Why did so many of us encounter sexism at university?

[LittleRedPumpkin]

Right, hope it's ok to start a thread on this - it's partly because I am thinking about it for myself, and partly the topic has come up on at least two threads recently so I thought it'd be nice to have a discussion about it.

Do you think universities are still fundamentally sexist? If so, why? Is there really something about higher education that men are better suited to (an argument I've heard a lot)?

Was your experience of women supervisors better or worse?

I'll get the ball rolling: I have had male supervisors, but now I'm in a department mostly made up of women. I've noticed that here, there is a far stronger attitude of co-operation and partnership between the academics and their students - PhDs, MAs and undergraduates. For example, if my own supervisor isn't an expert on a chapter I want to write, she sends me to have a supervision with someone else, who is more expert. There's no sense of me being 'their' student or one course being 'their course' to run. This is very different from the male-dominated university I went to before, so I wondered how typical it was.

What's your view on women at university?

to LRP and Heartsease seems you were right ladys.

I dunno how 'right' I can claim to be while also professing jaw-dropping ignorance on the subject.

madwomanintheattic geography comes into almost everything which is why its such a wonderful subject.(Yes I am a self-confessed geography geek)

madwomanintheattic - if you read my earlier post on this thread, you would see that I don't say sexism is not there in academia. I said I don't think undergrads and postgrads are affected by this (whereas academics are).

Littleredpumpkin - those figures are from a talk I heard recently on the subject.

School geography gives you the grounding and the basics you need. Danny Dorling taught me on on my degree.

unseen - um, i know. i did read it. i wondered if you were on the cawks thread? there were a lot of academics who were expressing the same views and i've mostly forgotten who they all were... was just going to say hi, and ask where you were all hiding yourselves now... sorry, i think crossed wires somewhere

oo, ooo, proles, look at meeeeeee! (points loudly at username)

oh, sorry if I was a bit touchy (tired, still working....)

Well I attended one traditional university and one very traditional (Oxbridge) one, reading for a traditional subject. I really can't remember any sexism. I think I can say I was 'mentored' (had good words put in for me) by male lecturers, and benefitted from the 'old boys' network. Yes I am a woman and no i didn't sleep with anyone! I appreciate I was probably lucky, and also there wasn't the child thing to unbalance things.

unseen

I read your posts with interest. I fully agree about discrimination in the profession (see earlier) and that there are a great many men who are casually sexist. Yet at times when professionalism demands that those attitudes are increasingly hidden (including teaching and other examples) I am fairly confident that (explicitly at least) they are. I don't think that's a mystery-on the whole people deal with privilege better in circumstances when forced to recognise and relinquish it. This causes particular problems for those whose work and politics deny that split-feminists, queer theorists.

But there are still real problems for students in terms of 'academic generated' sexism. Some are about assessment. Messy but legible scripts, for example, tend to score higher in exams (and tend, but are not universally, to be written by men).

But many problems exist in the hinterland of negotiation with students and with student-generated sexism. A woman whose union allows its logo to be used for a High Street Honeyz event (cheaper alcohol) is being portrayed very differently to a man within the same union. And when she turns up for a seminar, anxious about peer approval, is susceptible to different pressures to perform or not to perform. Courses likewise-to get fully subscribed courses means giving students something they want. For years I tried to run two courses on medieval Europe that openly incorporated women into history, with minimal take-up on those questions and under-subscription. Change them more specifically to what look like different topics-social and sexual / political and uptake increased. Not that women or feminism weren't there, just that they were there more subtly.

I think it might be worth asking if sexism is better or worse at university than elsewhere, and exploring the different ways in which it comes into being, but I'd tend to look at any female undergrad who told me she wasn't experiencing sexism much as I would a fish that told me it couldn't see the water.

Really interesting thread. Not much to contribute as I ran away screaming departed from academia after first degree, but I share the frustration at the "ghetto" that women are put into as topics of study. In three years of literary study we had one week of "women writers" in the context of 20th century literature. Why it was more appropriate to look at Virginia Woolf in the context of e.g. Hilary Mantel rather than other writers from a similar era/style I will never know. Did complain to my tutor but he obviously CBA to do anything about changing it, being a lazy sod.

Didn't find it a sexist experience though despite it being a v old fashioned university. Possibly due to subject there was a majority of female students, good balance of tutors/lecturers etc.

...Ah yes, did spend a very uncomfortable afternoon listening to a certain male academic (hello, Val Cunningham!) giving a lecture about phallic imagery apropos of absolutely nothing at all.

On feminist geography: Feminism is very important to a lot of human geography. Feminist geography was developed as a way of redressing the masculinist balance in the subject, and society. Many of my colleagues, both male and female, would describe themselves as feminists (and often invite the students to debate on whether men can be feminists and other issues).

In whichever degree course hudd was talking about, half a module was probably devoted to feminist geography because feminism has had such a big effect in the discipline. It's important to explain where important ideas came from and why, and to explore how they've shaped ideas and practices. There will almost certainly have been feminist work on gender elsewhere in the course too, but half the module was probably dedicated entirely to feminist geography. So it isn't exactly the same as relegating feminist, or women, to a small corner of the degree programme while the rest remains masculine by default. Rather, it's about teaching important approaches to different phenomena (the feminist geography module may have accompanied marxist geographies or poststructuralist geographies to something of that ilk) so that they can come at issues from a range of different perspectives.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure I'd describe Dorreen Massey, David Harvey and Danny Dorling as the 'fascinating' end of geography. It's more the well-established 'stuff you find in textbooks that we teach to the first years' end of the discipline these days.

I would add on 'ghettoisation' (which was where me and my supervisor clashed) that in terms of undergrad (and even postgrad) courses I have designed there is a real problem of student perception.

I teach medieval history. Most of my students have extremely unsophisticated ideas about what they are doing as historians, certainly far less sophisticated than those commenting here. They might think of a period, of a region or (if really contemplative) of a subdiscipline (political, social) As academics we are deeply suspicious of ALL these categories (not just the gender ghetto ones) but these are what students on the whole choose our courses on, and what they apply for. So if I want to recruit historians with an interest in gendering perceptions and understandings of the past onto a course, I can't just call it 'The impact of the Norman Conquest' and incorporate women in as I would in my own work. Rather I have to design a course called 'Sex, marriage and the family after the Norman conquest'. And if I spend a lot of that course discussing aristocratic landholding and politics, which mattered a great deal to aristocratic women, and how recognising women transforms understanding sof those fields, they avoid those questions like the plague and moan on the student questionnaire. And then my numbers fall and my colleagues get hit with the burden.

If on the other hand, I teach 'Impact' making sure women crepe in throughout, then do a two week final binge on 'women' and rethinking the course (which touches on those issues) everyone is happy, a lot of students get to understand these issues better and, maybe, to explore them themselves. But that is a far more ghettoised course in construction.

And modules matter even more. Nobody wnats to lose the bright 18-year-old with an interest in women's literature because it isn't clearly identifiable as an option on the prospectus.

Basically, I (at least) compromise and teach and structure in a way I'm unhappy with and would never wish to work in term sof research, because what I'm doing is appealing to a group of (as yet) unsophisticated and often sexist students.

I didn't find much sexism at university at all. I think I was very lucky in that I mainly had good lecturers that really tried to make sure that everyone got the same out of seminars and had a chance to contribute.

For example, sometimes if the men in the seminar were dominating it then the lecturers would point this out and make sure the discussion became more balanced again.

AdelaofBlois, perhaps you are right in some of your points (in your post of 12:45:47). I think it would be difficult to address some issues. I would also have doubts as to whether this is worse than sexism encountered elsewhere. On a personal level, as a science undergraduate, I didn't experience any overt sexism (but then, I was one of those with the messy, legible exam scripts, who outperformed all the males on the course ). In my later scientific career, I have experienced a lot of sexism, both in academia and outside. So, possibly within science, it's all relative - as an undergraduate you are protected from the much more aggressive, sexist attitudes which are still commonplace in later scientific careers.

Adela I know exactly what you mean about teaching gender-related material/texts (I'm a lit person, but work on late medieval/early modern stuff). I no longer teach Renaissance women writers to undergrads for the reasons that you describe - they require so much contextualisation and subtlety and inevitably suffer by comparison to Shakespeare that students tend to retreat to default positions, critically. They do the 'woman' question, which means that they talk about misogyny, oppression and how much better things are now , and fail to understand the context. They write the same answer whether the women/gender/sexuality in question comes from ancient Persia or the 19th century. Like you, I've found it much more productive to focus on how gender is constructed in mainstream texts and then hope that bright interested students will start to look for the women writers (they do, usually :)) Not sure what I am rambling on about (sleep deprived thanks to DD, plus very intense class on Milton - mostly about gender), but wanted to say that many of the things you said in your posts really resonated with me.

Adela, I may be being naive here, but isn't part of the problem also to do with academics' own ignorance/unwillingness to deal with women in history? When I was an undergraduate we were told 'medieval women couldn't read Latin', and someone asked 'what, none of them', to receive the reply: 'Well, if I can't think of any examples I should think there aren't any!'

With another dose of

So it is not simply to do with the students' perceptions of what the course should be on and which course titles attract them, it's also ignorance/unwillingness higher up.

(I don't in the least mean to suggest you or your colleagues are ignorant, mind! )

LRP

I agree there is a danger of ghettoisation and ignorance higher up, and am puzzled at the unwillingness of many colleagues to do more that think of women as an added bonus. Structures don't help-much that is transformative is published in specialist journals that might be ignored (another problem in course design, reading lists need to reflect accessible journals and articles need to speak to the uniformed). And that places pressure the other way to-if I claim that you can't understand landholding practice by ignoring women as active agents-aren't I really just accepting that the 'male politics' of land matters most to historians (I would answer not-it mattered a hell of a lot to medieval women, but you get the point?). Ultimately the battle this generation of feminist/women's (or in my case very definitely 'identity') historians are fighting is to gain acceptance of their subdiscipline not simply because it is a facet of the past that is understudied, but because the questions asked of society are impossible without considering them, without surrendering its methodologies, and within a framework which ghettosises (and which was in some cases, ironically, often set up to develop the study of women in history through specialist treatment).

I think what I was trying to say here, though, is that counting modules or looking at course design is not really a sensible way of gauging this because even those of us who are trying to change the way our colleagues think will perforce design courses which look ghettoised. Neither is it fair to think of course design as a purely top-down process (even though it must seem to be).

PS: I am really shocked anyone said that. Not one example? ffs, we owe Arthurian literature to a female patron of a Latin author, Heloise clearly learnt Latin. Beyond that Adela of Blois herself ran a major French principality during her idiot husband's absence, issuing charters in her name. The Conqueror's wife, Matilda, seems responsible for a large number of Caen manuscripts in Latin which suited her interests. Whether all these women 'read' the texts in the modern sense might be debatable, but they encountered them in much the same way as any aristocrat, and seem to have been much more actively involved in their production and commissioning than their male counterparts. Has this person never read the bit at a front of a text where it describes the transmission, patronage bits? Crazy stuff.

Sorry, this will be my last post for a while, but I'd like to thank all those who have helped me think on this thread.

I think my basic points throughout has been to accept that universities are sexist places but also to urge people to consider that they are not really run by academics-that we are part of patriarchial networks in everything we do, from pastoral care through teaching to research. Hence if someone magically invented a machine to make academics not sexist, I'm not sure it would be as transformative of fields or universities as some here seem to think.

None of this excuses the horror stories of individual ignorance and abuse or removes the responsibility on us to combat them. It's just, as everywhere, a discussion of how patriarchy is experienced at university should not assume that the answer is to identify those who seem most powerful as misogynists. That's part of the problem, and perhaps the most easily solved in terms of professional contact, but not its whole.

Ghettoisation is a good example. I struggle, for instance, to stay on top of all research in my field directly related to politics, law, gender, class and ethnicity. Art history, archaeology, even to a certain extent linguistic scholarship, passes me by (especially now I can't attend conferences because of the kids). LRP's tutor may be a sexist fool for what he said on women reading, or he may be a well read scholar in many subdisciplines who hasn't read the necessary work. The teaching is still sexist, but the thread's question is answered in very different ways.

Adela your conclusions are academic in the very best sense of that word!