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Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Constance Backhouse
Women, Work and the Academy:
Strategies for Responding to Post-Civil Rights Era Gender Discrimination:
Research and Intervention Strategies
Constance Backhouse, Professor of Law, University of Ottawa
I have participated in, observed, researched, and published about
gender discrimination in Canadian universities for more than two
decades. Perhaps it was an inevitable offshoot of the first book I
wrote with Leah Cohen in 1979, The Secret Oppression: Sexual
Harassment of Working Women.[1]
That was also the year I was
appointed to a tenure-stream position in a very conservative and
male-dominated faculty of law at the University of Western Ontario
in London,Ontario. My notoriety for having co-authored the first
Canadian book on what was then viewed as a controversial new topic,
along with my interest in feminism and law, contributed to the
creation of a very chilly climate within my own workplace. I can
claim without hesitation that my experience at Western would provide
an experiential base of knowledge about hostile and sexist treatment
to rival many.
During the 1980s, law schools in Canada became contested sites of
struggle, in which small groups of feminist law professors banded
together to demand that previously patriarchal teaching and research
environments make way for woman-focused agendas. The fall-out,
often designated as the "gender wars," dislocated faculty and
student relationships, wreaked havoc with the careers of some and
the reputations of others, spawned several legal actions, and
occasionally caught the attention of the mainstream media.[2] Women
law professors in Ontario maintained feminist community throughout
most of this decade by holding twice-yearly retreats throughout the
province, where support could be solicited, strategies vetted, and
comradeship cemented.[3] We created "women and law" courses as
beachheads in the otherwise male-stream curricula. We supported
"women and the law associations" for feminist law students. We
created national feminist legal institutions such as LEAF and NAWL. [4]
Our very own Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, which
became the first law journal in Canada to pro-actively seek
feminist, lesbian-positive, and anti-racist articles, published its
first volume in 1985.
Although I was thoroughly implicated in all of this feminist law
school organizing, I also turned my attention outside of the faculty
to the wider university. Like its law school, the Western
University had a reputation for conservatism, but there were a
number of committed, politically engaged feminist faculty members
scattered throughout the campus. In an odd way, I think that the
unsupportive environment at Western generally gave rise to a
cohesive, determined, deeply-rooted community of resistance. In
1980, we set up Western's Caucus on Women's Issues, to serve as a
voice for feminist demands. The Caucus initiated various campaigns
calling for affirmative action in faculty appointments, the
introduction of women's studies curriculum, and campus safety. Its
members also hosted hilariously funny dinners, at which we parodied
our enemies and laughed until we wept. We publicly awarded annual
medals, named after famous women from Canadian history, to the women
who distinguished our community with their acts of bravery, the ones
who had "taken the most cannon fodder" in the previous year. We
gained strength through feminist reading groups. We created the
feminist institution known as the "Wednesday lunch." We wrote
university briefs, petitioned academic administrators, and wrote
countless outraged letters to the university media.
In 1986, as chair of the Caucus's affirmative action committee, I
was dismayed to discover that our university had nominated itself
for a provincial employment equity award, and what was worse,
received it! I resolved to do some research into the status of
women at Western to balance the record of the ensuing flattering
publicity. In 1988 I released what has come to be known as "the
Backhouse Report," examining the highly discriminatory history of
women faculty at Western, and making a number of radical proposals
for change.[5] Shortly thereafter, three feminist faculty
colleagues, Roma Harris, Gillian Michell, and Alison Wylie, joined
with me to conduct a series of interviews with other faculty women.
In 1989, our group report, which came to be known as the "Chilly
Climate Report," documented the multiple "environmental factors"
that continue to impact negatively on women's working environment
across the university.[6] The ensuing media attention, and the
viciously antagonistic response from Western's central
administrators, created a furor that refused to die down for months
and turned the report into a major cause celebre. In the end, the
detrimental fall-out from the report also inspired more positive
actions. Under Alison Wylie's leadership, a group of Western
feminist joined together to create "The Chilly Collective" which
published a full-length book detailing this history: Breaking
Anonymity: The Chilly Climate for Women Faculty.[7] The Caucus
obtained government funding to produce a video titled "The Chilly
Climate for Women in Colleges and Universities," which has been
distributed across North America, and continues to be used in
classrooms and workshops even to this day.[8] A decade later, the
York Stories Collective at York University in Toronto, cited our
work at Western as one of the points of inspiration for their own
volume, York Stories: Women in Higher Education, which
brilliantly expanded the documentation of discrimination to include
race, gender, class, disability, age, sexual identity, and
antisemitism.[9] It was with the greatest of pride that I
represented the Western collective at the incredibly successful York
book launch, and it reminded me again of the contagiousness of
women's courage.[10]
In 2000, I left Western for an appointment to the faculty of law,
University of Ottawa. The university has a much more progressive
reputation than Western, and its law school has been administered by
feminists and pro-feminists for more than a decade. Not
coincidentally, Ottawa's law school emerged from its gender wars
with the highest ratio of female law professors and female law
students in the country. Since my appointment, I have felt freer to
teach more social justice material than ever before. I have also
personally been the recipient of a series of awards and honours from
the university that would have been unfathomable for a feminist at
Western. The environment, while by no means completely expunged of
discrimination, represents a sea-change from the chilly climate of
my first two decades. And as I look around, I notice that there are
other faculties and universities that can also claim to have made
substantial movement. A number of Canadian universities now have at
least some female (and feminist) chairs, deans, provosts and even
presidents. Many of us now hold positions of relative power in the
academy.
And yet, looking more carefully, it seems to me that we are still
far from achieving what we sought at the outset. Our universities
have remained stubbornly male-centered in their core curricula,
pedagogy, and administrative processes. Our female students
complain of much of the same sorts of discrimination and harassment
that we faced as students. Our expanding knowledge about the
dangers of treating gender as an essential attribute, and the
importance of incorporating the intersectionality of race,
disability, class, and sexual identity, has not translated into
anything like a full inclusion of more diverse faculty and students
in the academy. What change we have wrought remains at the margins.
Worse, we seem stalled on a plateau, even in the most hospitable
institutions, with lagging spirits and lowered horizons.
What accounts for this? One might speculate about several
possibilities. We have lost some of our most impressive feminist
faculty to tenure-battles, voluntary resignations, early retirements
and illnesses. Reflecting the women's movement more generally, we
have not managed fully to renew our ranks from incoming younger
generations. Some of us in positions of relative power have been
forced by institutional, faculty, and student pressures to
compromise. At times, it is less a problem of external pressures,
and more of internal self-censorship. Many of us have laboured so
long in chilly environments that we have developed what might be
characterized as a "trench mentality." We can't stop thinking of
ourselves as speaking from the perspective of the powerless, as
perennial victims. We have difficulty recognizing how much power we
actually now hold, and we neglect to exercise the options that are
available. Some of us would describe ourselves as "burned out,"
while others, who seem to be working longer hours than ever before,
would frankly admit that it is not radical feminist activism that
engages the bulk of our time. To the extent that we are engaged
with feminism, our projects are diffuse and our energies dispersed.
If there is a unifying theme within feminism in these recent years,
it appears to be critique. We complain that feminist authors do not
grasp the issues properly, we fault the process and results of
feminist research, we disagree with how conferences and workshops
are organized, we dismember feminist organizations, we critique
feminist leaders and their strategies. In addition to all of these
problems, we face a cultural context of increasingly conservative
politics, educational under-funding, corporatization of the academy,
and the pressures of globalization.
Given all of this, what are the prospects for moving beyond the
plateau? I think workshops such as these are a great place to
start. I would offer the following plan as a possible departure
point for engaged discussion:
- the convening of a series of small-group regional
workshops.
Essentially, we need to know who is out there - the
still-militant, those whose spirits are sagging but who are still
prepared to commit, and the new-comers. The objective would be to
identify, and bring together, faculty members who have expertise in
feminism, critical race, disability, class, and gay and lesbian
issues - and an interest in the transformation of the academy. The
workshops should be designed to allow participants to share and
evaluate their experiences, and think creatively about the next
stage.
- the creation of informal networks.
The objective would be to keep the participants from these workshops
in communication with each other, and with the participants from
other workshops, to share information and collaborate on strategies.
Although I would not recommend the creation of formal associations
or institutions, or the expenditure of substantial resources on
this.
- the development of a clear focus.
This is an attempt to get beyond the diffusion problem. Although I
suspect this will be a contentious idea, I think we need to narrow
our goals into one or two manageable projects at a time. I would
suggest that potential projects be judged on their creativity as
well as their feasibility and the potential for maximizing change.
I would also recommend that we select projects that are fun.
- the consolidation of forces.
The objective would be to pool our strengths and resources. Once
the specific projects have been identified, we need to identify who
needs to be involved, what needs to be done, and what sort of
timetable would work. We need to marshal our talents, energy, and
relative power and privilege towards a focussed implementation.
- evaluation.
We need a mechanism for the periodic review of the projects,
strategies, and outcomes. We need to be able to identify when
projects succeed, when they fail, and when they need to be
redesigned mid-stream.
We also need to begin thinking about an entirely new chapter in
the saga of the integration of women into the academy. In some
pockets, we have now successfully recruited and retained 50% women
faculty. (We have been far less successful in the recruitment and
retention of visible minorities, faculty with disabilities, and out
gays and lesbians. All of these areas require substantial
improvement.) But where we have achieved equitable distributions,
what should be our next objective? Is it sufficient to achieve the
number balance alone? Or does that merely benefit the few women
faculty who have achieved these prestigious positions, without
altering the academic landscape more systematically?
One way of describing the options is to compare
accommodation to transformation. Under the first
model, the achievement of balanced faculty distributions is the
final objective. The new faculty are required to accommodate
themselves to the institution, and to succeed within the
traditionally defined horizons. The second model would suggest that
the equitable faculty numbers are simply the first step. The second
model would require another stage as well: a deep-rooted
transformation of the academy in more fundamental ways to take
account of the distinctions of gender, race, disability, class, and
sexual identity.
The transformation model would require us to reexamine every
aspect of academic life: student body, faculty, alumni. We would
need to work towards the composition of student bodies that
reflected the population at large. We would need to recruit faculty
who represent novel and unconventional backgrounds and talents. We
would want to rethink how we define "the best" in faculty careers,
so that we support and value a much wider array of characteristics
and outputs. We would seek to assist our university graduates to
find meaningful careers that advanced social justice interests, and
to keep them integrally involved in the university.
The transformation model would also require us to reexamine our
curriculum, our pedagogical methods, and our processes of
evaluation. We would need to rethink our disciplinary divisions,
our course offerings, and our student programming to respond more
fully to the critique of patriarchy, racism, homophobia, disability
privilege, and class bias. We would want to reexamine our
educational methods, to ensure greater variety, and more sensitivity
to equality concerns. We would need to reevaluate our grading
processes to ensure that they were less wedded to narrow
hierarchical models, and more fully capable of assessing the range
of talents our students bring to their university education.
The vistas for change that might be contained within a truly
transformational model of university education are daunting and
challenging. Although all universities have begun to move in some
of these directions already, few have made holistic revisions in
ways that are both truly futuristic and deeply visionary. But I
would argue that without such objectives, the campaigns we are
waging to recruit and retain more diversified faculties will
constitute only half-remedies, and fail to produce the truly
egalitarian universities that we hope to create.
Endnotes
1. (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1979). Although initially a
Canadian publication, the book was later revised and republished in the
United States as Sexual Harassment on the Job (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981). [Return to text]
2. Many would date the commencement of the "gender wars" to 1986,
when the "McIntyre Memo" was leaked to the press. This was an internal
faculty memo detailing the discriminatory treatment received by a junior
feminist law professor, Sheila McIntyre, at Queen's law school in
Kingston, Ontario. It was subsequently circulated widely, and published
in various national journals. In Toronto in 1987, York University
chose an external male candidate for the position of dean at Osgoode
Hall law school, over the internal female candidate. More than one
hundred female law professors, lawyers, and law students filed a
complaint of sex discrimination with the Ontario Human Rights Commission
regarding the failure to appoint Professor Mary Jane Mossman. In 1989,
Associate Dean Craig Brown at the faculty of law, University of Western
Ontario, circulated a memo to the faculty on hiring policy that was
supportive of two feminist colleagues who were seeking permanent
appointments. The next day he was quoted in the local newspaper
acknowledging and criticizing sexism within the law school. Two days
later he was fired unceremoniously from his position as associate dean
and removed from the appointments committee by the dean. He brought
suit for wrongful dismissal, and the battle was followed fully by the
media. The positions of the two Western feminist colleagues, Diana
Majury and Cheryl Waldrum, were not renewed. For more details of the
gender wars in Ontario law schools, see Bruce Feldthusen "The Gender
Wars: 'Where the Boys Are'" in The Chilly Collective eds. Breaking
Anonymity: The Chilly Climate for Women Faculty (Waterloo: Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 1995) 279-313. [Return to text]
3. The retreats, which attracted between 25 and 35 participants
(occasionally including a few women from outside of Ontario) were housed
initially at various law schools with billeting provided by the home
faculty feminists. When they grew too large for this, we moved the
venue to small country resorts. The first retreat was held in 1989.
The last formally organized retreat took place in 1997. A small number
of the participants continued to meet informally for several years after
this, and the concept was reactivated in 2002, when a large retreat took
place once more. [Return to text]
4. The acronyms stand for the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund
(LEAF) - see Sherene Razack Canadian Feminism & the Law: The Women's LEAF & the
Pursuit of Equality (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1991) - and the
National Association of Women and the Law. [Return to text]
5. The report was widely circulated on campus, the subject of
extensive attention in the mainstream media, and the subject of several
large meetings convened by Western's Caucus on Women's Issues. The
editors at the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law made the
courageous decision to publish the report, although it did not really
fit with the journal's mandate, and it appeared in volume 4 (1990)
36-65, thus allowing me to claim that it constituted "academic research"
and should be protected under the mantle of academic freedom. It was
republished as chapter 3, in The Chilly Collective eds. Breaking
Anonymity 61-95. [Return to text]
6. This was also later published as chapter 4 in The Chilly
Collective eds. Breaking Anonymity 97-132. [Return to text]
7. Ibid. Initial explorations into publishing at the University of
Toronto Press came to naught, but Sandra Woolfrey, the director of
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, courageously spear-headed the
publication of these and other essays in the book, despite serious
concerns of defamation lawsuits. [Return to text]
8. The video was produced by Kem Murch Productions, London, Ontario;
funded by the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities and the
Ontario Women's Directorate; and distributed by the Department of Equity
Services, 295 Stevenson Lawson Building, University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B8. [Return to text]
9. The York Stories Collective eds. York Stories: Women in Higher
Education (Toronto: TSAR, 2000.) [Return to text]
10. The speech I delivered on the occasion of the book launch has
been published as "Reflections on Feminist Activism Within Two Distinct
Universities: Timing and Location for Transformational Activities"
Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation Sur la Recherche
Feministe 29:1/2 (2002) 117-24. [Return to text]
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