In 1943, Mass Transportation magazine provided a list of guidelines for male supervisors of women in the work force during World War II. These included caveats such as:
- Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. Companies that are already using large numbers of women stress the fact that you have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and consequently is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.
- While there are exceptions, of course, to this rule, general experience indicates that ‘husky’ girls — those who are just a little on the heavy side — are likely to be more even-tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.
- Get enough size variety in operator uniforms so that each girl can have a proper fit. This point can’t be stressed too strongly as a means of keeping women happy.
We can look at this now, with snorts of incredulous superiority. But how much room is there for complacency about women in the workplace of academia?
With regard to gender transformation, universities are guided by rosy visions informed by the Constitution, the Employment Equity and Labour Relations Acts, the Higher Education Act, the White Paper on Education and other idealistic documents. Vice-chancellors have bravely taken on the challenge of transformation of institutions of higher learning, some more charismatically than others. One of these is Loyiso Nongxa, who stirred a sullen senate into a yearning passion for his vision of Wits:
‘We want to create an institution that has successfully transcended divisions of the past and will be a leading change agent in the fight to eliminate race and gender stereotypes; an institution that will be a microcosm of a South African society of the future and an institution that will provide opportunities for those who want to realise their true potential and be the best that they can be.”
And then there is (former University of Cape Town vice-chancellor) Dr Mamphela Ramphele’s comment that ‘our democracy and our institutions suffer and are the poorer if any voices are silenced or marginalised”.
Add to this the incontrovertible, uncontroversial and ubiquitous statements that, ‘in a time when universities are required to do more with less, we need to use all our resources to maximum capacity”, ‘women are a national and institutional asset” and ‘transformation and diversity are only realised when the voices of all members of the community are empowered, heard and celebrated”.
All of these point to an ideal of a university to which all of us subscribe, whose distribution in terms of gender (and race and language and culture and —) reflects and celebrates the gifts and boons that a wide range of individuals have to offer the enterprise.
Rosy visions, indeed. But then there are the prickly realities. How come, given all the ideals enunciated above, the gender distribution of academic staff at a leading South African university looks like this?
And, at the same university, is it cause for concern that the academic management structures look like this?
Wherever presented, this data creates discomfort. Female audiences sigh in satisfied umbrage. Victims all of an oppressive male hegemony. We knew it! Men in the audience, particularly senior leadership at universities, shift uncomfortably and resentfully in their seats. Yes, yes, they too know about the male hegemony. But it’s not like they wanted it that way. It’s not like it’s their fault, after all.
And then there are always some who feel that white women are spoilt, middle-class, neoliberal whingers who get belligerently impatient with what seems to them to be petulant and irrelevant data.
But wait, there’s more. The realities are pricklier yet. There are other graphs and tables that unsettle the audience further and shake some of the complacencies.
‘Women don’t publish,” we were told when we asked deans and university management why women weren’t being promoted. Anecdotal? Unfair perceptions? The figures are bleak:
Corporates tend to respond to the challenge by developing women’s leadership programmes with objectives such as enabling women to ‘skill up, to network and to develop support systems” or to become ‘well-rounded businesswomen”. The risible image elicited by this phrase is surely unintentional.
Such programmes tend to include alarmingly patronising components such as dress-for-success workshops. One corporate has even included golf lessons on the premise, one imagines, that important core business decisions happen not in the boardroom but at the 19th hole.
Universities have lagged behind business in developing such interventions and perhaps we can be grateful for that, given the apparent founding assumption that women need help, need to get a grip, need to fit in and shape up to cope in what remains an unchallenged patriarchal model of organisational culture.
Wits University is one of the few that has initiated a women’s empowerment programme. Called the WonderWoman Project, it is funded by donors (given that the tertiary sector does not have hard money to spend on fripperies). The project has taken about 50 women through a series of programmes aimed at increasing their research output and — rather than teaching them to play the university game — assisting them to interrogate the rules of the game and make informed and empowered choices about how they want to play it.
The success has been varied. Although alumnae of the programme are generally enthusiastic, senior (male) staff at the university have been heard referring to the initiative as the WonderBra Project. In addition, individual WonderWomen have been told (by senior men) that they have ‘committed career suicide” or that ‘they have let the side down” (by senior women who made it without the crutch of a ‘women’s programme”). We’ve got a long way yet to go.
Professor Margaret Orr is director of the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Development at the University of the Witwatersrand