Amina Mama,
"Rethinking African Universities: Gender and Transformation"
(page 3 of 7)
Findings
I. Gender Disparities in Enrolment and Employment
During the 1990s, over three decades after independence, one key
source suggested that only 3% of Africa's professoriate were women, and
that women made up only 25% of those enrolled in African universities
(Ajayi et al. 1996).[2]
Today, it is estimated that only about 6% of
African professors are women. The gender profile further suggests that
the majority of the women who work in African universities are not
academics and researchers but rather the providers of secretarial,
cleaning, catering, student welfare, and other administrative and
support services.
The gross enrolment data is patchy and can only be interpreted with
great caution. However, it is unequivocally apparent that across the
continent women's overall enrolment is far below parity, averaging
around 30% of total enrolment.
Table 1: Percentage of Women Enrolled in Select Countries[3]
Ethiopia 16%
Ghana 35%
Nigeria 35%
South Africa 51%
Zimbabwe 37%
(Culled from Tefera and Altbach, 2004 and ASHEWA, 2007)
There are a few exceptions to this overall deficit, notably Swaziland
and Libya, along with some arts and humanities faculties in certain
South African institutions, but there are not yet any proper
investigations or analyses of the factors giving rise to these.
When it comes to the employment profile, the gender gaps are even
more marked than those in student enrolment. The overall picture is one
of gross under-representation of women. This gender disparity is most
severe at senior academic and administrative levels, which remain
heavily male-dominated.
Women make up just 29% of Africa's academic staff, compared to the
global figure of 41%. The available figures for the proportion of women
hired as academic staff in the case study institutions ranged from as
low as 6.1% of academic staff for University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia[4]
to 12% for University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal and 21% at the
University of Zimbabwe. Nigeria's national data indicate only 12.4% of
academic staff are women, but the University of Ibadan has 24.8% women
academic staff, similar to the University of Ghana's 24% women
academics.
These figures present a pyramidal picture, with women concentrated in
the lower ranks and only a very small proportion of women making it up
through the system into senior academic and administrative positions
anywhere in Africa. University of Zimbabwe, for example, has only a
single woman at the full professor level. At Ibadan, 14% of the full
professor/reader-grade are women, as are 30% at the senior lecturer
grade, while as many as 41% of the junior lecturer and research
assistant grades are women. Ghana has seen an increase in women
professors from none at all during the 1970s (following Africanisation)
to 19 % currently. In terms of their roles within the university, women
who do make it into senior administrative positions are most commonly
employed in positions that relate to student welfare, human resources,
and other aspects of administrative work deemed to benefit from a
"feminine touch." The interview data indicate a clear expectation that
women in the professional space of the university act in accord with the
conventional domestic and nurturing roles.
The under-representation of women, combined with the fact that the
majority of people in universities are not fully conversant with gender
as an analytic concept, impacts the knowledge production, too. This is
reflected in research and publication outputs of the institutions, as
has been discussed elsewhere (Imam and Mama 1997 and Pereira 2003). The
small numbers of women remaining in academia as senior academics, and
thus contributing to knowledge production through research and writing,
may well be the most pernicious consequence of all, as it produces an
intellectual culture that remains deeply andro-centric. In sum,
rank-related gender inequalities remain pronounced in African
universities, and are likely to affect the quality of knowledge
production (See Imam and Mama 1997 and Pereira 2002).
Rethinking the universities means going beyond these rather bleak
statistics to ask deeper questions about gender relations within. What
gender dynamics are working to sustain these persistent inequalities?
What is the quality of women's life in Africa's universities, and how
does this differ from that of men? How can gender cultures inside
universities with profound resource constraints be changed so that
universities resist and challenge historical inequalities instead of
perpetuating them?
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