Gender equity as ‘boundary object’: …or the same old sex and power in geography all over again?

Abstract

In her 1990 analysis of the gendered character of United Kingdom Geography departments, Linda McDowell argued that Geography was a bastion of male power in academia (McDowell 1990). More than a decade later, much the same can be said of Canadian Geography (also see Rose et al. 1996). In this paper, I examine issues relating to the gendered character of Canadian Geography. I argue that geography should be seen as a gendered space, and that within such a space gender equity policies can be seen as `boundary objects' that mediate the tensions between conservatives who oppose equity programs and more progressive Geographers who support them. A key problem with equity programs arises in relation to the question of `merit' and the way that it is constructed in masculinist terms that marginalise women geographers. Gender Equity in Canadian Universities, The Social Sciences, and Geography Canadian universities have committed themselves to employment equity under the Employment Equity Act, but these institutions have not been particularly successful when it comes to employing female faculty. Between 1986 and 1998, the period during which the Employment Equity Act has been in force, the proportion of university faculty who are women rose less than 10 percent, from 16.8 percent to 26.2 percent (Table 1). Women are also significantly under-represented in the higher ranks of the professoriate (Table 1). Much of the recent increase in the proportion of faculty that are women occurred because of a decrease in the absolute number of male faculty, not because of any significant increase in the number of women being hired. In fact, the numbers of women faculty have risen almost imperceptibly since 1995. The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (1999, 43) warns that the (already slow) progress in gender equity in the universities is now `threatened'. Similar to the universities as a whole, women faculty comprised just 26.7 percent of Social Science faculty members in Canada (Table 2). If the Social Sciences are compared to other academic fields in the university system, however, the gender equity picture is even less bright. Indeed, Social Sciences rank in the lower half of the eight academic fields defined by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (Table 3). Gender equity programmes have been even less successful in Geography than they have across the University and the Social Sciences. Women faculty drop from about 26 percent for the Social Sciences and the university as a whole to 16.2 percent for Geography departments (Table 4). Across the Canadian university system, there were a little more than six times the number of male full professors (35.6%) as female (5.6%) in 1998. In Geography, however, there were almost nineteen times as many male full professors (44.6%) as female (2.4%) in 1999. Geography thus has one of the worst gender equity records in Canadian universities. The Gendered Character of (Canadian) Geography How are we to read these data on the participation of women in the labour force in Canadian academic Geography? Some analysts have suggested that the problem of unequal gender representation in academe is merely a result of women choosing not to pursue an academic career (see the review of such literature in Winkler 2000, 738-742), or more insidiously, that women lack the `academic qualities' that men possess. Writing about the British context, for example, A. H. Halsey (1990) claims that women make up a higher proportion of `non-producers' and a lower proportion of `high producers' in the academy. These are familiar arguments in the debate over gender equity in academe; they are often deployed in taken-for-granted ways by both men and women in ways that justify not hiring women, or deny them tenure and promotion. In contrast to some of these `common sense' perspectives, there is a significant literature that suggests that we should understand academe as an exclusionary space of white, bourgeois masculinity (McDowell 1990; Rose 1993; Berg 1994, 2001; Seidler 1994; Rose et al. …