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Doing Academia Differently: CAUT Biennial Women’s Conference
Ottawa, February 22-24, 2007
By Kym Bird, School of Arts and Letters, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies.
27 Feb 07 - This was the first CAUT women’s conference I attended and it was, indeed, a fascinating reunion of women, many of whom had been involved in women’s activism and the fight for women’s rights since the 1980s. There were even a couple of women who marked their work for women back to the 1969 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. As this was the first such conference since 2002, with a promise to hold bi-annual conferences in perpetuity, there was a great sense of having reignited the struggle in the face of significant Tory take-backs in funding related to women’s issues. It is not insignificant that York University was held up on at least two occasions as a model in the struggle for fair policies respecting women and the recent work of Penni Stewart et al. was several times commended and referred to in the discussions of the speakers.
The conference focused upon two important and contradictory issues faced by academic women: work-life balance and activism. It also examined women’s wages. As is not surprising, most women seemed to achieve little balance between their work, on the one hand, and their personal lives on the other, although some spoke of strategies for attempting to do so. The call from the panelists for us to be, among other things, “full -time amazons” and “weekend warriors,” in the fight to re-establish women’s programs, services and rights, all the while still being paid significantly less than our male counterparts, seemed to fly in the face of the first goal.
Highlights
Work-Life Balance: Lesley Burke, Staff Representative, FPSE British Columbia. Burke spoke of what has become a common theme these days, the move toward hiring more contract faculty in the universities. Women, she said, represent 60% of casual or contingent faculty. She focused upon the effects of cell phones, email, and similar technologies that make it more and more difficult to disengage from work. Email redefines student contact hours and conveys the message that work is more important than family. The average worker today spends much less time with their families than they did 30 years ago. Programs and standards, she insisted, can be initiated: legislation and programs adopted in Northern Europe can be used as examples. We need protections to insure shorter and more flexible work days, weeks, and years; we need stronger standards for family vacations, holidays, parental leave and long-time care leave. We need a national childcare program with high quality professional childcare in every province; we need a homecare program to help care for aging parents. The money for this could come from the 45 billion in Employment Insurance surpluses. We need to strengthen employment security language and use collective bargaining to address these issues. What is required is a collective response.
Speaker 2 Linda Hawkin, Executive Director, Centre for Families, Work and Well-being (Guelph). Hawkin elaborated what she called common stories we tell in terms of work interference with family and family interference with work. The first comes from women graduate students who lament that they would like an academic career but they would also like a family. The second is a story told by women faculty who talk about taking leaves but are forced to return to the university during their leaves because they have to look after their labs, fill out grants, and attend to students. A third story is told by women faculty who are unable to look after family in times of need because they can’t leave their students. How, Hawkin asks, do we get access to our rights? Work-life balance, she insists, is a noun not a verb. She went on to talk about four related aspects of these rights. 1) Work/life balance. There has been a lot of research over three decades on work and family, job segregation, lack of pay equity, double and triple burdens, and child care. Women suffer a combination of gendered expectations at work and home. We know the importance of making women’s care work important and visible. We also need to look at men’s care work if we want to change the condition in women’s lives. 2) Work/family conflict: work interferes with family and family interferes with work. These roles are permeable. There is time-based interference and strain-based interference, the latter of which occurs when a person is thinking about one thing, like work, while performing a domestic duty, like playing with children. The flexible work schedule of an academic woman is the best and worst of situations. Children of such parents express the desire for their parents to be present when they are with them. Academic women have perceived control over resources – they have control, for example, over when they do email – but it is a constant factory and therefore their control is only a perceived benefit. We need social support in terms of networks, like family friends, that are buffers against work. We need co-worker support and managerial support, where managers are gatekeepers for workers against encroaching administrative policies. We need supportive spouses and those who can help us build networks of care.
Wage Equity: Speaker One: Rosemary Morgan, Legal Counsel, CAUT.
In general, Morgan argued that most pay equity is not proactive enough. There is little surveillance of policies and few penalties when employers do not adhere to them. Pro-active legislation does not remedy past wage losses. There are no remedies to lost contributions to pensions and a continuing deference to the hegemonic view that wages will correct themselves in the free market. Women, grateful as we are, accept jobs with less pay. Today, there is no employment equity branch at the Employment Equity Commission. We need to expand pro-equity legislation for new groups. Every collective agreement should have a clause that says one cannot be discriminated against in terms of gender. We need to do periodic analyses inside the university; get expert help to undertake a pay equity study in terms of sex and other groups; get help doing a regression analysis. Institutions need to identify wage practices and train people to understand how culture effects wage practices. Arbitrators have the power to uphold human rights practices. One problem is that they are timid to employ strenuous remedies because they are paid by both sides and want to be hired by both sides in the future. Many universities have done different pay equity studies and York’s pay equity studies were held up as examples.
Michael Piva, Assistant Executive Director, CAUT. Sometimes equity fund fixes do not continue to solve wage equity funds. Piva cited York up as an example of a university that used an anomalies fund approach. Such an approach corrects past injustices but does not do anything to correct the problem. The engine that creates inequality is still running. He then discussed the problem of salary systems that continue to generate problems. A job has a value. In a grid system, it is important to know what the band width is between the floor and ceiling. How long should it take to learn a job or get to the ceiling? There is a consensus that for a white collar worker the starting salary should be 10 percent below the job rate and the job rate should be 10 percent below the premium rate. In universities, ceilings are often two times the floor. Starting salaries are arbitrary and up to deans. Merit pay is also often up to deans. Merit pay committees employ dubious processes, are not transparent, are not monitored, and their decisions are often arbitrary. Add to this market differentials. Often, none of these processes are monitored. Salaries increase with time and experience but beyond this there is no pattern. This system discriminates in terms of gender: the entry age for women is older than men; the arts, where a great many women teach, are paid less. It discriminates in favour of longevity as it transfers all money to the last five years of one’s career and assumes one enters the system around 30. If you don’t enter the academy when you are 34 or 5 you will never get the pay off and the hit to your pension plan is devastating. This is the biggest source of gender inequality in the university. Women’s scholarship is also undervalued and this has real impacts. This undervaluing occurs in initial hiring decisions: women don’t get bonuses at beginning and their past experiences are not valued in the same way that men’s are valued. A $1000 gap in starting salary is worth $280,000 in one’s career over all. If we narrow band width in universities that employ a grid system and reduce the number of steps from floor to ceiling, we can minimize the damage done to salaries and will produce a positive benefit greater than correcting the gender problem.
Day Two: Activism in the Academy:
Glenis Joyce, University of Saskatchewan
Our core values are being imported from the business world. “It is as if the neo-liberal economic discourses and neo-liberal conservative ideologies that work together in the current market-driven climate have given new life to the ‘old’ sexist, racist, classist and heterosexist practices, reinscribing what counts as knowledge, framing research and research practices, and legitimating structures of inequality.” We are now doing our activist work in a neo-liberal climate. Sexual assaults on campuses are receiving a luke warm response by the administration. Our classes are not full, they are overflowing. Canada Research Chairs are only 22.2 % women. Much of what we want to change involves conversation and negotiation. From a feminist policy analysis framework we need to ask questions like, what affective changes has the university made for women’s acceptance?
We need to ask how is power exercised. Who is controlling the agenda? Quoting S. Lukes, Joyce asks, “is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, their cognition, their preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things either because they see or imagine no alternative to it or they see it as so natural and unchangeable and they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial?” We need to take some individual action, like the action taken by Louise Forsyth et al respecting women’s lack of representation among Canada Research Chairs. Do not donate to your universities; stop sitting on a myriad of committees that are supposed to be doing equity but instead are simply making it look like the university is doing equity.
Cindy Oliver – member at large CAUT Executive; President FPSE BVC
Women make much less than men. They are under represented in all jobs at the upper levels. The salary of full professors is $6,000 less than their male counterparts. Women still experience systemic discrimination. Oliver spoke of the British Columbia salary situation in which there are eleven steps in the salary grid. The bottom two are effectively lopped off. Largely, people now start at the top two steps of the salary grid. 73% of our membership will earn 85,000 by 2009. This is the top of the salary scale. Discipline does not determine pay (pay is not differential). Gender bias is neutralized in this system. This helps build solidarity between men and women. We also have won pension buy-backs: members can buy back years of pensionable service they have lost (when unable to contribute to pension plans) at a discounted rate. B.C. now has several private post-secondary institutions and organizing efforts are being targeted to help try to insure that professors at private institutions work under the same conditions and protection that professors at public institutions enjoy.
Other Reports from this Conference:
Joan Allen
Eve Haque
Didi
Khayatt