Anyone in the UCU?

[Closetlibrarian]

And striking at end of Feb?

I joined UCU after the last strike, so this will be my first. Even though I voted in favour it, I'm now in an utter quandary. I have an absolute monster of a semester coming up and I'm fretting about all the lectures, tutorials, etc, I'll have to cancel as part of the strike.

If you've gone on strike before how did you present it to your students so that they didn't just get really pissed off with you for cancelling lectures (that we're then, according to UCU, not supposed to reschedule)?

Also, how did you mange with the loss of income? I'm the 'breadwinner', so 14 days of strike action is going to massively impact us (i.e. I'm not sure we'll be able to pay our bills).

*Not to mention people with caring responsibilities of various shades, who aren’t as free to move around as the traditional academic model of the single unencumbered, able-bodied male.

You sound pretty privileged, but not everyone has had it as easy as you.*

You know nothing about me. I suffer from a life threatening illness and I have spent years caring for somebody else.

Funnily enough, many things happen to women in life which are not necessarily ‘choices’.

Many things happen to men and women in life that are not choices - funnily enough, I didn't choose to have an illness that will most likely prevent me from reaching retirement age.

This doesn't detract from the fact that there are in addition active choices to be made in academia, particularly at its earlier stages.

emy - I might well have misinterpreted it, but I read the thread as raginggirl responding to things I have said, and things neverever has said, not your comment about it being more difficult for women to get involved in running things because of wider gender inequalities in society (I would hope we would all heartily agree with you that the position of women in academia isn't just about the way the work culture is set up, but also the domestic culture - and divison of domestic labour). I am full of admiration for anyone who manages to juggle an academic career and a role as a hands-on parent to any child, let alone one with additional needs.

Instead, I get responses like that of @EmyRoo upthread, and the implication that if I'm doing jobs which facilitate other people's research it's because a) I'm not passionate about my own research; or b) I have a hide of a rhonocereos.

Or that it's OK for me, because I haven't had to struggle. From people who know nothing about my health or personal life.

Maybe I'm missing something here (it wouldn't be the first time!! ) but wasn't raginggirl actually responding to neverever rather than emyroo on that point? I do this sometimes - for some reason, on Mumsnet it's really easy to think a post is by one person when actually it's by someone else. I have done this myself at times!

Or have I got the wrong end of the stick??!

Sorry to hear about your illness user. I don't really know what to say other than that health problems are so desperately unfair.

I’m sorry to hear about your illness user and I hope your health is ok at the moment. I’m surprised that that hasn’t made you more sensitive (at least from your posts on this thread) to the invisible barriers facing many people in academia. Instead you appeared to dismiss the structural forces that often underpin different career trajectories by stating that there is ‘nothing to be gained from comparing choices’ (paraphrase). If that wasn’t what you meant, then fair enough.

Where I am, the only way to get promoted is to publish. No amount of committee and admin work will get you there. I have been told this explicitly.

And our research are mostly quite individual - all you need is a quiet room, no equipment and hardly any need for even a computer. We are cheap.

I was the only person who went part-time for a long time, and am still one of the very few. Nobody knows how to promote a part-timer. To be honest I have had enough of this. If I'm going to be stuck I would at least spend my time on things I like. I have never obstructed anyone and have always been as supportive as I can (and I try not to think about whether anyone else has been supportive of me), and I will abide by any decisions made collectively - I have never been late for any bureaucratic/admin deadlines, I have helped out colleagues where I can, but I will not kill myself for my meagre pay and for snide comments about going home early. They get their pound of flesh but I'm damned if they get more.

And I really don't think that people who take on admin don't care about their research! I appreciate the sacrifice they make and have always tried to response and support as much as I can.

Like RagingGirl, I and most of those women who become professors (far less than 10% in my field) have often made huge sacrifices along the way - moving countries, leaving behind relationships, not having children, having fewer children than we wanted. Of course that doesn't mean academic women who aren't professors haven't made sacrifices too - but there isn't anything to be gained by making comparisons about choices.

This is what I wrote.

You can't compare a (wo)man with no children who works 12 hours per day with a (wo)man who works part-time and cares for children/parents, when evaluating for promotion/grants etc.

And it is not a competition as to has made the most "sacrifices" - there is no point in making such comparisons.

neverever - This is the thing, isn't it? The institition/capital will always try to push to exploit- I don't think any one individual intends to do this, it seems to be some kind of interior logic to the way universities work, emerging out of an increasingly managerial structure.

In response, we have to support each other to ensure that the workload doesn't fall disproportionately on the few, but we also have to push back against really exploitative/unreasonable demands. And we also have to hold onto the things that make the job worth doing - the joy of research, the delight of a really engaged bunch of students.

It can be hard to walk that line.

You don't sound like one of the uncolleagiate types we have been discussing! You really don't! I think part-timers really face a battle to ensure they aren't doing a full week for part of a week's wages, and I do think it's absolutely necessary to push back at times. That's not the same thing as refusing to do anything to help others - as you said, you have your admin and your teaching, just as others do, and you try to be supportive wherever possible.

I think what raginggirl is saying, and where I'm trying to support her, is something a bit different - that sometimes it matters how we push back. For example, ranting at your HoD that the NSS is a complete waste of time is just more of a waste of time, and misery-inducing for the HoD concerned, who probably agrees with you, but who is under the cosh from management about return rates. Fucking up the NSS might appear to be an effective strategy of resistance, until you realise that it actually just involves the already-stressed HoD and Director of Learning and Teaching in having to spend days in meetings, producing an action plan of how to correct a fall in the score from 94% to 89%, caused by one member of staff having an unofficial protest (this actually happened to DH). Encouraging students to think about boycotting the NSS so that the return is uncountable, however, might be more effective - this is what some colleagues in an adjacent department managed to do!

"we also have to push back against really exploitative/unreasonable demands"

Yes. And certainly the effort to push back is not helped by in-fighting and undermining each other.

I think we are not have a quarrel here.

More power to our collective elbows.

Not having a quarrel, I mean.

No, I think we agre neverever!

user - I think what many of us are arguing is that there is a problem in wider society that means that care work falls disproportionately on women. And I don't just mean the work of caring for someone who requires a great deal of attention. I mean the daily work of care, too - the grocery shopping, the clothes washing, the food preparation and cooking, the running children to school and getting them readfy for bed. (This is what I call "the work of social reproduction").

The point is that this mostly unpaid labour forms part of the necessary labour of life. The waged work of employment is dependent upon it. So in a heterosexual couple, the waged work of many men is dependent on an unseen and unpaid quantum of socially reproductive labour which falls disproportionately to the lot of women. This is what we call structural inequality and it's not so much an individual choice as the way that society is set up! (There are many, many things that reinforce it - like the fact that sexism means that women are paid thousands less than men in their first jobs, and promoted later, which means they are often still behind when it comes to raising children, which means that it can make more sense for the woman's salary to be sacrificed than the man's.... and you see where I'm going with this!)

Academia, like many other fields, tends to ignore this and to reward based on a model of professional achievement that doesn't acknowledge this gender imbalance. But it doesn't have to be that way! We could perhaps make some adjustments that would ensure that many women aren't automatically disadvantaged by gender inequality. Providing free hiqh quality childcare could be a really, really good start.

I find it hard to believe that any women in a senior academic position got there without making all kinds of sacrifices. Or any academic position tbh.

I think training for men would be useful but I would worry that the enormous capacity for cognitive dissonance among so many of the male academics I know would render it pointless. Take my partner (really ex-partner but we’re in the process of splitting) as an example. He is fairly representative of his male colleagues of similar ages (and older actually) in humanities and social science disciplines.

He imagines himself to be this amazing, liberal, feminist man but he utterly refuses to see how much of his success is built upon the sacrifices made by the women around him, and me in particular. Because, of course, us moving away from my place of work to facilitate his career (and gaining a 4 hour each way commute) was in no way a sacrifice. Nor was changing to a job with only a 2 hour each way commute and making myself seriously ill with it. Nor was taking a post at the pretty crappy local post-92 which has almost entirely killed my research career (and confidence) to help him out. Nor is my looking after everything at home while he goes to important conferences and events and networks (we work in the same discipline, so this means that I miss all the main conferences). Nor is my doing the school run, taking the days off for illness and so on and so on.

Nor is his success based on the fact that I spent many, many hours teaching him to write coherent sentences. And helped him edit all his papers (not in the last year, admittedly) and two books (saving him from huge problems in the latest one as his finally chapter was illogical). And so on, and so on. (Has he ever even read anything I’ve written you may wonder: no, not as far as I know).

And then there’s the fact that he’s been bought out of teaching for the last 3.5 years. He’s only had an external research grant for 18 months of that, so it is just the university deciding that he is more special than his colleagues (there are a lot of junior women picking up the teaching slack at the expense of their research careers in his department).

No his success is all down to him and his brilliance and work ethic. In fact, he recently decided to work at home on a day I’d taken off work because DS2 had a teacher training day at school. During that day he elicited my help for three issues with his work. First he whinged and complained because his part-time and precariously employed RA had ‘purposefully screwed him over’ by being pregnant. And he was particularly annoyed that she’d waited until as late as possible to tell him (can’t think why!). He then phoned his more senior colleague (who is even worse in the so feminist but blind to how he’s facilitated by and holding back the women around him) to discuss it and decided that it would be OK because he’d only be without an RA for 3 weeks at the end of her contract. But still, she’d ‘done it on purpose’ and he was annoyed she ‘hadn’t been straight with him’. .

The next conversation was about his fear of being named on that all male panel tumblr. He always makes sure he puts women on panels he organised not because he values their work but because he doesn’t want to be publicly shamed for his all male panel. He was worried that only two women had submitted abstracts to his session and one of them was terrible. And what did I think he should do? Bear in mind that this is for the major conference in our shared discipline which he is able to go to because I am not (not that he asked me about it before putting in his session proposal). And the final conversation was him asking me to proof-read his abstract for the bloody session at the conference I’m not going to, and haven’t attended since before 8 year old DS2 was born. He’s been every year though, including the year DS2 was born (about a week before the conference). I said I was too busy watching minecraft vloggers on YouTube with DS2).

More fool me for much of the above, but my point is that P’s capacity for cognitive dissonance would mean that training would probably be counterproductive. And so many of his friends and colleagues are exactly the same.

I agree about not having a quarrel - sorry I am over-sensitive about inferences about my life 'choices.' I've had too many female colleagues make negative comments in general about women academics who are single & childless.

I'm afraid I now bite back - but I'm starting to refine the argument.

Recently (I mean about a month ago at a fairly high-powered international workshop) I had a female colleague rant to me about the fact that all 5 female full professors in her department were childless.

I said something about the sacrifices that women make. That some women have sacrificed relationship & children for career. I was somewhat frosty, I must admit. I find it painful to be in my situation in a heteronormative world - a failure as a human being; unloveable. Anyway, I'll put away the world's tiniest violin My life is pretty damn' good. It's just sometimes these kinds of conversations throw me off kilter.

But that conversation with a female colleague whom I didn't really know very well (nor she me, as I'm sure she wouldn't have been so insensitive) really got me thinking.

The comparison should not be made between women of different ranks. It should be made between women and men of the same rank. We, as women get sidetracked by the awful patriarchal measuring up of our life choices. And just as others here have spoken about the myth of choice - well, I've never had the actual choice of partner & children. No-one has wanted me to be their life-partner or mother of their children. I haven't really had a choice about that ...

As far as I know, all the heterosexual male professors I work with are or have been married/partnered and are fathers. And are still professors, whose domestic situations have empowered them, rather than held them back.

That is the inequality we should all be arguing about!!

Also - portmanteau post - I know that in working as Research director with colleagues on fractional appointments, the matter of the regular unpaid overtime we all do comes into sharp relief. As so it should. If you've taken a pay cut in order to be able to do other things, then the standard overload of our work is a real thing.

And I've tried to use that principle in talking/advising my full-time colleagues as well. Don't overpromise; do what's necessary; choose your priorities.

But that as to be within a fair distribution of workload across the unit/Department.

I wonder if one of the long-term effects of this strike will be for a lot of us to rethink our devotion and vocation? I know I certainly am. Getting a taste of a 'normal' working day!

And then I read the account of the partnership that @UnimaginativeUsername has 'benefited' from, and I thank the goddess that I"m single. So sorry to read all that Unimaginative - is it too blunt to say that I'm glad to read you're in the process of separating?

A very good friend of mine ruined her career for her also-academic husband. When he started becoming emotionally & financially abusive, she divorced him, and got a 60% share of the assets in recognition of all she'd given up.

Academia, like many other fields, tends to ignore this and to reward based on a model of professional achievement that doesn't acknowledge this gender imbalance.

I very much agree with this. It’s something that I really despair of in my own career. I’ve found myself stuck in this job with no hope of escape or even promotion because we’re simply judged on our CVs - and the lists of publications and grant income in particular. My CV won’t even get past a cursory sorting exercise because I don’t have any research grants and my publications record is patchy. It makes no difference what the reasons for that it because all that anyone looking sees is an inferior CV.

The system doesn’t care that you didn’t sleep proper for 2 years with a baby and had to cope with a 4 hour commute (albeit working in isolation at home most of the time). Or that you have an incurable, exhausting and painful autoimmune disease disease that is exacerbated by commuting - and still you did your 2 hour each way 3+ times a week commute anyway. Or that you had a workload that came in at more than 200% of the maximum without any research allocation factored in at the RG university you used to work at. Or that your current employer thinks that 180 hours of research and scholarship time a year is the maximum you should ever expect, and still overloads you with teaching and admin anyway. Or that your lack of networks is largely because you’ve been unable to attend conferences because you are the childcare for someone else doing so. Or that your relationship is so dysfunctional (and actually abusive) that your partner has managed to convince you that actually it’s perfectly reasonable and fair that he gets to go to all the conferences because he magnanimously picks up the children and does bedtime while you commute to the workplace you moved hundreds of miles away from so he could get a job.

And I’d imagine that all sorts of complex stories are hidden behind the other patchy CVs that get filtered out in favour of the ones with brilliant lists of publications and research grants.

No @TheRagingGirl, it is not too blunt to say that you’re glad we’re separating. I only wish that I’d been less isolated and had better advice so that I’d have left him 10 years ago and stayed in the great (and well paid) post that I’d manage to get before I’d even finished my PhD. Ironically, I would have if I’d been where I did my PhD but while I got a great post it was at the loss of an incredibly supportive community, including some wonderful women in senior academic positions.

I’m certainly not angry at all the senior academic women without children. I think the fact that very often it is only women who don’t have children who are able to become senior academics is a damning indictment of the whole academic career system. But that isn’t the fault of the women who have worked their way into senior positions.

Instead I might choose to ask why I know so many young men in their thirties being promoted to professor but women of the same age whose research is just as good or better are so often junior lecturers. Or why so many of these men have a woman behind them whose academic career seems to be stalling (or they’ve moved into school teaching or admin posts or something else that’s not academia) while theirs takes off. It is seriously alarming how many men my age or ever so slightly older are in this kind of situation, but I don’t know of a single woman in my field who has been promoted to professor so quickly.

(However, my P looks at this and instead feels hard done by that he’s not a professor at 34).

I don’t know of a single woman in my field who has been promoted to professor so quickly.

Nor me.

But of course, men are the ones who are considered "geniuses""* whereas women merely work hard for the same achievement

unimaginative - I am so, so sorry. I am shocked and horrified for you. The one thing I did want to say, though, is that I've seen the careers of several women in your position take flight as a result of the decision to leave a partner like your DH. Because they haven't actually realised how much of their time, energy and professional capacity that person is actually using up - and it is 'used up' because editing, catching mistakes, working on someone else's stuff is an exhausting burden. I really hope that this is also the case for you. I trust that it will be, because you sound absolutely brilliant and very much someone who deserves a break. I have no idea who you are, but I am now desperately rooting for you in a scarily overinvested way.

I can relate to some of what you say about your soon-to-be ex-partner. My DH does try, and he is the very opposite of a self-aggrandizing arsehole. He does really make an effort around the house. But he doesn't really fully acknowledge the extent to which my career has been put on the back burner for his, or recognise the frustrations that it causes when my career is lagging and his is shooting off somewhere glamorous, leaving me to do more than my fair share of boring housework, which then holds me back further. It is a peculiar and degrading feeling, and I honestly don't think many men have actually experienced what it is actually like to be in that "second violin" role because they have this in-built switch that says "This is not my role" and they just walk away from it.

The answer is not women turning off that switch, I think, but men turning it on. Because the world of care, social reproduction, domestic labour, whatever you want to call it, does not simply go away if it is ignored!

"The comparison should not be made between women of different ranks. It should be made between women and men of the same rank."

This x10000, with bells on.

**

Me too. Although where I am, I think it needs to be a hoody.

Aww, thanks.

Hopefully I’ll be able to start figuring out my career once the logistics of separating are done. (Although I have resolved to make him do much of that work).

You’re right though that I will have so much headspace without him. Even the general work of social reproduction will be easier when I’m only having to think about the kids and me.

And then there’s the building back up my confidence, which I now realise he’s been steadily eroding for years.

I need everyone's advice on a situation I'm facing re. the strike. I'm a co-I (one of several) on a VERY large cross-faculty RCUK funding bid being worked on at my institution. We found out we got to the next round last week and need to get the final application in right after the strike. There have been several meetings in the last week I've missed due to the strike and several more next week/ week after that I will potentially also miss. What would you do? Would you cross the picket to go to the meetings? Clearly no one else on the bid is in the UCU and I a) feel like a tool for not pulling my weight on the final application and b) worry that they'll just write me out of the grant application.

I'm just-on-the-cusp-of-mid-career and being on this grant, if it's successful, would be a Good Thing career wise.

What to do??

p.s I'm in the humanities, so big collaborative bids like this don't come along very often

I think what many of us are arguing is that there is a problem in wider society that means that care work falls disproportionately on women.

And being a women, a parent, a carer, I am well aware of this.

I also sit on many panels that try to address these issues in academia with basically no funding to do so. Free childcare requires a magic money tree, for example.

It is very hard to see how to make changes that will significantly improve things without funding. In reality, almost all promotions are still on the basis of research success. Taking into account circumstances tips some women over the thresholds, but doesn't help with the many women that are just stuck.

The culture in STEM of requiring a history of managing grants to give grants is however something that can be changed and may finally move to be changed (at least for some calls) - I am one of the advocates in RCUK for bids and pre-bids that are anonymous, wherever possible, to stop women without a history of being PIs being disadvantaged.