The UNIque Guide for Women: Confidently embracing your career in research and beyond

By Emma Williams

The early career research stage is tough. Interesting, intellectually challenging, pushing back frontiers of knowledge, working with talented people from around the world - all fantastic things. But have you ever ...

• Wondered what on earth the next career step is going to be?
• Felt surrounded by researchers who are brighter and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellectual Perspective Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781908770462

Book preview

PART ONE

YOU AND THE UNIVERSITY

Do you feel part of the university where you work? Do you describe it as your university? Are you aware of the career progression routes in and through your institution? Have you looked at the institution next door?

This first section is grounded in where we are now. Universities are fascinating places. Esteemed ivory towers of scholarship. Hotbeds of intellectual discussion. Full of silos and politics. Big machines that don’t care about the cogs within. It’s quite possible to simultaneously love, loathe, and be mystified by these institutions. They have certainly held me captivated for the past thirty-plus years.

But this is our launchpad for our future career. We need to understand our environment and what it has to offer to be able to maximise its utility in our careers.

WOMEN AND THE UNIVERSITY

It’s crucial that you understand the structures that we work within so that you can decide whether to work with, to flex around, or rebel against them!

Currently most professors are male, and we have a leaky pipeline, a glass ceiling, and numerous other metaphors for women not progressing to the higher ranks in academia. This chapter is not about fixing women nor is it about man-bashing. As women, we must live within the structures as they evolve and encourage them to do so. Universities tend to evolve slowly as anyone who has ever sat on a university committee will know!

I’ll start with the statistics; we are researchers after all! I’ll be using data from the UK as that’s where I’m based and where I do most of my work. This data was taken from the statistical bulletin from HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the experts in UK higher education data)¹. The following statistics are based on the academic data from 2020/21. If you’re like me and you love Excel, you can download the complete tables; they are published every February. Researchers are incredibly international. If you’re based elsewhere or looking to relocate, find the relevant data for that country and interrogate it!

There were 224,530 academic staff (excluding atypical) employed in the Higher Education (HE) sector. Among academic staff, 174,940 or 78% had a basic salary that was financed entirely by the HE provider in 2020/21

The remaining 22% had other sources of basic salary. Other sources can include being partly financed by the HE provider, financed by research councils, UK branches of multinational companies, the NHS, and/or UK and overseas charities.

Important to note that universities are big employers and can be very big business. As a researcher we can be unaware of the ecosystem around us that lets research happen.

Of professors, 28% were female in 2020/21. The percentage of female professors increased by one percentage point year on year from 2013/14 until 2019/20 and has remained at 28% for 2020/21.

Women hold more part-time posts (42,055 to men’s 32,220) and fewer full-time posts (63,385 to men’s 85,475) compared to their male counterparts.

Look at that data again! There’s a huge gender gap; circa 6,000 female professors, compared to circa 16,400 male professors. As we move down the hierarchy, however, the gender gap reduces, and when it comes to non-academic contracts, we’re closer to parity. Of course, gender isn’t the only criteria we need to look at. Ethnicity, nationality, age, and disability status are other factors that contribute. In this book, we’ll stick to gender but it goes without saying that there will be many other factors that intersect in your UNIque career trajectory.

Remember only 28% of professors were female in 2020/21. Knowing that there are fewer female professors at the top might not be an obvious issue for you, but it’s important to acknowledge that there will be less female support. Knowing this will help you to navigate.

Universities are changing employment contracts. There are 44% of academic staff on teaching and research contracts, with an increasing percentage of teaching-only contracts. This is a shift across all universities, which is either because of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) or potentially because students are now customers. The other thing about females in an academic setting is that we might pick up the more caring part of being part of the academic family. More women have teaching-only contracts (38,615 to men’s 34,205) and fewer research only contracts (24,350 to men’s 26,950). We might convene courses, take on course admin, and provide extra pastoral support for our students. If we couple that in with the after effects of the pandemic, where we were perhaps spending more time looking after our students, nurturing them, keeping them sane, whilst trying to do the same for ourselves and our families, you can see that there are compounding effects.

Thinking about your career, you need to concentrate on the metrics that you’re judged on if you want to move up. Unfortunately, pastoral care for students tends not to have a lot of kudos associated with it. Papers, publications, books, patents, and grants are the things that we are really weighed on, as opposed to being nice to a student.

The gender pay gap.

All large organisations within the UK must report their gender pay gap. The results are published annually in March, although during the recent pandemic, the figures weren’t collated. Universities don’t come out well. In nine out of ten universities, men are paid more than women. Let’s consider a sample of three well-known London universities as seen below². If we take an average of the median pay gap we get 9.2%. 9.2% over a lifetime of salaries becomes a significant loss of income.

The Fawcett Society works in the gender equality space.³ They suggest that there are four main reasons for the gender pay gap:

Discrimination – Although illegal it still happens, especially around pregnancy/maternity.⁴

Unequal caring responsibilities – Women play a greater role in caring for children, as well as for sick or elderly relatives. Part-time work is typically lower paid and with less progression. The pandemic really emphasised unequal caring responsibilities, which has then impacted people’s ability to publish.

A divided labour market – This really does boil down to the fact that there are jobs for girls, and there are jobs for boys. The jobs for boys tend to pay more. This plays out in research disciplines too.

Men in the most senior roles – In 2021, forty of the top 200 universities in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings had female vice-chancellors (the top job). Men are in the majority at the top with the highest pay packets.

Universities are working hard on this topic. Athena SWAN is one mechanism. Various other initiatives are working hard to close the pay gap by encouraging women to stay on in higher academic roles. Progress has been and is being made. I went to university a long, long time ago. The physics lab had one female set of toilets. That lab now has Athena SWAN gold, which hopefully means it also has more female toilets!

The big question

What is your experience of being a woman in your research setting? What intersecting factors affect your experience? University, discipline, career stage, ethnicity, age?

Research mode

Go and have a look at the gendered figures for your institution within your specific discipline. How does it compare to physics and my experience? Have a look at your department. Is there a difference with the institution overall? Are you applying for an Athena SWAN award? How’s it going? What initiatives are in place? Take some time to look at women’s place in your