Joanne Pyke, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University in Australia.

This guest entry is written by Joanne Pyke who is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University in Australia. Her PhD thesis explores why women continue to be a minority in senior academic roles in Australian universities despite more than 25 years of equal opportunity policies and legislation. 

Australian higher education is commonly described as ‘feminised’ with overall numbers of both female students and academic staff outnumbering men. At the same time, women remain a minority as senior academics in Australian higher education. In 2009, the national average of female appointments above Level D (Associate Professor) was 26.5% (QUT Equity Services 2011). This is despite the fact that universities have, by and large, complied with Equal Opportunity legislation and have systematically worked towards gender equity in senior academic leadership (Winchester, Chesterman et al. 2005). This has worked to the extent that the gender balance is approaching equal at Level C yet there is a noted trend that women tend to withdraw from seeking promotion just at the point that they have the qualifications and experience to be eligible for promotion to Level D (Probert 2005).

There are many explanations for why women in leadership remain a minority and the broader literature draws attention to the multiple systemic barriers that affect women’s progress in academe. Doughney and Vu (2007) for example, highlights the gendered outcomes of professorial appointments made through external recruitment process – a process that heavily favours men. Others highlight the power of ‘gender inequality practices’ that operate to cancel out the effect of gender equity strategies and make systemic discrimination invisible (van den Brink and Benschop 2012). An alternative explanation, and one that has been influential, comes from human capital theory that explain women’s under-representation as an outcome of ‘choice’. That is that women choose not to pursue senior academic positions in preference to balancing work and other responsibilities, particularly caring for children and families (Hakim 2000).

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