For 12 months I’ve been working in a project team that’s been thrown together to support an institutional shift from one LMS to another, and I’ve learned a lot about what people think about academics. Listening to IT colleagues in particular it seems as though we either need monk-like protection from the realities of technology, or their technology needs protecting from us. That’s when we’re not huddled under our desks with our robes thrown over our heads, resisting change.

But the most interesting part of the experience has been meeting people who still refer normatively to academics as “he”.  As in, “this is what will happen when the lecturer updates his site.” I found this so startling that for a while I said nothing, because it seemed picky to point it out, like mentioning that someone who is saying something quite interesting has spinach in their teeth.

In the end, however, it had to be said.  And here’s the thing: the result was instant, thoughtful, and courteous. Our colleagues were surprised to discover that they did it, and immediately took to correcting each other in meetings, without any irony.

I was thinking back on this essentially good experience when I read the recent column by Female Science Professor in The Chronicle on the kinds of comments she has heard from male colleagues in the last 12 months:

• Regarding three female scientists listed as principal investigators on a grant proposal: “That’s too many women on one project.”
• Regarding three female scientists (and no men) as organizers of a conference session: “Don’t they like men?”
• Regarding three female scientists talking in a corridor of a science building on a campus: “Is this a Girl Scout meeting?”

Female and male academics, from STEM disciplines and others, are still slugging it out in the comments over whether or not these are symptoms of an unusually toxic departmental culture, or are the product of an over sensitive disposition (what do you call a feminist with no sense of humour? surely you’ve heard that one), or whether they’re just the kind of corridor banter that everyone runs into now and again.

The nerve that Female Science Professor has jangled seems to be the same one behind yesterday’s suggestion in The Atlantic, that men could pledge not to appear on or moderate all-male tech conference panels. Rebecca Rosen’s article picks up on a blog post by Matt Andrews from The Guardian, who challenged the organisers of an unusually packed schedule to explain why their selection process for discussion leaders had not managed to find a single woman.

And this apparently sparked off such a response that the organisers themselves have now posted this explanation on the conference website:

Why aren’t there more women on the panels?

We’re very much aware that our panels are male dominated, even more so than the broader tech industry. Underrepresentation of women in the industry is a problem we fully acknowledge and is something everyone in the community should be working hard to change, the organisers of this event included. There are many ways of doing this, and it can’t be as simple as saying that every event without exception must be representative to have any legitimacy. If small, niche events go unstaged for fear of unintentionally provoking arguments over diversity, then we’re the poorer for the lack of valuable knowledge sharing opportunities that those events would have provided.

Well, OK.  I want all of this to be true. I want to work in an achieved culture of non-discriminatory inclusion of all of us, regardless of what we look like, how we dress, what age we are, whether or not we have beards, or speak French, or need help up the stairs. I want all our children to be educated in that world, and I want our students to graduate into it.  I do also think that in that world, we will all enjoy the way that randomisation of opportunity and blind promotion of ability will be the twin guardians of “small, niche events” and “valuable knowledge sharing opportunities”. It all can’t come soon enough.

But we’re not there yet. The gender gap in graduate salaries is persistent. Career progress is much harder for some than others, regardless of ability. Vague ideas of “cultural fit” currently govern the recruitment process in many companies, which adds up to hiring more and more people who look like the boss.  And long-term unemployment is still hard to overcome for no better reason than that hip young recruiters think people over 45 will need naps after lunch.

So we all still work in a world hamstrung by stereotypes, and unless we’re as conscientious about challenging this as my two colleagues who keep remembering to say “when the academic updates her website”, then this world is going to go on reproducing itself, because it can.

And this is why it really is making me crazy that I work for an institution whose current student recruitment campaign, representing the relationship students can expect to enjoy with the academics they’ll meet here, hasn’t managed to come up with a single female academic.  Everywhere I traipse around my community, I’m confronted by billboards featuring my male colleagues, from talented ECRs to the professoriate.  Maybe there’s a billboard I haven’t seen, tucked in a stairwell somewhere, where one of our female professors gets a go, but I doubt it.

Because the talking-head video from this same campaign that’s prominently featured on our website also doesn’t feature a single one of my internationally respected or locally appreciated women colleagues. In fact, as the student in the video says, “the best thing is that … my lecturers are the researchers, so I get to learn directly from the guys that are doing the research.”

OK, hands up who pictured a woman at that point? I really do get that “guys” can mean men or women in Australia, but it’s very context specific. I don’t think this student was referring to his female professors as “the guys”.  I just don’t.

So here we are, starting a new year with a marketing campaign that doesn’t practice the simple courtesy that my two tech colleagues have achieved—in fact, it confirms their first approach.  And no one involved at any stage in its creation thought this was a problem. So now I’m wondering what it would take for my male academic colleagues to take a pledge and not participate in our marketing without checking first that the result will do justice both to the institution that they work in, and the future we all want to see.

I think if asked, they would.

Related articles

• Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013? (threechords.org)
• Female graduate pay gap doubles: report (abc.net.au)