Three ways to embed gender equality in your university
How do you build a stronger awareness and commitment to gender equality? Here at Royal Agricultural University (RAU) we have had a concerted focus on engagement events with students and staff.
In March, the RAU Students’ Union (SU) Adviser, Sarah Tennant-Bell (thanks again, STB!) and I organised and hosted 22 events to celebrate International Women’s Month and Women’s History Month in collaboration with female and male colleagues, students, alumni, governors and wider community members from the region and land-based sector. We also promoted the excellent webinar ‘Under-representation of women in HE leadership: How to navigate the barriers and challenges in higher education’ hosted by Jobs.ac.uk and Women-space.
In June, we held a week-long ‘Staff Fest’ (staff development week) with the theme of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Staff Fest comprised a range of staff development opportunities, including a session regarding ‘Creating inclusion in the workplace: Gender, sexual orientation and privilege/ social mobility’, led by Unleashed(unleashed.org.uk/); a ‘Menopause Support Group’, led by Claire Bloomer, Mayor of Cirencester and former Councillor; ‘The Role of the SU Welfare & Liberations Officer at the RAU’, led by Alexandra Godfrey, RAU Students’ Union Campaigns and Liberation Officer; and our inaugural Learning, Teaching and Assessment LTA conference with the theme of ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for an Inclusive Curriculum’.
And what a fantastic conference it was thanks to the truly inspiring, insightful and powerful workshops, research seminars and keynotes! Feedback from colleagues highlighted the event to be “transformational”. A huge thank you to the wonderful and passionate advocates of equality, diversity and inclusion who educated, challenged and inspired us: Navaratnam Partheeban, Veterinary Surgeon and Co-Founder British Veterinary Ethnicity and Diversity Society; Dr Janet Hoskin, Senior Lecturer in Education, University of East London; Dr Matthew Rogers-Draycott, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, RAU; Professor Jonathan Glazzard, Professor of Teacher Education, Edge Hill University; and Professor Christina Hughes, CEO Women-Space.
I’d like to share with you some of my 3 key reflections following Christina’s fantastic Grand Finale keynote, in which she focused on Gender and Belonging in the Curriculum:
1. Amplification
As many women know, all too often our voices and participation are ignored, disrespected or disregarded by a man talking over us and/ or making the same point and his voice is suddenly heard and accepted and the woman’s idea taken forward as his own. As Crockett (2016) explains, “For most women in the workplace, this phenomenon is exhaustingly familiar: A woman offers an idea in a meeting, but nobody notices or acknowledges it until a man later says the same thing. And it’s not in our heads. Decades of research show that women get interrupted more often — by both men and women — and that women are given less credit, or even penalized, for speaking out more.”
Christina encouraged adopting amplification, a feminist practice and strategy as a daily practice in these circumstances – i.e. when a woman makes a key point, other women should repeat it, giving credit to the woman who made the point, which forces the men in the room to recognise the contribution and denying them the chance to claim the idea as their own. Christina role modelled amplification beautifully during her keynote to amplify other women and me on the 1st time of meeting us in person and in front of others for our contributions in making sure everything was well-organised for her for the conference; a very special act which I really appreciated at the end of the academic year and it’s so important to acknowledge and thank those great allies. Thank you, Christina! It was the 2nd time of being amplified in my career – the 1st time was when Kath Harris, my greatest line manager, who appointed, championed and promoted me twice, amplified me by shouting “Miss Bradbury [as I was then], I love you!” over a crowded secondary school dinner hall filled with teenagers for a small act of kindness I’d shown her (I’d written all the children’s reports for a class we shared; not a problem for me as a young, single teacher with no responsibilities). Thank you, Kath! I am fortunate enough to be regularly amplified in my personal life by my husband, who thankfully had good female role models in his mother and sisters; thanks, Giles, Glenys, Fiona and Moira! I’ve also just enjoyed reading Eliza Reid’s book, which highlights Icelandic female role models and the strive for and progress in gender equality in Iceland, and was a birthday present; thanks Mum! As Reid (2022, p. 182) amplifies,“We need to tell women’s stories, celebrate their victories, sing their songs.”
Crockett (2016) concludes that amplification “shows that when women band together and support one another, it can be incredibly powerful. Women have tremendous strength in numbers, but gathering those numbers in the first place takes courage and conscious effort… It’s a great model for women everywhere who are frustrated with the status quo of manterruption and bropropriation, and other silly new words for all the serious old things women have always dealt with but never named.”
2. Inappropriate behaviours
The #Me Too movement has been a powerful movement against sexual abuse, sexual harassment and rape culture in society. It is helpful in also shining a spotlight on the sexism and misogyny still too prevalent in our workplaces and communities. How many of us experience ‘subtle’ forms of sexism and misogyny, such as being denied the key resources, pay and advantages afforded to men which we need to fulfil our roles, is still staggering. It’s often difficult to address too and when we do call out this behaviour, we are made to feel like we are being awkward and difficult (and called worse behind our backs), when the inappropriate sexist and misogynist behaviours are allowed to pass unpenalized, leading to a culture of undermining women and a paucity of women and female role models in senior roles.
In more obvious forms of sexism and misogyny, such as inappropriate language, manterrupting and mansplaining we can, however, “name it, shame it and pivot”, as Christina eloquently advises. Good advice whilst we are still tolerating men calling and referring to adult women as ‘girls’, ‘ladies’, ‘love’ etc and not calling out this behaviour. How many more times do we have to hear ‘master’ at the start of a phrase too, showing it as an ideal/ superior item (e.g. master spreadsheet, master bedroom), which undermines and devalues women?! I’m a linguist and educationalist and perhaps more sensitive than some to these matters, but language matters.
Some men may be fed up with words such as ‘manterrupting’ and ’mansplaining’, but they are real phenomena which exist and highlight the socially problematic behaviour and communication adopted by some men (Lutsky and Lawson, 2017). The current Rishi Sunak-Liz Truss debates have raised awareness of this inappropriate behaviour, with Sunakcriticised for manterrupting, mansplaining, talking over Truss and for his general “shouty private school behaviour” (Davies, 2022).
Manterrupting has been a scientifically proven issue for nearly 50 years and occurs when a woman is interrupted by a man simply because she is a woman. A research study discovered that men are three times more likely to interrupt a female than one another and revealed that men were likely to talk over women in meetings in a dominant, aggressive manner (Zimmerman and West, 1996).The Merriam Webster dictionary defines mansplaining as "when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he's talking to does."
3. Belonging
For Christina, “the outcome of equality, diversity and inclusion should be belonging”. That sense of belonging is so important for our female students and female colleagues in higher education. In this year’s National Student Survey results, we achieved our best ever results, which included an overall student satisfaction score of 85.17% and a score of 83% for Learning Community. I’m really proud of these results and the latter score in particular, which placed us 1stfor Learning Community of all UK universities! This commendation from our students evidences the emphasis we have placed on student and staff feeling part of a community this year.
So, what next? Plans have already started to take us further forward for the next academic year. We’ll be building on the success of this year’s International Women’s Month and Women’s History Month in collaboration with the RAUSU. This year’s SU comprises 8 women of the 9 elected officers, including a female SU President and Vice President, which is a first for the RAU. Congratulations again, Meg and Chloe! I’m really looking forward to working with you and the team. We are also embedding Equality, Diversity and Inclusion across our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, which includes the 9 Protected Characteristics, and the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (which include gender equality) via curriculum mapping.
Dr Lorraine Thomas, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education and Students), Royal Agricultural University, UK
References
Crockett, E. (2016) The amazing tool that women in the White House used to fight gender bias [online] Vox. Available from: https://www.vox.com/2016/9/14/12914370/white-house-obama-women-gender-bias-amplification
Davies, C. (2022) Sunak’s interruptions ignite debate over ‘mansplaining’ in politics [online] Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/26/sunaks-interruptions-ignite-debate-over-mansplaining-in-politics
Reid, E. (2022) Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland's Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World Simon & Schuster
Zimmermann, D.H. and West, C. (1996) “Sex roles, interruptions and silences in conversation.” In Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science Series 4 (pp. 211-236). John Benjamins BV.