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Editorial: Breaking Boundaries: Women in Academia

2008; Wiley; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1468-0432.2008.00391.x

1468-0432

David Knights, Deborah Kerfoot,

Gender Diversity and Inequality

This is only the second time that we have published a plenary paper from the journal's biennial international interdisciplinary Conference series. The first occasion was when we published Joan Acker's paper (ultimately published as Acker, 1998) from our very first conference held in Manchester, UK in 1996. In her plenary paper, Joan remarked that, as scholars, we had not exhausted the possibilities suggested by ‘broken boundaries and new connections’ in work that sought to bring together the fields of gender and organization, just as women had not yet broken the boundaries and made the connections that would secure their full place in the world. More than a decade on from Joan Acker's original address, Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón's ‘The thin end of the wedge: foreign women professors as double strangers in academia’ acts as a timely reminder of the continued struggle of many women to break boundaries and to make connections at all levels of organization and in differing cultures. In publishing Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevón's piece from the 5th conference, and partly to celebrate the journal's 15th year of existence, we have made an exception to the normal length of the contribution by allowing it, with appropriate critical commentaries from three important gender theorists, to fill the whole issue. We cannot, of course, guarantee to repeat this concession in future but we are encouraging normal length contributions from our plenary speakers as a matter of course, subject to review. We trust that each plenary essay in turn will signal key themes, debates and troublesome questions for stimulating discussion and advancing knowledge on gender, work and organization. Apart from celebrating Gender, Work & Organization's ‘coming of age’ in the academic community, and perhaps its readiness to be even more troublesome now that it has broken through establishment barriers of scholarly recognition, the contribution by Barbara and Guje could be seen as a landmark piece of writing. It provides us with a narrative of the first women professors in four countries, Finland, France, Poland and Sweden. These women form the thin end of the wedge from which this plenary essay takes its title, for they were the first to open the hitherto firmly sealed doors of the academy. What is more remarkable, given the ancient history of academies or universities,1 the essay also provides us with evidence of how recent is this limited change in job gendered segregation in professional work and, despite their brilliance, what struggles these women had in gaining recognition. This is not the place to enter into analysis of why this is the case but Gender, Work & Organization has previously published a number of articles, including a special issue (Gender, Work & Organization, 2003) on the theme of sex discrimination in academia in terms of the contemporary situation in universities. There may be more women professors today than in the late 19th and early 20th century, the period of history covered by Czarniawska and Sevón's essay but, relative to the increased size of the higher educational sector, and given the growth of legislation designed to eradicate sex discrimination, the improvement has been far from overwhelming. However, the theme of their essay is more complex and nuanced than a simple account of sexual discrimination and inequality. The authors make no claims to causality, arguing that there are multiple causes of social change and, as institutionalists, they examine ‘trajectories as being individually unique but, taken together, as characteristic of their times and places’ (p. 282). Their essay is concerned equally with the concept of Otherness, not just in terms of gender but also in relation to strangeness, or being an outsider. All four of the women whose lives are examined were living in countries outside their place of birth. Hence, they were foreigners or strangers to the culture in which they practiced their profession and Czarniawska and Sevón argue that this could work to their advantage as much as to their disadvantage. They were transgressors in the double sense of women entering a male profession and as strangers to the dominant culture. While this sometimes was cumulatively disadvantageous, the authors suggest that at other times the two disadvantages had the partial effect of cancelling each other out to give the women a more level playing field. Herein lies the distinctive contribution of Czarniawska and Sevón's essay and certainly it has already stimulated considerable critical debate, as can be seen by the three commentaries. In her response to Czarniawska and Sevón Joan Acker is unconvinced by the thesis that as foreigners it was easier for these women to advance academically than if they had been working in their own countries, or that they were especially advantaged in comparison with ‘native’ women. Her argument is that gender was, and is, more important than foreign status, arguing that, for example, in the case of Sofia Kovalevskaya, a Russian who became a professor in Sweden, this occurred only after she repeatedly failed to do so in other countries because of her gender, suggesting that ‘gender discrimination forced her to find other work that then transformed her into a foreigner’ (Acker, p. 290). She concedes that being foreign may have made it less difficult to disregard negative messages relating to their gender and thereby easier to avoid a self-effacing passivity that would take them out of a head-on competition with men. However, she believes overall that the double disadvantage thesis of strangeness reinforcing gender discrimination is more appropriate than one that suggests foreign status is an asset that can cancel out the effects of gender discrimination. Acker underlines the argument that universities were, and continue to be, gendered institutions. As such, the gendered freedom from responsibility that many men enjoy comes with all the assumptions of masculine power and avoidance of servicing or support work in the minutiae of everyday life that this entails. Lotte Bailyn is more positive about the Czarniawska and Sevón thesis, providing further evidence from examples from other countries and of a more recent period when the wedge of ‘upcoming’ women became thicker due to a range of cultural and political changes, not least the feminist movement. However, she still concludes with a argument parallel to that of Joan Acker when she suggests that while double strangeness helps, ‘too often it helps at the expense of womanhood’ (Baylin, p. 296). Drawing on the example of Black women in the USA, she notes that these women are usually found on the lower rungs of social and economic status, as well as lower rungs of the organizational hierarchy. Yet highly qualified and professionally successful Black women were regarded first as professionals than as women. West Indian women contributed disproportionately to professional leadership in the American Black community, which may indicate that the strangeness of being foreign could have helped to overcome the stigma of Blackness. In the context of academia more specifically, Bailyn reminds us that foreigners in the academy may be strangers, but they are not strangers in the same way as women. The female academic remains the real transgressor. For Marta Calás, The Thin End of the Wedge has a special significance and highly personal resonance. Yet having ‘been there’ herself as a woman professor, political exile and emigrant, Calás felt that the theory might not the case (Calás, p. 298). She offers instead the metaphor of the doorstopper. The door stopper, she argues, enables a tantalising glimpse of what lies beyond but ultimately fails to allow in little more than a mere sliver of light on to the aim of women's equal opportunities. For her, the doorstopper creates but an appearance of openness. Our challenge as scholars, writers and commentators, as well perhaps as activists, thus lies in the avoidance of being captivated or seduced by such appearances as evidence of any meaningful change. Recognizing that Simmel's essays on women are problematic, Calás critically challenges his notion of the stranger, querying the extent to which the concept can act as a useful lens for observing that, indeed, the door for women is not sufficiently open. She dismisses the assertion that having a proportion of women professors signals anything other than a ‘meagre accomplishment’, asserting that this covers up ‘a very long trail of gendered power relations’ (Calás, p. 301). For Calás, the position is one where we need to ‘move towards a place where doors are no more’ (Calás, p. 301). None of the commentators fully acknowledge the ambivalent and nuanced character of the essay where Czarniawska and Sevón refuse to make grand theoretical claims or wide generalizations, but instead offer an alternative analysis as one possible interpretation of the secondary material of the biographies of these four women professors. Perhaps what is also significant about both the essay and the critical commentaries is that, taken as a whole, they overlook any critical reflection on the concept of success. As such, the collection of writings leaves unresolved issues surrounding the prevailing definition of what success might mean outside a historical and contemporary preoccupation with a hierarchical career in the organization of academia. This highly specific definition of success remains bound up in a pre-eminently masculine preoccupation, albeit one suffused with other institutional (such as capitalism, class and politics) and cultural (such as sport, celebratory events, community and family) constructions. This cannot be avoided when reporting on the struggle that women experience in becoming professors against barriers that are decidedly gendered. However, our point here is it would be useful to comment on, rather than overlook the subjugation to success as a predominantly masculine discourse. This is not to support a masculine backlash that would take the ladder away to protect men's well-established professorial privileges but rather to encourage a critical examination of hierarchical life and its associated criteria of success. At the same time we support the concerns of both the authors of the essay and the three critical commentaries to remove any continuing obstacles in the way of women or minorities in developing their academic powers. In the words of Marta Calás, the doors do need to be dismantled, rather than simply opened up, because as long as they exist, it is always possible for them to be closed again and kept locked while dissembling about the ready availability of keys. We trust this issue will stimulate further discussion and debate and, more importantly, changes in practice such that essays of this kind no longer need to be written.