WORKFORCE
campusreview.com.au
S
erious investigation into full-time employment pathways for
casual academics was among key recommendations of a
new report on producing gender equity in higher education.
Women, Careers, and Universities: Where to from here?, which
Griffith University published recently in partnership with the
University of Queensland, has reinforced a wealth of previous
research showing the gender gap that exists in higher education.
It also reinforces research from the UK that shows pushes to
make universities more entrepreneurial and corporate will widen
the gap. And while the situation is getting better at the executive
level, workforce casualisation is undermining these gains, the
report states.
Casual academic teaching staff, typically hired semester by
semester, formed the largest component, on a headcount basis, of the
academic workforce, the report states. Women constitute more than
half of the casual academic teaching workforce. Career advancement
is hard for those on fixed-term contracts, the report states.
“The lack of a career path was a notable trait of fixed-term and
casual academic teaching staff,” says Griffith University’s Dr Kaye
Broadbent, one of the report’s co-authors. “Casual academic
teaching staff often felt invisible within the university and struggled
to gain access to basic resources.”
Thus, the report recommends “that universities seriously
investigate ways in which casual academic teaching staff can
access, and compete for, permanent appointments”.
The report was recently launched in Brisbane. Researchers from
Griffith and UQ worked with peak body Universities Australia to
produce it. The National Tertiary Education Union, UniSuper and
19 universities also collaborated on the project.
Associate professor Rae Cooper, from the University of Sydney’s
Business School, says the casualisation of higher education’s
workforce reflects trends in other industries. She recently coauthored a separate report that shows a third of working women
aged 25–54 in Australia worked part-time in 2014. Comparatively,
only 18.5 per cent of women in the US across the same age bracket
were employed part-time.
Here, Cooper discusses the findings from her report, Women At
Work: Australia And The United States with Campus Review.
CR: Can you begin by running through your report’s key points on
women at work, comparing Australia and the US?
RC: It’s a complex picture, comparing the performance of both
Next steps for
gender equity
Making flexible work mainstream, increasing
pathways to full-time work and transparency
in remuneration are all critical aspects
to closing the stubborn pay gap.
Rae Cooper interviewed by James Wells
24
countries in relation to women’s working lives and women in
leadership. On some measures, Australia has caught up with and
surpassed the American experience. On other measures, Australia
is lagging.
Australia has caught up with the US in terms of representation
of women on the boards of the largest companies. It sits at
about 20 per cent of the ASX 200 in Australia, and the Fortune
500 groups in the US, which used to lead us by quite some way
in this regard.
In some ways that’s great; particularly in Australia, because
we’ve shifted in the last seven or eight years from 10 per cent
to 20 per cent women’s representation. But if you flip it the
other way, both economies are under-performing relative to
population, and there’s a serious gender gap. It’s not necessarily
something to celebrate that we’ve gone from having 90 per
cent men on those boards to 80 per cent. Still, we’re having a
trajectory in Australia that is steeper than in the US, which is flat.