workforce
campusreview.com.au
The quota question
Should there be gender
quotas in universities?
By Loren Smith
F
ollowing allegations of sexism in
Australian politics, the gender quota
debate has re-emerged.
Liberal MP Julia Banks, in announcing
her intended resignation from parliament
following the most recent leadership spill,
stated the following: “I’m not done. I am not
giving up the fight for gender equality. The
scourge of cultural and gender bias, bullying
and intimidation, continues against women
in politics, the media and across businesses.”
Then, in an address to parliament, she
called for gender quotas in politics to ensure
equal gender representation. Currently,
only about 20 per cent of Liberal MPs and
senators are female.
This imbalance extends to universities.
Less than a third of full professors are
women, and just over a third are vice-
chancellors of public universities.
Quotas, along with cultural change,
can redress this, says Victoria University’s
Dr Joanne Pyke. A senior research fellow
at the university’s College of Business, she
pre‑empted critics of this approach.
“The response is always, ‘It’s unfair, men
will miss out, it goes against the merit
principle’. But there’s a need for it because
the merit principle doesn’t work. If it did,
there would be 50/50 male and female in
those roles.”
Further, counteracting the claim that
women opt out of leadership positions by
‘choice’, Pyke explained that women often
take on care-giving roles in addition to work
not because they want to, but “because
who else would do it?”
By contrast, Dr Jeremy Sammut,
a senior research fellow and director of
the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society
Program at the Centre for Independent
Studies, told Campus Review, “The other
factor here is obviously the choice by
women to interrupt their career and
have children.”
Yet Pyke conceded one ‘choice’: that
some woman are reticent to volunteer for
leadership positions.
“When I did my PhD eight years ago,
women were more successful than
men who applied for promotions, but
women were less likely to apply … Women
would wait until they were ‘absolutely
ready’… I don’t think men say that.”
This is where she thinks quotas, as part of
broader organisational change, could help.
“They are one important direct measure
when change has been so slow.”
Professor James Arvanitakis, of Western
Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and
Society, thinks quotas are an apt last resort.
“I’m a big fan of targets if they’re achievable
and ambitious … If they continue to fall short,
then I think the answer is quotas,” he said.
Though he qualified this by stating
that, like Pyke suggested, quotas must be
accompanied by support structures, such
as targeting funding for female early career
academics. He learnt of the need for this
during his ‘reverse mentoring program’,
where less experienced mentors mainly
spoke of the enablers, rather than the
barriers to success.
Another ‘enabler’ is employers
considering a female job applicant from
a different perspective. “We don’t directly
compare between disciplines, so we
shouldn’t directly compare between life
experiences,” he said.
However, he acknowledged that barriers
do exist for women. “There are pockets
in universities that have almost a locker
room culture, where it is a bit of a boys’
club, and there’s a sense of women not
feeling welcome. We need to confront
those things.”
But not everyone sees all gender
imbalances as problems to be rectified.
Speaking as a guest on a University of
Melbourne podcast last year, David Gonski
argued against gender quotas in companies.
Instead, “we ... have to move in business in
particular to a much better flexibility and a
much better response, in my opinion, in how
we track and indeed help a successful career
to be worked out”, he said.
In terms of higher education, Sammut
says there’s “no evidence” of systemic
discrimination, therefore, quotas aren’t
needed. “Enormous progress towards
gender equity has actually been made
without quotas,” he said.
He went further, stating the argument
that there are much fewer female leaders
in STEM fields recalls the James Damore-
Google scandal (he implicitly agrees with
Damore’s view than men are better suited to
some tech careers than women).
“Competition is fierce for high status
positions, and men won’t simply get out of
the way for women,” he added.
“Studies have also suggested that gender
doesn’t explain most of the difference
in outcomes for CEO sex disparity – that
choices and other differences explain this.
There is no reason to think that the same
doesn’t apply to VC appointments.”
Agree with them or not, university quotas
are already being implemented. Possibly
soon-to-be merged University of Adelaide,
for example, recently advertised eight
female-only positions in its engineering
faculty, where 85 per cent of its academic
staff are male.
Pyke thinks these kinds of measures
are positive.
“If we don’t have equal representation, we
only have half the talent …
“Higher education is where we create
knowledge and influence policy … If women
aren’t there to shape the narrative, that’s a
real loss.”
But she doesn’t think quotas alone will
ensure gender equity in higher education.
“Getting better is not guaranteed. There
are new forms of disadvantage that hold
women back; for example, the casualisation
of the academic workforce [where people
are] increasingly measured against hard,
bottom line measures.
“The other issue is disciplinary segregation …
Women are in a narrower range of fields, and
even in those with a vast majority of women,
like nursing, men are still at the top. That
pattern is very hard to shift.
“Where are we heading to? Who knows.
But it will take more than targets to achieve
equity.” ■
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