Liz Dean: gender, class and working in academia

The definition of the word inhibit means “something that restrains, blocks or suppresses.” When it comes to discussions around the absence of women in positions of influence and power, specifically in institutions that have an historical legacy of being exclusive to men, one of the most pressing questions is: what are the inhibitors? Whether it’s financial constraints, institutional bias, self-imposed limitations, or cultural pressures, the factors that feed into a small percentage of women accessing high level positions are complex and often interlinked.

I talk with Melbourne University lecturer, Liz Dean, about what has challenged her during her academic career and the influence of class and gender on career progression.

Liz, tell us about your entry into the world of higher education.

[Liz]: Originally I left school really young, and in the end that was also what enabled me to study as a mature age student. I’ve always been incredibly curious about the ways of the world, so to be able to actually indulge in study — which is how it felt after having worked from [the age of] 15 to 24 pretty much full time — was a complete shift in worldview. It opened up an enormous amount of worlds. And I think what study did for me too, particularly the subjects I elected, was it actually gave me way to think about things that I’d already been thinking about.

I began studying English Literature, feminist philosophy, women’s studies and sociology or social theory, and they were a really nice cluster of subjects which really suited where I’d arrived at in the world when I started university.

How did you move from being a student into being a lecturer?

[L]: Look, it was a bit protracted. As soon as I started doing an honours year I began to do some tutoring because that is a natural progression, and if you show any acumen in these areas then you get tapped on the shoulder by lecturers. I moved quite quickly into doing guest lectures when I did my PhD. [As you work] with different people that starts to spread the word around.

It’s not uncommon to see a lot of women in tutorial positions and guest lecturer positions because often it’s free labour. Tutoring not so much, but the guest lecturer very rarely gets paid. If you’re lucky you might get a bottle of wine.

A bottle of wine hardly seems like a fair payment, and neither does free labour. What’s the reasoning behind this type of payment, or lack thereof?

[L]: I think it’s the constraints of the academic budget, which is an interesting conflict amongst those who’ve actually worked in this way. Many of us find ways of paying anybody who we invite in. Some courses have a budget, like a Master’s course might have a budget that you can [use to] pay lecturers who’re from outside [the university], but if you’re within a university structure and somebody from within the university invites you to do a lecture, then you’re already getting paid. However, many people are on short term contracts now — causal contracts [that range] from five to six months or three year early career contracts. I think actually, that needs to change.

There seems to be a growing expectation of workers to adapt to what the institutions want, but do you think there’s an equal amount of flexibility given back when you choose to work and have a family?

[L]: I don’t want to generalise here, but personally when you choose to have a child it becomes more difficult — and this is part of a broader shift in the whole working life that everybody’s experienced — to be able to be what some people call on time and available before work, in order to keep everything moving along so that your career can progress in a timely manner that’s measured and quantified in this type of way.

I mean, some people can juggle this really well, but personally I think it’s hard to try and sustain relationships, be a parent, and be more than simply an academic. In order to keep going, I think you have to be adept at seeking out collaborations, particularly collaborations with more senior people, but that goes back to knowing the rules of the game and knowing that that’s what you need to do from a very early age. [It] also [requires] having the confidence to know how to do that, to establish those connections with people which assist you in your rise through academia. I’m not saying that all women would experience that but I know personally that [that] has been the conflict between loving what I do and also knowing how to get my work into places.

You mentioned the need to play “the game”. What do you mean by that?

[L]: There’s a social theorist called Pierre Bourdieu who talks about your habitus: the way you take on and take up the world, and how you’ve come to think about yourself and what you can or cannot do. [He] talks about knowing how to play the game and knowing what the rules are in order to play the game.

Pierre also talks in a gendered way [when] looking at early education research [at] how young girls would know how to sit up and be good students whereas the young boys, in a gendered stereotype, would be more fidgety and not as good at knowing how to embody what it is to become a good school [student].

I say all that to say that I think that because my background was more working class, I’m still learning in many ways the rules of the game of academia in order to become an appropriate player. Having an experience of the world which had nothing to do with academia, I have to cross-pollinate class with gender and not just speak about gendered position. You’ve got a gender specificity there in relation to women who do know how to play the game and are [still] excluded.

This exclusion from the upper echelon — is it an overt exclusion in your experience?

[L]: I haven’t had a lot of overt sexism in academia, and yet recently [at] a different university, I felt that the male tutor I worked with for the first time didn’t really take me seriously because I was a woman teaching what would have once been seen as a more male [subject]: contemporary social theory. There are these sorts of biases towards what’s proper to a subject and who is proper to teach [them] that can fall on gender lines; or the old ideas of gender lines, i.e. [sic] that there’s just two genders.

To discover more about women who are working to subvert sexism in academia, check out #FEAS (Feminist Educators Against Sexism).

“By challenging sexism through humour, irreverence and collective action we highlight the inequalities, absurdities and dreary everydayness of sexism in the academy. From the original three, #FEAS now has many members located in Australia and all over the world including UK, Aotearoa New Zealand, Sweden, Belgium, the USA, Canada and Saudi Arabia.”