University Place

>> Welcome to the last on our series for the semester of our distinguished faculty lecture series here in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. My name is Janet Hyde and I'm the director for the Center for Research on Gender and Women which is the research arm of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. I am delighted to introduce our speaker today, Professor Myra Marx Ferree, who is the Alice Cook Professor of Sociology here at the University of Wisconsin and has also served many years as the director of the Center for German and European Studies. Myra earned her Bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College in political science, actually. I didn't know that until I read it. And then earned her PhD in social psychology in the program-- in the social psychology program of the Department of Psychology and Social Relations at Harvard. She was also, before coming here, she was at the University of Connecticut where she was director of their women's studies program. Myra has published numerous books. I'm not gonna tell you about all of them because I think you'd rather hear her than hear my long list but I wanna call to your attention some of her most recent ones. In 2014,

the book Gender

Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, which was co-authored by former graduate student Lisa Wade and published by Norton. That's a textbook, too, right? For undergraduate courses. In 2013, the book Gender, Violence,

and Human Security

Critical Feminist Perspectives, which was co-edited with Aili Tripp and Christina Ewig, also of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. And then in 2012,

Varieties of Feminism

German Gender Politics in Global Context, which was published by Stanford University Press and won a bunch of awards. I also want to mention one article by Myra because it's my favorite one. I've used it in my own work.

The title of that article is

"Practicing Intersectionality in

Sociological Research

A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities", which was published in "Sociological Theory" in 2010 and won an award from the section on race, class, and gender of the American Sociological Association. Without further ado, let me introduce Dr. Myra Marx Ferree, who will speak-- be speaking today about gender equality in the age of academic capitalism. Myra. >> Thank you.

applause

Sociological Research

It's quite an honor to be in this list, you have to understand. I mean, I've come to the previous three distinguished talks and they were really excellent...

laughter

Sociological Research

...and I'm like, okay, the bar is pretty high here, let's see what I can do. But I have to say it was a great idea of Janet's to invite the faculty of the department to talk. I've learned a lot and I hope I don't disappoint you. This is a talk in which I'm really going to just be laying out a few ideas about how stratification processes in universities are changing and what this has to do with gender equality. This is a book project that's still in its relatively early stages which seems odd to say since we've been slaving away at it for about three years. But it's coming along and I'm on sabbatical next year, so we're hoping that it will really come along. I'm interested particularly in understanding feminist mobilization in a university context as an institution that's undergoing a lot of stress and strain, as those of us here in Wisconsin know all too well, but I'm also interested in putting it into an international context.

low voice

Sociological Research

And, what the heck here? What am I doing here? This is not right. Here we go. My 2012 book Varieties of Feminism, was really the inspiration for this project because, in looking at the very significant differences in how gender was understood and how gender politics was done in Germany and the United States, and in particular the intersections between race and class and how race and class were mobilized differently by feminists in Germany and the US to understand what gender meant, that really got me thinking about intersectionality and, as Janet said, Hae Yeon Choo and I did this paper in which we were trying to think about level of intersectionality and we drew a lot on Kimberle Crenshaw in that, but tried to move a little beyond where she was. And she was talking about structural intersectionality and political intersectionality. Structural being sort of like where you are and political intersectionality being more what you claim. And as I have been struggling with how to think about institutions in an intersectional light I've also had the good fortune to be reading work that Keisha Lindsay, one of my colleagues, has been working on about intersectionality and helping to think about the different kinds of claims-making that are done in different sites and how these are intersectional without necessarily being progressive. So, if we think about intersectionality as Keisha does, as what she calls normatively malleable analytic framework, then we have to ask the question about who has voice and what power they have to be heard and how do you succeed? What kind of discourses have hegemonic power? So, in this talk, and in this project, I'm trying to approach the idea of intersectionality as something that happens at the level of discourse. And if you think about that-- or a metaphor that I've been thinking-- woke up this morning thinking about, I don't have a slide for it because I just woke up this morning thinking about it...

laughter

Sociological Research

...but if you think about it as different things like patriarchy and neoliberalism as being like rocks thrown into a pond, and you have a number of different ponds, Germany being one and the United States being another. And these different rocks are thrown with different velocity, they come from different angles, but what they do is they produce waves. And the physicists refer to these circles of waves when they intersect as being interference patterns and that everybody is located somewhere in these interference patterns. These intersections are not optional but they're very specific to particular sites. So,

this leads me to the question of

what is the age of academic capitalism? What's throwing rocks? What is going on here? And the main thing that I think we've all experienced in one form or another is that universities are a place where there's something being transformed and struggled over and academic capitalism is a word now much in use, borrowed from Slaughter and Leslie's book in the 1990s, that's talking about corporatization as a process that emphasizes economic growth, global education markets, the new managerial class of administrators, the profit potential that exists in universities. Now, this academic capitalism is sometimes called neoliberalism but I wanna emphasize that neoliberalism is never a term that is used by the people who are advocating it or defending it. Like patriarchy is also never used by its advocates and defenders. If you're actually arguing for patriarchy or neoliberalism it's not the term. But, nonetheless, there is what is clearly recognized as a transnational phenomenon affecting universities and it's part of a broad and, I would say, global restructuring of higher education that has multiple dimensions. One of which is what is sometimes called massification. That is to say higher education now serves more students than ever before. What used to be an elite thing is now much more available to a much larger number of students and a much more diverse range of students. And by diverse I do not mean by that just not white and middle class but I also mean in different parts of the world and bringing different kinds of experiences and different expectations into higher education. And this restructuring that is producing this particular form of neoliberalism that affects universities, and in the slide I sort of sketch out some of the aspects that you have probably directly encountered being here at the university, but it's also part of a broader global knowledge economy, where we have information being financialized. Lillian has been studying intellectual property regimes, for example, as a part of that process. Post colonial migration regimes. I wanna remind everybody, for example, that passports and student visas and things like that are only an invention of the last century. People traveled much more freely before that. But, also, transnationalism, the acceleration of physical travel and virtual communication, as ways of managing intellectual capital. And any of you who've ever used Skype know how that can be. So, what does this have to do with gender equality reform politics? Well, I'm arguing that gender equality is also a politics that is shaping universities and it is a major mobilization. And like neoliberalism it is both inside universities and transcends them. It has its particular forms of university gender politics as well as the things that go beyond it. Gender equality politics is a way of thinking both about the kinds of claims that are being made but also the political work that is being done with these kinds of contested claims. And I'm just kinda heuristically laying out three types of gender equality reform politics. The first is what I call gender representation. And that may be in the sphere of politics with things like party quotas, electoral goals, set asides of particular seats. In family or educational systems representation means the rights of women and men to have custody over their children, to have access to certain kinds of jobs, to enter certain kinds of educational institutions. And here, again, let me remind you that a lot of the gender representation that we now take for granted in educational institutions has really only been achieved since the 1970s. Gender knowledge transfer is another kind of gender equality politics that's very relevant to universities but is also relevant outside of universities. It's everything from what we do here in Gender and Women's Studies to what Europeans call gender mainstreaming projects. Advocacy-- gender equality advocacy networks, networks out of state or local level like the Wisconsin Women's Network, the gender networks, but also transnational women in science and other things or other areas. I'm a proud member of Sociologists for Women in Society which is a knowledge transfer network in sociology around feminist work. And there's a lot of popular writing about gender, too, and any of you who have been in the feminist blogosphere lately know that is a large and expanding area of gender mobilization. And the third type is what I'm calling gender transformations, and that's the actual changes of institutions. Mary Katzenstein argued that the last major wave of feminism in the early part of the 20th century was really about constructing institutions for women and a lot of that carried over into the 1970s of making women's groups, women's programs, women's things just as the late 19th and early 20th century established women's colleges and built institutions for women and networks for women. What we see now is a lot more gender equality mobilization that's about gender transformation. Reorganizing existing organizations to do more than to represent and include women but to change how they function, to change the ways that schools evaluate children, to change the kinds of ways that families operate and how the division of labor is organized, to change the way that work is supervised. So transformational work. And, of course, transformational work around gender cannot help but intersect and collide with the kinds of transformations in institutions that are happening because of neoliberalism, academic capitalism, or the knowledge economy, whichever you want to call as the causal factor here. But the transformations that come with the differences in the economy. However, I also want to argue that gender equality reform politics, however broadly we can put them into these three categories and recognize the similarities across many different contexts, we should also think about how they're very specific, in particular, in various contexts. And that's the point that I made in Varieties of Feminism looking at the German case and then bringing it into comparison with the United States and the UK and other countries in terms of thinking about what is it that's specific about Germany. In this book, what we're trying to do is to think about what is specific about both Germany and the US. Both at the level of thinking about the kinds of discursive campaigns, the national campaigns to make people think differently about gender, work differently about gender, transform institutions, gain representation. You know, what kind of gender knowledge transfer is going on? What kind of representation is being sought? What kind of institutional transformations are being looked for broadly in these different contexts, Germany and the US? And then we're trying to bore down on the specific institutions of colleges and universities, the systems of higher education, in these two countries. And the ways in which there are real struggles going on that are different in Germany and the US and even different if you look at the US or Germany between what's going on, say, in engineering and in English or between what's going on in economics and in sociology or what's going on in languages and literature and what's going on in fine arts. There really are different struggles being waged that are specific to particular places and so we need to look for how, if you will, those interference patterns of different kinds of positioning and different kinds of interests happen in very specific little ponds. And Wisconsin's one of those nice, little ponds, right? So, let me just go back to the how to think about how the university is changing. What is academic capitalism doing? What kinds of things in this system are really about academic capitalism or might be about something else? Is it just capitalism in the neoliberal, dare not speak its name, kind of terrible remaking and destruction of the university? Or are there also other changes happening that we could see perhaps in a different light, positive or negative, but different? And we're arguing that there are really two kinds of changes reshaping universities like Wisconsin or the Ruhr University Bochum where I had the privilege of spending a semester. And these different universities and within a country each different university is a different university. Wisconsin is not Yale but Wisconsin is also not MATC or Edgewood. So there really are very specific kinds of things about universities. So, what are the things that are happening? And we're arguing that there are two broad transformational processes that are going on. These are structural transformations but they're also discursive formations. They're ways of making sense about how these structures are happening and helping it to go along or holding it back. So I don't think it's useful to call everything neoliberalism, but there are feedbacks between both of these systems with each other. The first is what I'm calling modernity, or the world is flat, principle. I owe that to Nicholas Kristof's term. And that's a fairly positive view of the transformations, but it is a view that this is the post-enlightenment world, the modern era. Faith in science dominates, along with reverence for the rituals of objectivity, like quantification, and the actual technological innovations, from the steam engine to the Internet, that are actually changing what we can do and what we do. What we actually do and what we talk about it-- how we talk about it. Political liberalism is also part of this notion of the modern era. In emphasizing individual autonomy and the humanist freedoms of thought an inquiry. It is part of what has been described as the world polity in which NGOs and other forms of transnational organizations have increased their power and many of them advocate a normative stance that is gender inclusive, pro-citizenship rights, and in favor of human development. While it is transnational the modernity principle is far from equally empowering for all. And one of the important factors here is that the global north, in general, wields disproportionate power in transnational governance systems. So, for example, English. English, as the common language for both science and for transnational governance, confers special advantages on English speakers and on their national institutions. And by the fact that the English speakers get to do a lot to define the nature of the club to which others get to seek admittance, institutional responses are often directed towards conforming to the best practices of these more powerful actors. So the thing that I wanna stress here is the modernity principle is a principle not of competition but of isomorphism, a nice sociological term for how organizations tend to resemble each other through imitation, cooperation, filling the same niche in an environment tends to make them evolve to look pretty similar. Not directly through competition, though of course, not unrelated to competitive pressures. The second, of course, in addition to modernity is markets and markets are not the same thing as modernity, but they're certainly related to it. And there the principle is the winner take all and it's a certainly less sunny view of transformation. And this is what's often called neoliberalism. I dislike the term neoliberalism not only because its own defenders won't use it but because there's nothing neo about it in the United States. It's a long standing way of thinking about profit, entrepreneurship, privatization. I prefer to call the US version of the transformation that is happening market fundamentalism. And what it stands for is the kind of deregulation of capitalism to allow more winner take all competition among unequals. It emphasizes the disruptive power of capitalism, especially as it enters into academic institutions. The promoters may applaud and call this the entrepreneurial university. Or the critics may talk about the ruthlessness of privatizing profits. Like modernity, market models have internal contradictions and these are especially visible in unfree market mechanisms, such as monopolies and managerialism, which are techniques for controlling the risks that unfettered markets produce even for the powerful. Managers exercise organizational power directly, make decisions about what is to be produced and how, set up structures to define, assess, and increase productivity and to reduce costs. In many ways, what we see in the form of academic capitalism is not so much the unrestrained winner take all form of competition that we think of as being capitalism, but the managerialism of controlling productivity, reducing costs, and defining and structuring the ways in which people do their work. Managers' interests do not automatically align with those of owners or with those of workers or with those of consumers. Their work is shaped by the bureaucratic logic of growth and of measurement. And modern transnational enterprises use these modern tools to navigate market systems. In these systems productivity is frequently and quantitatively assessed and management-by-objectives is institutionalized, along with many short-term market centered metrics. Okay, that's my introduction to academic capitalism as we see it here. So, what does that have to do with gender equality movements? Our argument is that they share the principles of modernity in markets to various varying degrees but they are heterogeneous, both in their discourses and in their political demands, that there's no one global gender equality movement but a variety of movements. In their discourses there are different themes that overlap to a greater or lesser extent with the themes that are brought forward in the discourses of modernity and of markets. The modernity discourse in universities overlaps with many of the demands that are identified by political scientists with classical liberalism. That doesn't mean leftish or mildly-leftish as it does in the United States but, rather, the liberal classical view of self-governance called democracy, a bourgeois privileged elite claimed. Self-governance in the university also echoes that classical liberal idea. Liberalism talks about pluralism and the competition of ideas and the university institutionalizes that in the freedom of research and teaching. It's a classical liberal way of thinking about it. And the individualism of classical liberalism is also operationalized in university structures as a mandate for self-development. You shouldn't be just learning how to do a job; you should be learning how to be a better person. So, there are these discourses about progress and development that are part of modernity, part of classical liberalism, and part of the institutional structures of universities which feminists have long been very critical of. At the same time the discourse of markets also comes into play. The discourse of market fundamentalism, managerial standards, efficient productivity talks about not wasting human capital but developing it. Let's instrumentalize inclusion because diversity has its own rewards It increases creativity, it produces better decision making. We need true merit and real competition, not male bias, not racist standards, but ones that would be fair and inclusive. And we can see gender equality movements picking up these claims of modernity, for freedom of research and individual self-development and democracy and self-governance, as well as the claims of the market in terms of trying to identify and eradicate bias so that we could have fair and equal competition, that we can monitor progress by collecting statistics on gender inclusions, and we can apply managerial strategies of rewards and sanctions to push decision makers to make every effort to do affirmative action. These are principles for changing universities that are not separate from the principles that are actually institutionalized in the university. So, what happens at the intersection? That's our big question. And here I want to introduce you to Cassandra and Pollyanna.

laughter

this leads me to the question of

Cassandra is the one who sees this as one big threat and talks about governance feminism as maybe even a reason why we should say goodbye to feminism for a while. Cassandras, such as Janet Halley and Nancy Fraser, are so critical of capitalism and so unsympathetic to political liberalism that they think that there's nothing to be gained by engaging constructively with institutions that are being transformed in these modernizing/marketizing ways. Pollyannas, on the other hand, tend to be the people who are in the trenches, the gender equality advocates who are doing gender mainstreaming work or involved in international development enterprises. Their optimism is part of what keeps them going. I'm presenting this a little bit more starkly than is real just to make the poles of the continuum clear. But the Cassandra view of all higher education reforms as being necessarily, and inherently, neoliberal and inegalitarian and, thus, never possible for serving feminist purposes, it's certainly a bleak view. Competition, privatization, precariousness they emphasize as being allowed to grow unchecked. You cannot treat women and men as if they were the same and ignore the very different realities they face without destroying the particular values outside of markets that somehow are also associated with women. The illusion of equal treatment makes feminism, as a movement, more abound and useless and the equalities are legitimated as if they were the natural outcomes of a neutral market, which of course, they're not. So, Cassandra's pretty bleak. Pollyanna, on the other hand, is also a problem in my view. Pollyanna's a little quick to brush off Cassandra's warning. Pollyanna sees the normative force of gender equality as really incredibly successful in transforming the composition of political parties and professions. The numbers in terms of representation are staggeringly better than they were 50 years ago. Pollyanna talks about imposing new legal standards of equal citizenship rights and re-directing investments in development towards women's empowerment. Women seat at the table of decision makers allows women's interests to be articulated and the old boy clubs are being challenged by merit-based selection mechanism. Femocratic change, led by empowered women, becomes the insider strategy that feminist movements can and should rely on with only an occasional public outcry needed to help strengthen the hand of the inside bargainers. Attention to standpoints and inclusivity brought into higher education by Gender and Women's Studies offers support, then, even to talking about mainstreaming diversity across organizations and one of the ways that this is often talked about, especially in Europe where mainstreaming is a big thing, is to talk about it as gender plus inequality. So gender plus this, gender plus that. Notice gender stays in the center place the way we don't do that in the US. So we're trying to avoid being either Cassandra or Pollyanna. So, we're looking at two different systems. We're looking at German system and the US system of academia and where are the women? It's both similar and different. On the one hand, you see the trend from the lowest level, i.e. Bachelor students, to the top level, grade A which is full professor. The trend is down in all those countries. The US is at the top. Germany's at the bottom. The EU average is in the middle. But the overall trend can be expressed now as it was in the 1970s. The higher you go, the fewer the women you find. So the trend is still there. But, of course, at the low end, women are now 50% or above. And that's a big change from 50 years ago. It is also the case that the German and American patterns do not resemble each other quite so sharply as the general EU and US does. Germany's different. The big obstacle in Germany is in the entry into the first postdoctoral phase, what they call level C, what we would call assistant professorships or tenure track jobs. There's just a huge barrier there. Those postdoctoral positions, which are not in fact all ten-- in fact there's no such thing as a tenure track in Germany. So they're not secure positions but even to enter them is a much, much bigger obstacle in Germany than in the US. So, what do we know about the two systems that tell us something about how they're different? Well, the main thing that I wanna stress here, and I have a lot of details up there from another talk, but I just wanna stress that the stratification is different in the two systems. It's hard to talk about it being more or less. In the United States we have a lot of interuniversity stratification. We think that it makes a big difference whether you're at UW Madison or UW Stout or Edgewood or MATC or wherever. And we think that there's a lot of stratification even within a category like research one universities. So we are busy thinking about ourselves and working on the stratification processes that organize our universities relative to each other. How good are we as UW relative to the University of Illinois relative to the University of California Berkeley? Ranking systems are really important. The German system is quite different. The universities are under their individual state's control. They are all entirely state universities. The very first new privatized universities were only founded in the 1990s and are extremely marginalized. Universities are all treated as being equal. You can go to any university from any state. In theory, they are all equally good. This has been true until very, very recently. 2005, the German government introduced a program called the Excellence Initiative which was finally, in their terms, to introduce some stratification between the universities to identify where the beacons of excellence were in the overall German university landscape. We don't have that problem. On the other hand, as much as we might say, oh my god, we are just so stratified, we are not nearly as stratified as the Germans are within any given university department. The German system is one in which very small number of professors are individually responsible for the people who are under them. So, assistant professors really are assistant professors. They are hired by the professor to be his or her assistant and the professors control the lines for postdoctoral research positions, for secretaries, for graduate student. A graduate student is a paid job. You don't pay to be a graduate student but you have to compete and find a professor who will bring you in as the graduate student for that individual. Competition here in the United States is problematic in a different way than it is in Germany. Germany's striving very hard to gain a position in the global system that it has lost. So, I'm going to just point to a couple things where the way that the pond is different in Germany and the US has something to do with how feminists are engaging with academic capitalism in these two places. So, let me see here. Wait a minute. Yeah. What I've got here is just a comparison between the US and Germany in terms of the kinds of academic capitalism. And the differences are pronounced enough that when we start talking about this with people who haven't really experienced one system or the other, they kind of go like, well, are you talking about it being neoliberal or academic capitalist then? So the US version is big on austerity. Tell us about it, right?

laughter

this leads me to the question of

The German system, at the moment, the neoliberal German system, the system that Cassandra in Germany thinks is being destroyed, is having huge infusions of money being put into the universities to make them competitive. They are turning, in the words of one feminist critic; they are turning professors into PIs. This is a bad thing because they're making lots of grant money available. They've tripled or quadrupled the amount of grant funding in most disciplines. They have grant competitions that treat the sciences and the humanities and the social sciences with relatively similar levels of funding. Although again, whether you want to call it markets or modernity, science and technology is taking the lead in the new knowledge economy and the money is beginning to shift more towards the sciences. There are also, in Germany, the emphasis is on international mobility. The big horrible thing that has happened to German universities in the eyes of German feminist professors is that you now have to count credits in courses. Courses need to be measurable in terms of credits. You need to know how many credit hours you are teaching. And credits need to be transferable between universities outside of Germany as well as within. So, a lot of credit accounting. And your status as a university rises if you are able to attract international students. So, international, not intranational, rankings are important. And how do you attract international students if you are teaching in German? So professors are supposed to offer more and more of their courses in English and retool their courses to follow a more American-style credit hour model and be taught in English. Managerialism in Germany means mostly a shift from state ministries. In the past if you wanted to hire, say, a professor of sociology, the various professors in the area of sociology, and there might only be six or seven of them because they're large middle bow lower level of support, the professors would get together and they'd come up with a ranked list of three and they'd submit them to the Ministry of Higher Education and the minister would pick the professor from the short list. So, managerialism and the growing role of the administration is now passing the buck from the ministry to the university and empowering deans at the university level to make decisions like that. In the US, managerialism is more about shifting from professors to deans. So far the self-governance of professors in Germany has hardly been touched in ways that, here, we've been seeing, I'm afraid, altogether too often. So let's just look, at the moment, at what that means for gender politics. It means that feminists contesting representation in the United States are worried about the effects of austerity and diversity; therefore, looking at students, looking at access to the tenure track and adjuncts, there is no tenure track in Germany. So everybody, in that sense, is an adjunct. They are looking at the United States as a possible model for introducing a tenure track so that people could stay at the same university and become a professor, which is a totally radical idea there.

Knowledge transfer

we're worrying about the ways in which the definition of what universities do can be defended from defunding. The recent proposal, for example, to cut National Science Foundation funding for the social sciences in half. But, at the same time, we've also seen a lot of institutionalization of Gender and Women's Studies, strong programs with a lot of outreach. And, as a member of the Gender and Women's Studies program,

I can tell you that you start debating

what are we going to do as a Gender and Women's Studies program when there are also all of these people who are doing gender studies off in their departments who don't even, like, check in with us? That's a really tough problem to have. It's not a problem the Germans have. Those small numbers of professors are still very, very, very male. Organizational transformation... we're also talking about diversity and how to do diversity politics. What about the Germans? Well, they have so few women professors. They established, again, just recently in 2007, a special program in which the ministries gave money to universities if they would hire a woman.

laughter

I can tell you that you start debating

And they made it competitive in the sense of first come, first served. So the further you were along in a search in which you'd identified a potentially hirable woman the more likely you were to get matching funds to go hire that person. Providing positive incentives. Challenge grants of various kinds. Knowledge transfer. Feminists are networking like mad among the EU countries to put pressure on the universities in terms of competition.

So that little graph that I showed you of

here's Germany and look how bad it is compared to the US and EU, the German feminists made that graph, they have a point to make with it. They want to network around the ideas of how can we transform the university? How do you go about transforming the university? Well, law mandates gender mainstreaming, which is to say active efforts to consider gender in the policy structures of all state agencies, and universities are state agencies. So every university has to have a gender equality plan and they have now been asked to make it not just a gender equality plan but a gender plus plan. A diversity plan. Some gender equality officers are having fits. You're not paying attention to gender anymore. Now we're just talking about diversity, whatever the heck diversity is. We wanna focus on gender not on diversity. There's a positive appeal to international standards This Excellence Initiative, all this money to create beacons of excellence, they did the first round. In order to decide which universities were beacons of excellence they, of course, had international reviewers look at the proposals. Where do you think you get high status international reviewers? In the US and the UK. What do the international reviewers from the US and the UK say when they see these German proposals? You don't have enough women. Where are the women? Aren't there any women in your discipline? So, as a consequence of the first round review the president of the Association of German Universities wrote a letter saying we are not meeting international standards of gender inclusivity.

laughter

So that little graph that I showed you of

In the next round please take seriously the gender mainstreaming plan and the law that says gender inclusion is mandated as a responsibility of you as a state agency. We will be looking. Well, the percentage of women, what do you think? It jumped up on the second round.

laughter

So that little graph that I showed you of

It could be done. Anyway, as I said, this is in an early stage. One of the things that we're doing at the moment is we're looking around demands for inclusion and how they're framed in terms of modernity and market arguments. And we're using some of the very, very many, I don't expect you to read them here, it's just an indication of the fact that there are like 20 reports that have been issued internationally and nationally about the really problematic situation of women in the sciences in economically-developed global knowledge economies and what are we going to do about it? So we're doing a discourse analysis of how these kinds of claims are being made. And then the other piece of the project that I'm doing is looking Title IX and the 40 plus years of evolution of Title IX as a program that started out making claims, not only about representation, but about the content of teaching that got narrowed in a process of political contestation into talking as if we thought that Title IX was only about sports, but actually has a lot of interesting gender mainstreaming components to it.

So I'm working on a paper that calls it

"a rose by any other name". That is to say it's gender mainstreaming in the sense of an affirmative action program in the way that Europeans think about it. In other words, not so much comparing lists and numbers, per se, but thinking about the institutional transformations that would need to be included. So Title IX is being used to confront sexual harassment. Title IX is being used to confront campus sexual assault. Title IX is being used to confront the provision of services for pregnant and parenting students. So it's actually looking at institutional transformation in the ways that the Europeans think they invented with gender mainstreaming. So, that's where the project is. I thank you for listening.

applause