Women
in Academia and their Struggles to Establish Authority
24 May 2008
Brian J. Reece
Table of Contents:
In
our male-dominated society, women struggle daily to rank highly within their
professions. The effort they exert often goes unacknowledged as they attempt to
assert themselves as authorities in their fields. The issue of establishing
authority, which is the way members of the scholarly community climb the ranks—usually
through having their academic writing published—affects women in
different ways than it does men. Whether or not men and women have equal access
to the established authority required for credibility in the academic world has
become more important as the number of women entering scholarly discourse
increases. While both men and women struggle to establish themselves as
authorities, the male-dominated culture allows men to achieve it by following
academic and discursive conventions while women must follow, and then struggle
beyond, those standards. In fact, the very nature of the writing required in
academia increases the difficulty of gaining authority for many women while
preventing others from establishing it at all. Feminist scholars find this
problem particularly difficult to solve as it relies so heavily on the
dominance of men in our society as well as the discrimination faced by the
women fighting against it by becoming authorities in the patriarchal community
of academia.
How
an unknown writer establishes academic authority in the first place is an
interesting phenomenon that both women and men struggle with at first.
According to Gesa E. Kirsch, an assistant professor of English at Wayne State
University, a writer establishes authority by following the conventions of the
discipline, "such as the procedures to citation, and learning when and how to
apply them" (48). The implication is that by following
these predetermined conventions, students can begin to produce works backed by
relevant and well-known sources. Eventually, when they have received enough
education and have produced enough work, the academic world will consider them
authorities in their disciplines. Kirsch argues that women face a much deeper
problem rooted in social inequality: "Establishing authority in public forums,
whether in writing or speaking, is an issue particularly critical for woman
because cultural definitions dissociate 'woman' and 'authority,' thereby
creating contradictory norms for women who occupy the cultural spaces of both 'woman'
and 'authority figure'" (49). In other words, women are
expected not to have authority, so establishing authority by adopting conventions
is merely the first step toward acceptance in the scholarly community.
Issues for Women Establishing Authority
Women
who have already established their authority in the current academic community
admit that they felt pressured in ways that men did not as they were entering
the field. Professor Ashley, a pseudonym for a full professor of Anthropology
specializing in Middle Eastern Studies, recounts her struggles as a student
hoping to eventually earn tenure: "When
I first came, which was 1966, there were definitely problems for women�getting
tenure and all sorts of things�.I felt that way all through graduate school,
too, where there were very few female graduate students and no female
professors" (Kirsch 24). Ashley felt intimidated by the
mere attitude her university held toward women students and faculty, which was
supplemented by the lack of female presence in her classes and on the campus in
general. While these statistics have improved since Professor Ashley began her
college career, they echo the very struggle that many female college and
university faculty went through to establish the authority they hold today. In
addition, while forty-one years may have been plenty of time to override the
unbalanced proportions of women attending and teaching at the university level,
other evidence proves that such a short period of time has not been enough to
override the attitudes that created the struggle for Professor Ashley and her
colleagues. Why is it so hard for women to establish their authority?
While
the lack of women in Professor Ashley's studies certainly intimidated her and
caused fear that she would not be accepted in the academic world, other
pressures affected the way she approached establishing her authority. Concerned
with the masculinity of the academic voice, Harriet Malinowitz, associate
professor of English and director of Women's Studies at Long Island University,
explains how one determines how the voice of authority is created: "Implicit
here is the belief that all rational minds can ultimately be persuaded to reach
procedural consensus—or perhaps that certain voices are marginal enough
not to count." In Malinowitz's opinion, authority is established by a "controlling
interest�which subsumes the claims of alternative approaches," and until women
have a say in that interest and do not feel intimidated like Professor Ashley,
male dominance in the academy will continue to drive the voice of authority (298). Ashley admits, "I felt that I had to write more
and publish more than men to become tenured�.I was told that I'd better get a
book out at first, whereas other people might not have had to [publish] a book.
So I got my dissertation published" (Kirsch 24). She
feels that the male-dominated universities expected women to prove themselves
far more than men—that following the same guidelines and expectations set
forth for men would not have gained her the same amount of respect or the same
offers, such as tenure, that men were receiving.
While
this explains why women might feel uncomfortable establishing authority that is
dominated by male views, more evidence suggests that one possible source of
women's inability to establish authority lies in the nature of the academic
writing required of them at any level of a college or university, whether as an
undergraduate student or a faculty member. According to Malinowitz, students
are encouraged to think the way professionals in their fields do; in fact, many
programs of study will "aim to make majors "proficient" in their fields—so
that an engineering student, for example, will 'read, write, and solve problems
like an engineer'" (qtd. in Malinowitz 295). Students
are thus encouraged to compromise their own style in order to mimic the style
and format used by those successful in their fields. The male dominance in what
Kirsch refers to as "genre inequality" perpetuates the gender inequality in
academia, because women "have to speak—and write—the 'language of
patriarchy,' a language that places men in superior and women in subordinate
positions in its vocabularies and representations of everyday phenomena and
social relationships" (21). Kirsch is referring to the
dominant genres of scholarly writing, which tend to mimic the social behaviors
of men. She quotes Cynthia Caywood and Gillian Overing, who write about the
genre dichotomy in academic discourse: " 'The expository essay is valued over
the exploratory; the argumentative essay set above the autobiographical; the
clear evocation of a thesis preferred to a more organic exploration of a topic;
the impersonal, rational voice ranked more highly than the intimate, subjective
one' " (qtd. in Kirsch 20). Because male genres are
valued over female genres in educated writing, women must either stay away from
the field or compromise the sense of self-expression gained from writing in
order to follow the conventions of their discipline. Choosing to write in a way
that does not fit into the genre of the discipline can result in a loss of
authority because part of establishing authority is following the conventions
of the field.
Women and Internet-based Research
Furthermore,
one must consider the pre-existing authorities on which women base the
establishment of their new authority. In a society that is becoming
increasingly dependent on the Internet, one can only imagine the implications
internet-based research has had on academia. With countless pages of
information on the web and the opportunity for just about anyone to publish
their own website, the legitimacy of internet-based research is highly
questionable. According to a study done by Yin Zhang, Assistant Professor of
School Library and Information Science at Kent State University, "The
introduction of the Internet as a new channel for scholarly communication poses
challenges of rebuilding the orderliness of scientific communication. Central
to the discussion on this issue is the legitimacy of e-sources in scholarly
communication" (631). This creates a unique problem for
women, who must take extra caution when considering the use of online sources—their
authority, which is difficult to establish and easy to break down, depends on
their careful selection of legitimate sources when using the internet. In
addition, Zhang's study states, "Results of several surveys show that most
scholars are not sure whether their universities would give electronic
publications the same recognition as print publications" (631).
With regard to women in academia, this problem would serve to be an even more
difficult one—wanting to go the extra mile to prove their research to be
credible, they may be more likely to avoid the internet in order to avoid
problems with establishing their authority because of the possibility of using
an illegitimate source. In many ways, this can limit their use of the many legitimate internet-based sources out there as well as make it more difficult for them to find sources, since searching through the internet is generally faster and more efficient that searching through stacks at the library.
How
can our society, which is so strongly based on patriarchy, help women
struggling to establish themselves as authorities in the disciplines? According
to Christy Desmet, associate professor of English at the University of Georgia,
some efforts that attempt to encourage women to express themselves naturally
can actually worsen the current problem. For example, Peter Elbow, known for
his "expressivist" approach to teaching writing, tends to "put women students
at a double disadvantage by asking them to mime behaviors already assigned to
them by cultural fiat ('Feminism')," and, contrary to his intentions, his
pedagogical style "obscures the operations of power in the writing classroom
and in the academy in general" (Desmet 156). Elbow simply
ignores the fact that his classroom is rather unique—what he is teaching
his female students may be helpful for them in his courses, but may potentially
damage their ability to establish authority in other classrooms and in the
academic world at large. Elbow's efforts have no value if they are not coupled
with a fight against the patriarchy of the scholarly writing and the academy
itself.
In
order to break down Kirsch's so-called "language of patriarchy" and fight
against male dominance in the academy, Bronwyn Davies of James Cook University
in North Queensland, Australia, suggests that we consider the very nature of
language itself. In her explanation, she reveals how language, which is
arbitrary and meaningless, can change over time if we let it:
We
are dependent on the language and its patterns of usage for making visible
those aspects of maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity, that have
previously been obscured or hidden. But our habits of interpretation lead us
inexorably to the conclusion that the thing named has an essential quality
captured by the name but independent of our naming. The complex task is to use
familiar language but catch ourselves falling into its traps and find ways to
deconstruct these and move beyond them. (15)
The solution that Davies
proposes demands a contradictory approach to the language of scholarly writing.
We must dissolve the masculinity of academic writing while at the same
dissolving the meaning behind "masculinity" itself. An idealist solution would
be simply to allow for the self-expression denied to educated writers by ending
the genre inequality that exists in the academy today. In a male-dominated
society and profession, however, the solution proves to be far more difficult
than that. As long as the majority of the current scholarly authorities are
males who are unable to "transcend gender as a category of difference," changes
in the presentation of academic writing cannot overrule the discrimination
faced by women (Kirsch 50). The success of women within
certain fields inherently will depend on the views of women by the members of
society who hold the highest ranks in those fields and in our society as a
whole.
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Research?: Examining Texts of Childhood."
Constructing Gender and
Difference: Critical Research
Perspectives on Early Childhood.
Ed. Barbara Kamler. Cresskill, NJ:
Hampton Press, 1999. 13-31.
Desmet, Christy. "Equivalent Students, Equitable
Classrooms." Feminism and Composition Studies. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA of America, 1998. 153-171.
Kirsch, Gesa E. Women
Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ.
Press, 1993.
Malinowitz, Harritet. "A Feminist Critique of Writing in the
Disciplines." Feminism and Composition
Studies. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt
and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA of America, 1998. 291-312.
Schmidt, Jan
Zlotnik. "The Story of a Woman
Writing/Teaching." Women/Writing/Teaching.
Ed. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt.
Albany: State Univ. of New
York Press, 1998. 61-73.
Zhang, Yin. "Scholarly
use of internet-based electronic resources." Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.
52.8. 11 Apr. 2001. 628-654. 24 May 2008. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/79001963/PDFSTART.