Institutional Inequalities

1. Institutional Inequalities Nov 20th 2006.

2. Gender and Class in Educational History • Domestic Ideology: • This ideology structured particular ideals offemininity; 'femininity' as understood to be a 'socially constructed' category. • Private Sphere • Public Sphere

3. Domestic Ideology • The domestic ideology contained three major assumptions: • notion ofseparate spheres • women were defined in relation to men • women as inferior to men

4. Two Justifications • Biological inferiority - made women unsuitable as recipients of Higher Education • Religion – women’s subordination justified by reference to the 'divine order'

5. Class Specific Bourgeois Ideals • Middle class and Working class women • different ideologies

6. Middle Class Women & Femininity • 'perfect wife and mother‘ • displayed through the virtues of self-denial, patience, resignation and silent suffering • associated with certain forms of behaviour characterised as 'ladylike' • Being a lady involved three major assumptions: • First, a lady managed a household but did not engage in routine manual work. • Second, a lady would often get involved in unpaid philanthropic work, but never in waged labour. • Third, a lady had to wear the right clothes and have the right manners.

7. Working Class Women & Femininity • 'good woman' • also located within the home • emphasis on the practical skills of housekeeping and mothering. • should not aspire to the ladylike behaviour of the middle class woman. • The ideal for working class women was seen as a solution to many of the perceived problems of the working class family

8. Blaming Working Class Women • It was the deficiency of the working class woman that was seen as the root cause of a host of social problems-alcoholism, crime, infant mortality and the spread of disease. • disharmony and malfunction in society = failure of the working class family – mainly the wife or ‘working woman’ • working women inadequate as wife and mother • the ideology of domesticity is reaffirmed

9. Class Control • the idea of the 'good woman' was a bourgeois attempt to transport the ideology of domesticity into a form that would fit the constraints of working class family life-a form of class cultural control

10. Contradictions – Middle Class Women • Seeking education to previously exclusively male institutions • Industrialization was creating new types of jobs in which women might participate, and the process of political democratization was placing greater emphasis on the individual • In fighting to gain access to higher education middle class women were engaged in a gender, not a class struggle as few working class women fought to gain access to university

11. Contradictions – Working Class Women • gender and a class struggle • Ideology of working class women: • they should be full-time wives and mothers • they would support a capitalist economy by supporting and nurturing a healthy workforce • tension between the demands of ideology and the realities of a capitalist economy which utilized women as a cheap source of labour • Most working class women were forced at some time in their lives to engage in paid labour just to survive • working class women who did attempt to gain an education had to contend with the rhetoric and content of an education provided by their 'social superiors' • working class women also had to contend with the working class men who began to take up aspects of the bourgeois ideology of domesticity • working class women had to contend with opposition from both the sexes of the bourgeoisie and from working class men • exhaustive demands made on them for family responsibility, and endless childbearing. • these demands made entry to any form of adult education extremely difficult

12. Type of Education M/C • middle class girls were educated in a closed environment, a preparation for a separate and different life style from that of boys. • most middle class girls were educated at home or in small private schools • content of their education tended to stress ornamental knowledge that might attract a husband • resulted in a low standard of education compared to that received by middle class boys and meant that women were largely denied access to HE and were not really prepared for it anyway • ideal of middle class femininity influenced the curriculum content

13. Type of Education W/C • offered a curriculum that emphasized utilitarian skills, rather than the middle class girls diet of social accomplishments • The standards in such schools were probably quite low • A result of poor schooling was that the literacy rate of women, particularly working class women, was for most of the 19th century lower than that for men

14. Gaining Entry to HE • Eventually women were admitted onto full-time degree courses • Oxford and Cambridge refused to award them degrees until 1919 and 1947 respectively • this experience of HE facilitated the passage of women into certain forms of waged labour, and paid work became a legitimate area of activity for middle class women • However, the majority of this new female elite entered an area traditionally linked with women-teaching • Before the 1870 Act in the United States, which made full-time elementary education a possibility for girls, a working class girl might experience co-education in a variety of forms such as Dame Schools, Charity schools or religious schools.

15. Native Canadians and Residential Schools • Residential Schools • Total Institution: a place where people are isolated from the rest of society for a set period of time and come under the control of the officials who run the institution (Goffman)

16. Total Institution • All aspects of life (work, play, sleep) are carried out under one roof. • All activity is in groups and strictly scheduled. • All activities are planned, to suit a rational goal:(1) to maintain inmate-staff split, social distance, prevent development of normal work ethic(2) mortification of self; each case is an unique experiment in the self-stripping process(3) maintain authority, evaluation anxiety, multitude of items coming up for judgment (dress, etc) • There is a privilege system (of house rules, small rewards, you can build a world around minor privileges, and the privileges eventually become rights). • There is an argot system (a lingo, an inmate code, secondary adjustments, a ranking of employees & inmates).

17. Goffman's list of total institutions • (1) homes for the aged, blind, orphans, or poor(2) mental asylums, TB sanitariums, leprosy camps(3) jails, prisons, POW camps, concentration camps(4) army barracks, ships, military bases, boarding schools(5) abbeys, monasteries, convents, retreats

18. Bias Against Caregiving • A 2002 study shows that Faculty members rarely take advantage of ‘family-friendly’ workplace policies • The research included a national survey administered to 4,188 faculty members in English and chemistry at 507 colleges and universities in the United States • Case studies of eleven institutions and documented the experiences of thirteen faculty parents in English and chemistry for three days each. • Findings: Few eligible faculty members take formal leaves for childbearing or caregiving (Researchers: Robert Drago, Carol Colbeck, Kai Dawn Stauffer, Amy Pirretti, Kurt Burkum, Jennifer Fazioli, Gabriela Lazarro, and Tara Habasevich )

19. Bias against caregiving • Between 1992 and 1999, only four of 257 tenure-track faculty parents at Pennsylvania State University took any formal family leave. • Why? Perhaps faculty parents were unaware of leave policies, or maybe department heads discouraged them from taking leave. • These researchers argue that biases against caregiving in the academy caused them to avoid taking time off. • As a result of such biases, faculty members suffer career penalties for using policies designed to help them balance work and family commitments. • To escape these penalties, faculty members rarely use the policies, engaging in what they call label “bias avoidance” strategies. Because the biases are often hidden, faculty who even inquire about relevant policies risk damaging their academic reputation.

20. Bias Avoidance • Some bias avoidance strategies can improve work performance: • Minimizing or reducing family commitments, for example, can free up time and energy for paid work. • women who take fast-track academic jobs are more likely to remain single or childless or get divorced than either their male peers or their female counterparts in second-tier jobs. • Major life decisions, such as remaining childless, may reflect what we call productive bias avoidance.

21. Bias Avoidance In this national survey of faculty: • 10.2 percent of men, but 16 percent of women, reported that they remained single because they did not have time for a family and a successful academic career. • Among parents, 9.1 percent of men and 17.2 percent of women “had one child, but delayed considering another until after tenure.” • In total, 12.6 percent of men and 25.6 percent of women had fewer children than they wanted to have “to achieve academic success.” • These examples reflect productive bias avoidance—minimizing family commitments to meet extreme job demands—and they all affect women more than men. • “I could not have done it while the tenure clock was ticking . . . [it] would have just sent me over the edge.”

22. Traditional Ideals • norms about ideal workers and motherhood shape women’s choices, not simply their work and family responsibilities. • Ideal workers—typically men but increasingly professional women as well—should be fully committed to their careers, willing to work long hours each day for years, and even decades, at a stretch. • The traditional role of mother casts mothers as selfless and endlessly giving to their children or others in need of care. • The gendered character of the norm for motherhood means that women who admit to caregiving responsibilities will be penalized more heavily than men.

23. Institutional inequalities • 18.9 % of men and 32.8 % of women did not ask for a reduced teaching load when they needed it for family reasons, “because it would lead to adverse career repercussions.” • 33% of faculty fathers and mothers did not ask for parental leave even though they agreed that it would have been helpful to them • just under 20 % of faculty fathers and mothers did not ask to stop the tenure clock for a new child even though they reported that they would have benefited from doing so. • Although only 14.4 % of fathers came back to work sooner than they would have liked after having a new child because they “wanted to be taken seriously as an academic,” 51.1 % of faculty mothers did so. • 37 % of fathers and 46.2 % of mothers missed some of their young children’s important events, because they “did not want to appear uncommitted” to their jobs.

24. Native Canadians and Residential Schools • Beginning in the mid-1850's, the British Crown and then the government of Canada had a policy to "Canadianize" Aboriginal persons. • Part of making Native Peoples into "Canadians" was to convert them to Christianity. • The government and several Churches and Religious Orders co-operated to run Residential Schools.

25. Residential Schools • By law, Native children were removed from their homes at a very young age, perhaps as young as five years old, and sent to these schools to "civilize" them. • The main things the Residential Schools taught were: • praying • reading and writing English • arithmetic • European-style practical skills such as: • cooking • cleaning • working in the fields • Métis historian Olive Dickason says that the Residential School curriculum was designed to prepare Native students "for life on the lower fringes of the dominant society."

26. Residential Schooling in Canada • re-socialization of people by instilling them with new roles, skills and values.  • institutions controlled nearly every aspect of their students’ lives.  • sexual abuse, physical abuse, spiritual and psychological abuse by caregivers and administrators was rampant.  • harsh and arbitrary punishments • removal and isolation from their families and communities and the destruction of their culture, language and spirituality.   • attained limited and poor education. • under funding left children perpetually hungry, malnourished, inadequately clothed, and forced into manual labour to support the daily cost of running the institution.  • schools were located in every province and territory, except New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island (about 100) • approximately 100,000 children attended these schools over the years in which they were in operation.

27. Politics and Religion • The Government operated nearly every school in partnership with various religious organizations until April 1, 1969, when the Government assumed full responsibility for the school system. • Most residential schools ceased to operate by the mid-1970s, with only seven remaining open through the 1980s. • The last federally run residential school in Canada closed in Saskatchewan in 1996.

28. Effects – Families of the Past • abuse • little contact with their parents and extended families • could not learn their customs • children who spoke Aboriginal languages were severely punished • parents and grandparents were powerless to protect the children from these abuses • families lost their natural structure and purpose • aboriginal communities began to fall apart • children left the schools feeling that their Native relatives - "even their parents!" - were heathen, dirty and stupid • attitudes they learned also affected how they saw themselves • As a result, very low self-respect is common among people who went to Residential Schools

29. Effects – Families of the Present • several generations of a family have attended these schools; multiplies the emotional and psychological damage within that family unit • Scooping - Governments started removing large numbers of Native children from their families, saying that the parenting or living conditions were inadequate • put in foster care, or adopted by non-Aboriginal families • more suffering

30. Blog Assignment • Given our discussion about the history of education, and the structural ideologies within the educational system, please comment on the various experiences of faculty and relate/connect found in the readings. • Can we make any links between this brief historical outline of the education of girls and women to present day concerns in the sociology of higher education?