10 April 2023

Misogyny Posing as Measurement: Disrupting the Feminisation Crisis Discourse

Professor Louise Morley Centre for Higher Education and

Equity Research (CHEER) University of Sussex, UK (l.morley@sussex.ac.uk)

10 April 2023

Closing the Gender Gap

• Number of male students globally quadrupled from 17.7 to 75.1 million between 1970-2007.

• Number of female students rose sixfold from 10.8 to 77.4 million.

• Global Gender Parity Index of 1.08 (UNESCO, 2009).

10 April 2023

Women as Pollutants

• In 2004, Dame Carol Black (then President of the Royal College of Physicians):

• Increasing numbers of women in medicine might lead to the profession losing status and influence.

(Lurie, 1993; Whitcomb, 2004)

• ‘dominant position of females’ (HEPI Report, 2009:3)

10 April 2023

Post-Feminism/ New Gender Regimes

• Narratives of crisis used to justify a return to values perceived as being under threat.

• Declaration of crisis reads facts/figures to become a declaration of war against the source of threat (Ahmed, 2004).

• Young women’s assemblage for productivity/ phallic girls/ vengeful patriarchal norms reinstated (McRobbie, 2007).

• The duality of sexual difference is re-confirmed.

• Gender norms are re-consolidated and re-stabilised (Blackmore, 2010).

10 April 2023

Crisis Discourse of Feminisation

• Reinforces gender dichotomy/ binary frame/ seesaw;

• Is about fear of the ‘Other’/ disparagement of difference;

• Underpinned by essentialism;

• Reduces gender to quantitative change/ confusing sex and gender;

• About hyper-visibility i.e. women as dangerous;

• Suggests a breach of social norms.

(Leathwood and Read, 2009)

10 April 2023

Whose Academy is it Anyway?

• Male Academy = Hosts/ Victims

• Female Students = Abusive Guests

• A woman’s place is in the minority

• Newcomers not knowing their place

• A ceiling on women’s participation?

• Reminiscent of immigration discourses (invasion fears).

10 April 2023

Feminisation= Damaging/Emasculating Men?

• Dominant group reconstructed as victims;

• Assumption that women’s success has come about by damaging men;

• White male injury now read as the same as subaltern injury.

• If atmospheric oestrogens don’t get them, women’s education and economic independence will.

10 April 2023

Decontextualised, Common-sense non- Analytical Understanding of Gender?

• Fails to challenge wider gendered power relations;

• Fails to increase women’s rights in wider civil society;

• Allows women to succeed in HE, but not in labour market.

• Positions women as (turbo charged) consumers, but not in powerful positions as knowledge producers/ gatekeepers.

10 April 2023

The Higher Educated (overperforming) Woman is Responsible for...

societal destabilisation;

a crisis in masculinity;

devaluing of professions/

academic credentials/

institutions;

detraditionalisation.

10 April 2023

Undoing Gender (Butler, 2004)

Feminisation =

• Resistance to distributive justice

• Subversion of gender equality

• Individual, not collective rights

• Re-doing of gender.

How to build on the momentum of

women’s increased participation:

• to undo gender in the academy

• transform knowledge production

• imagine a different future for

higher education?

10 April 2023

Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER)

• ESRC Seminar Series:

‘Imagining the University of the

Future’

• http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cheer/esrcseminars

Special issue of Contemporary

Social Science (Volume 6:2, 2011)

entitled: ‘Challenge, Change or

Crisis in Global Higher Education?’