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.
