The Positioning and Making of Female Professors by Rowena Murray & Denise Mifsud

Author:Rowena Murray & Denise Mifsud
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030261870
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Leaving the Ivory Tower

Conceptions from the last century viewed the higher education enterprise as distant from society, as focused on the pursuit of new knowledge through pure research and admitting some students to study to regenerate the academy and sustain it, and to populate some key professions. Contemporary notions of (UK) higher education as a public good, where applied research benefits society and it is valued and understood by the public, and where many, diverse graduates leave with employability skills to take on well-paid roles in a service economy has been a revolution that has taken place in less than a lifetime—in mine. I studied as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s when fewer than 5% of 18–21 year olds went to university: we were considered elite although times were starting to change. Later, when I was working in a university following my postgraduate studies, the changes to higher education were happening with more speed. In 1995, I was pregnant and had a child. I was on a two year fixed-term post-doctoral research contract for a national funding body and working in a research-intensive university science department in the UK. I was, by virtue of serendipity, the first researcher in the country, supported by that research council, to be eligible for maternity leave . This was owing to a recent change in the law, the number of months I had already worked on the contract and those that would remain after the birth. It was a stark reminder of the fate of many who had gone before me and had had no such support and it shocked me. It perhaps helped explain why only two of the academics I had met during my own studies were women: I had studied in the UK at research-intensive universities as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate researcher in the 1980s and 1990s. I was lucky, pregnant in the right window of my funded project and a funding body that was an early adopter of the new law. In fact, I was told proudly that I was the first woman to receive maternity leave from them.

I believed that starting a family as a woman and undertaking research were not easily compatible because it was commonly expected that as an early career researcher you needed to undertake one or two fixed-term research contracts, ideally in different research groups, before applying for a permanent (tenure-track) academic role. When I went back to work a few months after the birth of my child I returned as a part-time worker on a precariously short, fixed-term contract with a very new sense of the responsibility I now carried to provide for a new life. It wasn’t long before I started looking for jobs but deep inside, I felt that I hadn’t ‘done my time’ to get a job in the research-intensive university sector I was familiar with so I cast the net wider and applied for a role at a university college – a part of higher education I knew very little about.

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