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Making a case for equity initiatives Travelling towards a mirage? gender, leadership and higher education by Tanya Fitzgerald & Jane Wilkinson ISBN 9781921214684 Post Pressed, Mt. Gravatt, Australia, 2010. Review by Patricia Kerslake Reading this book reminded me of Salman Rushdie’s words upon reading Kipling, who had, said Rushdie, ‘the power simultaneously to infuriate and to entrance’ (Imaginary Homelands, p. 74).Tanya Fitzgerald and Jane Wilkinson offer a feminist reading of the current status of academic women in Australian and New Zealand universities: a view sufficiently grim to require little additional framing or politicising. It is at times the overegging of the cake that occasionally weakens, rather than enhances, this text, as the authors’ case is made perfectly well without necessary recourse to a feminist paradigm, or peripheral references. As a literary work, this text is parched and frequently over-argued. As a denunciation of the increasingly unbalanced equity of women in the academy, in academic research and in higher education management, it is unforgiving and relentless. The authors make no bones about their stance, and, for the entire 142 pages, return repeatedly to a profoundly pro-equity perspective, while taking the ‘enduring myth of equity’ (p. 9), and beating it to a bloody pulp. The narrative takes the form of an analogous geographical peregrination, with headings such as ‘Mapping the Terrain’ and ‘Charting the Territory’, although these headings are more for textual convenience than genuine indicators of content. Their argument is manifest and confronting. Fitzgerald and Wilkinson have undertaken a methodical review and analysis of the current state of academic staffing and management within Australian and New Zealand universities, and asked some obvious, yet critical questions. It is not their exposé of anomalies in higher education senior appointments that is so provoking, but rather, the fact that their subsequent concerns remain unresolved. A quick look at the variance between female vs. male staff ratios at higher levels in any antipodean university vol. 53, no. 2, 2011
makes it clear there is a potential problem, but how big a problem? Have women made any progress whatsoever into the male-dominated ‘bastion’ of higher education since the 1970s? That this question is still legitimate today is both suggestive and alarming. The text’s primary argument is that all professions and professional workers are ‘deeply gendered’ (p. 9), and that the authors wish only to ‘provoke the reader to think critically about the gendered nature of the academy’ (p. 11). This wish is successful, although the very force of the feminist mandate employed constructing such provocation produces almost an opposing effect: why so vehement? The answer becomes clear as one progresses through the chapters: a sharply defined and barely-capped anger and frustration at continuing gender iniquity is writ large upon each indictment. It is almost impossible to imagine this text written about the inequity of male rank and status with the academy, and, were it so, one can hear the political landslides from here. If men would find the situation intolerable, then why do women accept it? The text suggests that a view taken through three theoretical lenses may offer some insight: women in educational leadership; education policy analysis, and higher education itself. Fitzgerald and Wilkinson point to each element of their analysis to show how women in academia have been ‘corralled’ and ‘contained’ (p. 20), through the implementation of the new managerialism of tertiary education, where emphasis is focused on the educational marketplace and on ‘new regimes of accountability’ (p. 26). But what is wrong with an increased accountability or more pervasive management of the academy? ‘Power,’ say the authors, ‘has been redistributed upwards and this has produced a division of labour between academics and managers’ (p. 27), which, in Making a case for equity initiatives, Review by Patricia Kerslake
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