This article contains text from the lecture, “Gender and African Universities,” delivered on April 22, 2008 at Barnard College.
Introduction and Background
African universities are key sites for examining questions of citizenship, democratization, and social justice. There are over 5 million young Africans enrolled in the continent’s universities, making them a major training ground for the next generation of politicians, policymakers, public officials, and corporate and civil society leaders. From a feminist perspective, the gender relations prevailing in the intellectual and institutional cultures of universities are important because of their implications for national and regional development. The central gender question can be summarized thus: Do African universities sustain or transform the region’s conservative legacies of colonial and nationalist patriarchal cultures? Many African nations have made enormous progress with regard to inscribing commitments to gender equality in the constitutions, laws, and policies since independence. Universities might reasonably be expected to be at the vanguard of pursuing gender equality as an integral aspect of the development and democratization. But do they actually practice and promote the advance of gender equality, or do they tacitly or actively operate in ways that perpetuate the unequal status quo that characterizes the societies in which they are located?
This key strategic question can only be addressed by carrying out gender research in the higher education sector. To date, the empirical profile, though incomplete, suggests strongly that universities—not just in Africa but around the world—remain deeply imbued with inequitable gender dynamics that are reflected in the profiles of achievement, output, and the administration, and in the institutional cultures that continue to privilege masculine norms of behaviour, academic prowess, and status. While these features may be common all over the world, there are grounds for taking this especially seriously in societies that regard universities as socially-responsible public institutions with a key role to play in social and political development. In the African region, there can be little doubt that universities have been expected to uphold identifiable social and political agendas, even though these have changed over time. Although the initial colonial colleges were set up to advance imperial interests and groom a subservient class of public servants, the majority of Africa’s universities were actually set up after independence and tasked with decolonisation and intellectual development of the emergent nations. The fact that this agenda is shifting, having become increasingly contested with the displacement of national development agendas by crisis and economic liberalization, does not mean that the questions of social responsibility have ceased to exist. On the contrary, the university’s role in national regional development may need to be re-articulated and defended in the context of globalization and higher education reform processes.
There are several areas that need to be assessed to answer the question of whether universities play a conservative or transformative role with regard to gender equality. The first and most obvious is that of the employment and student profiles which, as I explain below, remain broadly unequal, albeit with some variability across locations and academic fields. Secondly, there is the matter of the institutional procedures and practices, most of which are assumed to be gender neutral; close analysis, however, points to various ways in which apparently neutral policies actually work to sustain inequalities, and this is the subject of a growing pool of research on institutional cultures and practices. Finally, there is the question of the curriculum, both formal academic and the so-called hidden curriculum, through which gender-biased knowledge, values, and assumptions can be transmitted or challenged. It is here that gender and women’s studies advocates have sought to intervene, both by developing specialized courses and by integrating gender analysis into existing disciplines and fields of study.
The Gender and Institutional Culture in African Universities (GICAU) project that forms the basis of this brief presentation was designed and carried out by the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, with the support of the African Association of Universities between 2004 and 2006. I designed and directed the project on behalf of the African Gender Institute, working closely with Dr. Theresa Barnes (from the University of the Western Cape) and a small team of researchers located within the institutions participating in the study.1 In designing a project constrained by limited resources but intended to open up the field for further work and gender advocacy, we opted to conduct case studies on five selected national public universities, thus excluding private and other higher education and research institutions from consideration. This was appropriate given our focus on the public responsibility of universities with regard to gender equality.
The GICAU project therefore carried out in-depth studies of University of Chiekh Anta Diop in Senegal, University of Ghana, University of Ibadan Nigeria, University of Zimbabwe, and University of Addis Ababa, with the full co-operation of the university administration in each instance. Each project was led by a local researcher who recruited assistants and participants from within the institution to address the overall profile and key manifestations of gender in the particular institutional contexts.
The study used qualitative methods—various modes of interviewing and participant observation—to document and analyze the operation of gender dynamics inside the target institutions. In this way, we set out to gather the information to support analysis of the dynamics sustaining the observed numerical gender discrepancies. We hoped that qualitative documentation and analysis of gender in the everyday work, social interactions, and the institutional practices, habits, and assumptions (in short, the daily life) of those working and studying in universities, would help to explain why gender inequalities were persisting, even though African post-independence universities have never formally excluded women. Finally, we hoped that in documenting and conceptualizing the workings of gender dynamics within institutions, we would be able to lay to rest the oft-repeated assertions of university administrators and researchers that the sources of gender inequality in higher education are not their responsibility because they are generated outside the institutions themselves—in the schools, homes, and indigenous cultures of African nations. We took the view that even though gender inequalities do exist outside in the wider society, the universities, as premier educational institutions, have an opportunity to effect change, and more than this, a responsibility to do so as a matter of public interest, in keeping with national and international legal and policy commitments.
In other words, we started out problematizing the assumption that universities are liberal, gender-neutral spaces. We also questioned the notion that the numerical inequalities are caused by women “dropping out” to marry and have babies, and to investigate the possibility that women might actually be pushed out by the less-than-supportive gender cultures of African universities. If this were indeed the case, then the policy implications could be addressed—there would be identifiable strategies that could encourage more women to remain in universities to pursue graduate studies, research, and academic careers.
- The university case studies were carried out by senior researchers working on the key institutions selected for their respective national contexts: Aminata Diaw (Senegal), Rudo Gaidzanwa (Zimbabwe), Abiola Odejide (Nigeria), Zene Tadesse and Rahel Bekele (Ethiopia) and Dzodzi Tsikata (Ghana). Related research was carried out by Lesley Shackleton (South Africa). [↩]
