This is a co-sponsored event with CHELT (Centre for Higher Education, Learning and Teaching).

Seminar and Workshop

This seminar will be presented by Gender Institute member Beth Beckmann and presenter A/Prof Maryanne Dever, from the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, and will be followed by a workshop.

It was once assumed that, with more women entering higher education and university employment, overall gender parity was only a matter of time. Although women now account for approximately half of all doctoral completions in Australia, these achievements have not translated into the anticipated changes in gendered patterns of academic staffing: women still remain clustered towards the bottom of the academic hierarchy. In this seminar, Maryanne Dever will discuss findings and recommendations from a team project that investigated how gender differences in early career academic employment paths and research performance in Australia are shaped by graduates' family formation and PhD experiences (see below for more details).

Coffee and tea provided -- please feel free to BYO lunch.

Please register here.

This seminar will be followed by a workshop facilitated by Beth Beckmann with special guest A/Prof Dever (click here for details).

Available data show that women now account for approximately half of all doctoral completions in Australia. However, these achievements have not translated into the anticipated changes in gendered patterns of academic staffing: women remain clustered towards the bottom of the academic hierarchy as they have done for several decades. For this reason, arguments about university staffing that simply assume women’s inevitable upward progress in the academy are now being replaced by more nuanced analyses of those factors that contribute to women’s largely unchanged status in the university sector.

In this seminar, A/Prof Maryanne Dever, from the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, will discuss findings and recommendations from a team project that investigated how gender differences in early career academic employment paths and research performance in Australia are shaped by graduates’ family formation and PhD experiences. She will show how consideration of the PhD context and immediate post-PhD appointments provides significant insights into why we continue to see gendered patterns of university employment.

A/Prof Maryanne Dever was previously Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Monash University and President of the Australian Women's Studies Association. Her research divides between questions of gender and higher education and explorations of archives, intimacy and materiality.