Event Details

Associate Professor Emily Gray, RMIT University, Australia Professor Mindy Blaise, Edith Cowan University, Australia Associate Professor Jackie Ullman, Western Sydney University, Australia Online Seminar

This paper reports findings from an Australian Research Council funded project, which is situated in the context of the negative impact of gender-based discrimination upon the higher education sector in Australia and internationally. Although sexual harassment and overt discriminatory practices receive a great deal of attention within university policy and staff training, this research also shows that significant career damage occurs through an accumulation of ‘everyday sexisms’. While much has been made of the individual-level, issues which impede women’s progress, an institutional-level examination reveals that systemic, institutionalized gender-based discriminatory practices serve as academic career roadblocks. Such practices are evidenced by a gender gap in grant successes, peer review, and citational processes which undermine and stymie women’s advancement. At the level of the individual workplace, Australian women academics report the highest levels of harassment or bullying (35%) with the majority choosing not to report these incidents for fear of ‘making things worse’.

While the full project consisted of four phases of data collection, this paper reports findings from a survey of Australian academics at 12 public universities. It focuses on 3 key findings. First, women and people with minoritised identities who work in STEM disciplines are more likely to experience everyday sexisms as part of their working lives. Second, the culture wars that shape public discourse within and outside of social media are playing out in significant ways within universities. Third, people with intersectional differences experience multiple micro-aggressions related to their identities, e.g. sexisms and racisms. Results highlight both how everyday sexisms are understood within the contemporary university as well as how they are refuted, devalued and how the very concept of everyday sexisms is railed against by academic employees at Australian universities.