Yesterday I attended a summit on Delivering Equality: Women and Success at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge. It was designed for leaders in Higher Education and was very well organised with some important speakers and a number of interesting things to say. The emphasis was on 'honesty', recognising just where we are in terms of gender equality in higher education, on making pledges towards practical steps that would lead to change within the sector, and on learning from other sectors. An important event, even if it was somewhat Cambridge focussed.
One of the things that I cam away with was around the idea of 'success'. The subtitle of the summit had two kinds of focus within the discussions during the day. The first was to ask how we might measure success within the terms of the agenda itself. How, for example, we would be able to increase the number of women in senior management and professorial positions above the 17-20% that appears to be the current norm within the sector. There was considerable discussion of this and a range of ideas put forward, none of which were exactly new in themselves. The answer here really lies in a common commitment and a concerted effort, paying constant attention to the metrics, and doing everything that we can to push the agenda forward. Dogged determination and not taking our eyes of the ball are the essential features of achieving this kind of success.
The other referent to the idea of success was, however, much more interesting. This was to ask what success in higher education might look like, when considered from the perspective of the individual career. Part of the wider issue of gender equality is the persistence of a model of academic success that is built on individual research (or occasionally team leadership), grant capture, publications, conference invitations and global recognition. This is not a specifically male approach to success, many women do achieve this, but it is something that the system makes much easier for men than it does for women. The question, of course, is whether we should be changing the system in order to make it easier for women to achieve this kind of success, levelling the playing field as it were, or whether we should, in fact, be redefining, or at the very least widening, what it means to achieve academic success in a way that opens up other possibilities?
The general view is that 'ideally' we need to talk about academic success in wider terms, to include excellence in teaching for example, an element of good citizenship, a recognition of the nurturing roles of mentoring, student support and so on. In this way some of those elements that have been traditionally seen as 'women's' roles within the departments would be recognized and play a more significant role within decisions around promotions etc. As ever, I have no problems with this, the whole of an individual's contribution needs to be taken into account and different individuals have different strengths, each of which should be cultivated and rewarded. To see this as a way of balancing the position of women specifically, however, may not actually achieve the desired results. There will always be a sense of the star researcher as the 'real success' and teachers, managers, mentors and the others as 'very good' but still somewhat second class. I can see what such strategies are trying to achieve, and I do accept and want to endorse, a far wider range of potential measures of success within the academy, but not just to allow in those who are otherwise excluded from being the star researchers.
The other way of looking at this came from another thread in the summit, that I am increasingly hearing being stated as fact. This is the idea that diversity in itself is a positive good and has a beneficial impact on the institution, including on the bottom line. As one speaker says, it goes without saying that there is a significant business case for diversity. This is stressed particularly at the level of the boardroom in industry and commerce, where it is increasingly being recognised that a range of skills and personalities (genders, ethnicities and sexualities) brings a breadth of experience and approach that is much more creative than the old monochrome boards of old boys. The evidence is clearly there to support such a view, but I am not entirely convinced that the message has really got across and even at the seminar there was a sense that such a message needed to be asserted in the strongest possible terms to make it stick. However, I am convinced that a positive bias towards diversity at all levels, and a recognition of the value of diversity within research teams, within teaching groups, within departments and schools, in professional services, and on University executive boards, is absolutely necessary and the best way of ensuring that a full range of individuals are recognised and rewarded, whether financially or through preferment, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or any other characteristic.
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