We seem to be in the middle of a spate of outpourings about the undesirability of women combining families and careers. Apparently women who try to juggle both are doomed to be unhappy. Writers lament the miseries of motherhood, professional women’s despair as the biological clock runs out.
It has been suggested that education should be restructured to ensure that women are made happier by being trained for the kitchen and child-rearing. A quarter of a century after the women’s movement, what is going on?
There is nothing to be gained in 2002 from resurrecting ancient arguments about the proper place of women being in the home. All of us in higher education should be opposing this kind of facile thinking. For there are genuine gender issues that deserve our attention in education, relating to disciplines, curriculum development, teaching and learning practices and assessment.
For a start, there is the unsolved question of why the gender balance is still so unequally weighted at different points in an individual’s education.
Every year at the degree ceremonies I watch graduands process and note the gender patterns: how few women there are in maths, engineering and computer science, for example; how few men in education, literature and languages. I note how many women undergraduates there are in English or biology, how that picture changes at postgraduate level and, more acutely, as we turn to look at academics what small numbers of women professors there are. Why?
The questions that trouble me also concern the nature of the subjects we teach and the ways in which we teach them. Is it true that exams privilege males who are trained to be more competitive from an early age? If so, why do girls usually outperform boys at school? Do we really know that continuous assessment is less stressful and, as some have suggested, more ”feminised”?
Are some subjects inherently more attractive to boys, such as computer science, which has fewer social skills requirements than drama? Or do men do better here because the computer is a toy they have played with since their early teens, and does this suggest we need to take a gender factor into account when developing e-learning strategies?
Are women performing better in universities today not because of assessment methods, but because of an increased number of combined and interdisciplinary subjects that may enable them to use multitasking skills more competently?
Are subjects such as maths off-putting to women because maths demands a degree of direct confrontation? If someone is wrong, you have to tell them straight how wrong they are, which can be perceived as aggressive behaviour.
How much have we in higher education utilised the research that has been appearing for more than 30 years, raising questions about gendered learning, social conditioning and biological constraints? More boys than girls are diagnosed with learning difficulties in schools, yet the power balance at the top of the tree in higher education shows more men than women in positions of authority, despite any early learning disadvantage.
How did they manage to overtake? There, the authors of the current books about damaged women would smirk, you’ve argued yourself into a corner. There are fewer women in positions of power because they are handicapped by domestic duties; because they don’t want to compete.
I reject this simplistic assumption. The truth is that there are far more questions about gender and education than there are answers, and we should be trying to move forwards, not backwards. To do that, we need more debate and more information about biological and social factors that affect the roles of men and women in universities and about the ways in which educational systems are gendered.
Susan Bassnett is pro-vice- chancellor, University of Warwick, and has four children