work and have children] unless you’re sufficiently good at what you do because everybody else has more time. So you have to be better in less time.” • “I am writing these research grants for funding and I’m competing against men for the same pool of money, men who don’t take time off when their kids are sick. If you compare my research output to men who are not at home as much with their kids as I have to be, I will inevitably come up short.” • “I recently heard a very senior manager say at a promotion panel something like, ‘There are no excuses. The person didn’t have sufficient publications because she had 2 maternity leaves in 3years.’” • “The tenure clock is a huge challenge. It ticks at the same time as the biological clock. If you choose to have children while you are going up for tenure, it’s tricky because you jeopardize your position. And if you choose to wait, it’s tricky because you risk not being able to have children.”
Misconceptions/Neg. Perceptions • Students have differing expectations of their male and female instructors: masculine traits are highly regarded. • women are expected to be more nurturing, accessible, and interactive and fun (smiling) in their teaching style. • Male instructors perceived as more knowledgeable • women are compared to men, not men to women) • perceive men instructors (even teaching assistants) as “professors” and women instructors (even full professors) as“teachers.” • Students express far more dissatisfaction with women teachers who give them low grades than with men teachers who give them equally low grades. • Women teachers are more likely to be described with highly-charged, words like “bitch,” “witch,” and “feminazi,” • Women instructors to be caring, accessible available, interactive, fun, respect students and give good grades
Maternal Wall • Many academic women feel that their career opportunities are limited after having children. • The average age at which women receive the doctorate is 34, the time when college-educated women are beginning families (Marcus, 2007). Add seven (or more) years to tenure and a woman is in her 40.s. • women are tempted to choose the softer, less secure, lower paying academic routes, either in anticipation of having children or once they become mothers. • I have people who invite me to speak and I say I have a young child and I'm actually not traveling. I don.t think I.m getting a very good reputation for that. And what's interesting is after awhile people stop inviting you, so it has a real career impact. • I seriously contemplated leaving my work¡¦ And part of me thinks in another life, or if I were a man, I would be trying to run myself up the ladder in academia.
Workload and Role Overload Academic jobs are oversized and growing larger – • a professor involves lecturing many classes, and also doing research. it’s always on your mind. In the middle of the night sometimes I’m up trying to do some things. • You have to do it all the time to make it work. We don’t really have eight-hour jobs here. • A million hours, I think. • Children require a parent’s time. Pregnancy, nursing, and taking care of children take time, emotional investment, and energy. Just because the child is in arms, does not mean the work day is done. • The month after [my son] was born, I was finishing writing a paper. I.ve never had the luxury of doing six months of total maternity leave. I would not understand what that means cause I don't know how to turn off my work .cause it's really mine; this is my research and I'm the only one that can drive it forward
The Guilt: Work life balance is a Myth • The motherhood ideal and the guilt that stems from failing to meet its unattainable standards continue to act as barriers to women’s work/life balance • Guilt, guilt is the thing. Guilty that you’re at work and then guilty that you’re at home, that is a challenge.” • never comes a point at which you can say, ‘Okay, I’m doing it well. Now I can find a space for my family as well. “My academic career was slowed due to family and I spent less effective time, less quality time with my family than I would have liked to in the last 20 years. That compromised my academic progress and I think it also compromised the quality of my family life because I was trying to juggle them both unsuccessfully.” • “Having one small child and am about to have another one, it’s almost impossible to have a work/life balance. If you are at work you feel guilty, if you are at home you feel guilty. It’s a real juggling act. It’s difficult in the sense that you feel like you’re not putting 100 percent into your work or 100 percent into your family.” • I think this whole myth that you can have a job, have a deep relationship with your children, and have a great relationship with your partner, which they.ve been telling women since the 70s. It’s just completely not true.
The Way to go 12009 Nobel Winner Elizabeth Blackburn's expc: • 37 years old when became a full professor at the same time you found out was pregnant • I decided not to have a family for a while, but became pregnant and so the decision was made for me. I didn't realize it would be so hard to have a child and do my research; I didn't think it through. • We'll always have guilt and stay-at-home moms have it too, although it's a different kind of guilt. We just have to realize we're not doing our children a disservice when we're engaged in our jobs if we are also engaged in them • My recommendation is to think about the fact that family responsibilities come in waves and it does take time; but work also takes time, so you need to decide to be very focused on this. For my husband and I, our lives were work and family and that was it; everything else stopped for a time, and now we're resuming things like going out to dinner or the movies. It wasn't a sacrifice; we love both our family and our work.
The way to go 2 • Understand the Reality – • demonstrate our abilities without fear. • empower ourselves—do what we know best • Take responsibility for our actions • Promote ourselves/compete without fear - sell ourselves • manage ourselves to be ambitious and smart • focus on our strengths rather than workg on our weaknesses • Be confident
The way to go 2 • Mentoring/coaches • Networking – network of women in academia • Collaborative research • Residencies, fellowships, grants • Invest personal resources for research, laptops etc – bank loans not only car/housing loans • Give birth to less number of children – • institutional childcare services • Family/male/partner support – get help:I get help with things that other people can do, like housework. If somebody else can do that work just as well, then why not let them do it? That way I am freed up to do the things I really need and want to do.” • Determination • with effort and creativity - “all things are possible”
