Hidden transcripts: The micropolitics of gender in Commonwealth universities

SynopsisThis article is about the subtle and complex ways in which discrimination against women takes place in higher education. A major finding of the Gender Equity in Commonwealth Higher Education Project was the way in which gendered power is relayed via everyday transactions and relationships. Even where there is a sophisticated equity policy context as in the case of South Africa, macro aspirations often do not reach the micro-level of experience. This article applies the conceptual framework of micropolitics in its analysis of women students' and staffs' experiences of the gendered organisational culture of higher education. It examines how gender discrimination can take place via informal networks, coalitions, and exclusions, as well as by formal arrangements in classrooms and boardrooms.Drawing on qualitative data from the five countries, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, and from the international literature searched for this project [Morley Louise, Sorhaindo, Annik and Burke, Penny. (2005). Researching women: An annotated bibliography on gender equity in Commonwealth higher education. London: Institute of Education.], this article explores some of the hidden transcripts of women's engagements with higher education on a comparative basis. It reports and theorises the findings that illustrate how social practices and gendered power relations symbolically and materially construct and regulate women's everyday experiences of higher education.By interviewing women staff and students, managers and policy-makers, as well as by observing gendered relations in classrooms, boardrooms and staff training sessions, the project found that women experience a range of discriminatory practices, gendered processes and exclusions within higher education. These include the exclusion of women from career development opportunities, gender-insensitive pedagogical processes, prejudice about women's academic abilities and intellectual authority, poor equality policy implementation and backlash and stigmatisation in relation to affirmative action programmes. Much of this discrimination was covert, intangible and abstract.