Amina Mama,
"Rethinking African Universities: Gender and Transformation"
(page 6 of 7)
Faculty Experiences and Academic Culture
The hierarchies of power and divisions of labor among faculty in all
five institutions were found to reflect conservative gender ideologies.
Women are readily moved out of academic and into administrative and
service tracks. Those who remain within the academic tracks still find
themselves positioned in "maternal" and "nurturing" roles. As such, they
are required to attend to the health and welfare of students and
subordinate staff, and quite normally expected to provide secretarial
and other services to their departments alongside their academic duties.
In other words, the ideology and practices of "female domesticity" is
seamlessly transferred from the home and wider society into the
professional space of the campus, unchallenged.
Faculty gender differentiations also arise within a dominant academic
culture that privileges disciplines and fields of scholarship over
others. It so happens that women are concentrated in the areas of lower
status and fewer resources (arts, humanities, and particular social
sciences), and that their under-representation is highest in the
high-status fields (natural sciences, engineering, and architecture).
There is not space to enter into a detailed discussion of how the
African situation diverges from the global pattern, as it does in the
fields of law and medicine, in particular. Suffice it to say that
overall, gender stratification is both vertical and horizontal.
The career tracks of women differ from those of men, in part due to
the real interruptions in research and graduate study created by
childbearing. However, there is evidence that there are also additional
constraints that result not from the actual years lost but from the
expectation that women will bear children, which works to marginalize
them further. Women who do not conform either behaviourally (in terms of
being willing to carry out care work, getting married, or being the
"mother" of the department) are often unpopular and stereotyped as
"tough" and uncooperative.
The informal routes to career success are also heavily gendered.
Women who comply with the available prescriptions for women are less
likely to be regarded as threatening, but at the same time may not be
taken seriously as academics, whereas women who unapologetically pursue
their careers, remain unmarried, or fail to behave in a nurturing manner
tend to be viewed as threats. Successful male academics often note the
value of networking and fraternizing with senior colleagues to learn
about valuable opportunities to advance their careers. When women
attempt to engage in networking—for example, by visiting the faculty
club or frequenting the campus bar—they are more likely to harm their
professional reputations than to be appreciated for their drive and
ambition. Whereas a young man will be perceived as someone who "will go
far," the same behaviour may lead a woman to be perceived as being "on
the make."
Gender Activism in Pedagogy and Research
African women faculty and students have engaged in various forms of
activism that seeks to transform both the institutional and intellectual
gender cultures within their institutions over the last several decades.
These have yielded a scattering of affirmative action policies (e.g., at
Makerere University), sexual harassment procedures (on many of the
Southern African campuses), mentoring programs, and scholarships to
support women in science.
On the scholarly front, women have set up curricula strengthening
initiatives (exemplified by the work of the Nigerian Network for Women's
Studies in the 1990s African Gender Institute since 2003, and later by
the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy at University of Ghana).
African gender research has taken root in many campuses, even where the
administration has resisted efforts to set up a centre, as was the case
at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop. Even here, we found that a
growing number of students and faculty have conducted dissertations and
research projects that take gender seriously (Diaw 2007). The successful
establishment of the continental journal of gender studies in 2002 was
the realization of a collective understanding of the value of home-grown
gender research and the need to disseminate this within the region, as
well as to make it available to the rest of the world through the Web.
Now in its twelfth issue, Feminist Africa is used to support
teaching and research in gender studies by the community of feminist
scholars in the region, as well as being widely consumed in the
West.
There are now gender studies units on more than thirty of Africa's
universities, many of them engaging in advocacy and policy work and
research and teaching. While this does not compare to over 600 such
initiatives in the USA, it does signify a concerted effort within the
African scholarly community. The scholarly output, the scope, and the
institutional and political conditions that have framed the growth of
gender studies in the context of scarcity have been discussed elsewhere
(Mama 2006 and 2009). The work of such centers is often
transdisciplinary—and transformative in its intentions. Gender
scholarship seeks to engage with policy makers, movements, and
communities that exist both within and beyond the campus. Furthermore,
many of these initiatives have drawn on international networks and
external support to develop courses, training programs, and new
research. This partly explains how they have managed to proliferate
despite the parlous economic condition of universities and limited
research funding raising the profile and credibility of their
institutions (Mama 2006 and 2007). In this way, while the field of
gender studies has often not been adequately supported and
institutionalized in a manner that would guarantee their long-term
sustainability within universities (in terms of the general operating
budgets and secure appointments), they have, perhaps ironically, been
able to withstand the cutbacks better than more conventional academic
departments.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Next page
|