Rethinking African Universities: Gender and Transformation

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). ¹ 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 ²

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 ³ 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?

1. Excluding North-of the-Saharan countries and South Africa. [↑]
2. The detailed statistical picture is likely to be far more complicated and diverse than these global figures indicate. Proper analysis is hampered by the fact that the available statistical picture of Africa’s tertiary institutions is so incomplete.[↑]
3. It is curious that this figure is presented alongside a very similar figure for the number of expatriates employed in the same university.[↑]