Highlights from last week’s equality and diversity news: US college withdraws appointment offer after female academic negotiates pay, does research assessment discriminate against female academics, research councils may tie funding to diversity accreditation and black scholars claim racism is still alive on campuses.
Last week, news emerged that a New York college withdrew its offer of appointment to a female academic after she tried to negotiate her pay among other things. This has raised a debate over the push for women to demand higher salaries and promotions to climb the career ladder – an individualistic approach that places responsibility on individual women to make it to the top, often without considering the systemic barriers in place.
It’s also raised the issue of assertive women being stereotypically seen as bossy, not collegial or too demanding whereas assertive men are seen as having leadership qualities, knowing what they want etc. Speaking of which, Sheryl Sandberg (Yahoo! CEO and founder of Lean In, an organisation that aims to empower women to achieve their ambitions) has launched the Ban Bossy campaign to raise awareness of how damaging it is to characterise female leadership as ‘unwomanly’.
Barbara Graziosi, professor at Durham University, has written about potential sex discrimination in research assessment. While the data has not yet been published, it appears that the proportion of women submitted to the REF was lower than the proportion of women working at Durham University. All institutions are expected to impact assess REF submissions to identify any disproportionate impact on a certain group. However, as Graziosi writes, “After the RAE in 2008, the Equality Challenge Unit examined 32 institutions and their equality impact assessments. Only 22 provided evidence of having undertaken an equality impact assessment; moreover, “save for a few notable exceptions, the quality of the EIAs provided was poor”. ” Interestingly, this week news emerged that research councils may tie funding to diversity accreditation.
Finally, at the UCL talk ‘Why isn’t my professor black?’, a number of black scholars claimed that racism may explain the startlingly low numbers of black professors (only 85 out of 18,500 professors in the UK). William Ackah, lecturer in community and voluntary sector studies at Birkbeck, University of London, said, “Society has grown comfortable with black people in sport or music, [but] it has a problem with black people leading in public life and academia…”
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