Report of the WOMEN in HIGHER EDUCATION Research Project 1988
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Report of the WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION research project 1988 - 90 Written and editedby Andrea Spurling King's College Cambridge May 1990 Copyright © Andrea Spurling and King's College, Cambridge 1990 First published 1990 by King's College Research Centre King's College Research Centre King's College Cambridge CB2 1ST All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. A note on this digital document This is a digitised version of the original Spurling Report, held in the archives of King’s College Cambridge, reference NW K 4W Spu. The original document was first scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and any errors in the character recognition process were corrected. A number of changes were made to the layout of the digitised document to improve readability and accessibility. These changes include: inserting line breaks between paragraphs, changing to a sans-serif font style, and left-aligning the body of the text. As a result, the pagination of the digitised document differs from that of the original document, and the table of contents was edited in the digitised documents to reflect this. In addition, sections appear here in a different order to that of the original document, to improve the legibility of the report as a whole. Specifically, appendixes and the bibliography appear at the end of the digitised document, after Part Two. In the original document, appendixes appeared after Part One. The contents of the document have remained entirely unchanged. 2 IN MEMORIAM (In a Suffolk church) Beneath the cov'ring of this little Stone Lye the poor Shrunk, yet dear Remains of one, With Merit humble and with Virtue fair, With Knowledge modest & with wit Sincere, Upright in all the Social Pathes of Life, The Friend, the Daughter, Sister & the Wife. So Just the Deposition of her Soul Nature left Reason nothing to Control: Firm, Pious, Patient, affable of Mind, Happy in Life, yet in Death resign'd. Just in the Zenith of those Golden Days When the Mind ripens, e'er the Form decays, The Hand of Fate untimely cut her Thread and left the world to weep that Virtue fled lt's Pride when living & it's Grief when dead. Lady Elizabeth wife of Honble Bussy Mansell and daughter of Earl of Bristol d. 3 / 9 I/1727 3 CONTENTS Key: ..................................................................................................................................... vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... ix FOREWORD ......................................................................................................................... ix PREFACE .............................................................................................................................. x PART I ................................................................................................................................. xii Women in Higher Education: ............................................................................................. xii The Friend, the Daughter, Sister and the Wife. ................................................................ xii INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 1: CONTEXT ................................................................................................................... 3 1.1 ACADEMIC CAREERS ........................................................................................ 3 Academic work and careers ......................................................................................................... 3 Status ............................................................................................................................................ 3 Gender stereotypes ...................................................................................................................... 4 Point of entry................................................................................................................................. 5 Motivation / complaisance ............................................................................................................ 6 Career progress ............................................................................................................................ 6 Occupational gender .................................................................................................................... 7 Family planning versus career planning ....................................................................................... 8 Career versus family ..................................................................................................................... 8 Stereotypes and atypical behaviour ........................................................................................... 10 1.2 INSTITUTIONAL OBSTACLES .......................................................................... 11 Cambridge University and career / family conflict ...................................................................... 11 Exemplar: UCL ........................................................................................................................... 12 1.3 TEACHING, LEARNING, AND RESEARCH ...................................................... 14 Relevance ................................................................................................................................... 14 Teaching versus research .......................................................................................................... 14 Education versus training ........................................................................................................... 14 Competition versus collaboration ............................................................................................... 15 'The Cambridge Style' ................................................................................................................ 16 Mentors ....................................................................................................................................... 18 Research councils ...................................................................................................................... 19 1.4 WOMEN AND CAMBRIDGE .............................................................................. 20 Women in a mixed college ......................................................................................................... 20 Role models ................................................................................................................................ 21 1. 4. 1 WOMEN'S INTEGRITY AS WOMEN ................................................................. 21 Clever or female? ....................................................................................................................... 21 Dissembling ................................................................................................................................ 23 'Fear of success' and fail-safe strategies ................................................................................... 24 Ambitions and imposture ............................................................................................................ 25 Women, class and Cambridge ................................................................................................... 26 Performance versus integrity ...................................................................................................... 26 Challenge or sabotage ............................................................................................................... 27 Aggression and assertiveness.................................................................................................... 28 1.4.2 WOMEN AND DISCRIMINATION ................................................................... 28 Sexism in supervision ................................................................................................................. 28 Women and science and engineering ........................................................................................ 30 Discrimination ............................................................................................................................. 32 1.4.3 WOMEN, FEMINISM AND FEMINIZATION .................................................... 32 Gender at work ........................................................................................................................... 32 iv Attitudes to feminism .................................................................................................................. 33 Men in feminist studies ............................................................................................................... 35 Gender and power ...................................................................................................................... 35 Gender and change .................................................................................................................... 37 Women's response ....................................................................................................................