The workplace is changing from primarily being a site of production to one focused on knowledge creation, where there has been a re-engineering of work in what has been termed post-Fordism.1 This changing workplace has experienced what some term a feminisation, as women have been entering the labour market in increasing numbers.2 As Ian Watson, John Buchanan, Iain Campbell and Chris Briggs highlight in their recent book, Fragmented Futures, changing workplace participation has had both positive and negative effects.3 Indeed, with all the talk about feminist theorising, workplace reform and changing societal norms, it would be expected that much has changed for Australian women over the past twenty-five years. Certainly, if one follows the commentary of certain sections of the media, one could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps gender reforms had, in fact, gone too far, with women supposedly taking jobs from men. Also, the argument is regularly made that gender is no longer an issue in contemporary Australia.4 This change also plays out in the university workplace, where economic rationalism and global competitiveness are now firmly entrenched in university discourses.5 Anna Yeatman asserts that restructuring within universities is dominated by market-orientated economic cultures of action and laissez-faire ideology because universities need to respond effectively to ongoing sociocultural change and complexity.6 For Milton University (MU), a pseudonym for a regional Australian university, this included the introduction of information and communication technologies, the restructuring of faculties, mass marketing to international students, changing employment patterns to hire more casual, contract and part-time staff, and a focus on vocational degrees. But as Jeremy Rifkin suggests, it is not enough to introduce new technologies in response to the postindustrial or post-capitalist workplace; rather, there needs to be a re-organisation of institutional structures — the university being one such site — and a reevaluation of what is means to be a worker in the new knowledge economy.7

This article draws on research carried out as part of my PhD thesis, where I used experiences related to me by four academic women who worked at MU in order to focus on the ways in which discourses circulating within this particular campus shape the performances and discursive positionings of these women — Veronica, Tamaly, Alice and Madonna (the names are fictional and were chosen by the women to represent themselves) — and how, in turn, these women negotiated these discourses. This research is therefore located in a qualitative paradigm that combines the use of a grounded theory approach8 and a discourse/ textual analysis.9 The use of a grounded theory approach enabled me to form or build theory from lived experience and present the voices of the women. Multiple data sources were used, including two formal interviews with each participant, numerous informal conversations with these women at various meetings, functions and seminars, peer debriefings with other academics, both male and female, and textual documents such as policies, emails, field notes, university reports and strategic plans. Interviews and conversations took place over a period of eight months during 2000–2001. This data-collection process enabled me to construct my own interpretive repertoire.10 Nigel Edley contends that interpretive repertoires are:

part and parcel of any community’s common sense, providing a basis for shared social understanding where people seem to be taking similar lines or making the same kinds of arguments as others.11

By immersing myself in the context and the data, I came to recognise patterns and develop a sense of the discursive terrain that constructed the MU academic workplace. I define the contemporary academic workplace as a site of multiple competing discourses. Multiple data sources add strength to qualitative research designs and allow for the triangulation of data. The data presented here is a case study and does not necessarily directly translate to other academic women or workplaces.12 However, the reading of the data will bring a set of lived experiences to the attention of readers in order that they can judge them and compare with their own situations.

My analysis reveals a gap between the rhetoric and the reality of transformation within a specific workplace.13 The reason for focusing on the university workplace was that it can be argued that it is in this particular context where changes in attitudes toward the place of women in contemporary society would be most likely to occur. As many feminist writers have been located within university structures and many university women align themselves (albeit in varying degrees) with feminist politics, it is reasonable to expect that these spaces would reflect much of the best of the gender reform, or pro-feminist work, that has occurred in the process of transforming workplaces and challenging phallocentric practices.14 The aim of this article, then, is to present a case study that focuses on the construction of an alternative figuration: the entrepreneurial academic woman, a subjectivity that concerns transformation, gender and the contemporary academic workplace. It offers an insight into how organisational change, occurring at a specific site, is experienced by four academic women.

The remainder of this article is divided into three sections. The first section explores key contemporary workplace discourses embedded within MU. The second section demonstrates key discourses found within the narratives of the women that construct an alternative figuration of the entrepreneurial academic woman, using the concept of nomadism.15 This discussion sets the scene for exposing the gap between transformation at the level of subjectivity, or microlevel, and transformation at the institutional level, or macro-level, which is presented in the third and final section of this paper.

Contemporary workplace discourses at MU

MU is embracing globalisation processes through an emphasis on flexible and innovative teaching-and-learning technologies via web-based delivery and through the promotion of academic courses for the international full-fee-paying market. There is niche marketing of education, with both research and course development geared toward industry partnerships within the local region. Tamaly, a senior academic woman, sees the image of MU changing as a response to the way the university wants to position itself within the global educational marketplace:

It’s beginning to change because of the vocational nature of academia now … I mean the sort of programs that you are offering. We have got to be very mindful of the marketplace, student numbers and making sure that the courses we’re offering suit today’s market … you’re got to be in line with some of the other external expectations.

While there is a desire to attain a high research profile, MU cannot compete with the larger ‘sandstone’ universities. Instead, teaching is a ‘business’ and becomes valued when associated with entrepreneurial activities. The university is working toward the niche marketing of technologised teaching packages through its distance and online courses, and the attraction of international students to supplement revenue. An aggressive marketing program initially focused on the international student market16 and is now aimed at the domestic market through a series of television advertisements. To enhance this niche marketing, the notions of innovation and flexibility came into play; one innovation is the introduction of a four-term year, which enables the ‘fast-tracking’ of degrees so that students can graduate sooner and enter the workplace ahead of ‘the competition’ graduating with similar degrees from other universities. Veronica saw this innovation as challenging traditional work practices:

In teaching delivery we are running a four-term year … that tests the student and the teacher. So rather than having three hours a week for twelve weeks, it [the course] might run for three or four days, nine hours a day or two weekends at various times in the semester, and that really challenges you as to how you will deliver the material. It pushes the students to discover new ways of engaging with materials; it also forces the teachers, I believe, to think about new ways of assessment and evaluation.

Veronica sees the four-term year as a way of becoming flexible and innovative with teaching design and delivery, both key components of an entrepreneurial discourse. This move requires new approaches to teaching and learning, especially when it needs to address vocational demands and industry standards. The university also has a primary emphasis on vocational courses, as opposed to theoretical ones; these are tied directly to industry partnerships through both training and research. For example, the Faculty of Arts, Health and Sciences takes pride in its establishment of industry partnerships through research, with the faculty marketing itself as having considerable strength in this area.17 Legitimate research for this faculty is that which is named and requested by its partnership agencies, often resulting in sourcing and securing postgraduate funding. The faculty justifies these arrangements by stating ‘these liaisons bring “real world” focus to the group’s activities and contribute significantly to the funding of scholarships and equipment’.18 The ‘good academic’ in this faculty, then, is someone who secures large funding grants through these industry partnerships.

Increasing numbers of non-academic lecturers or industry practitioners are being employed to address the growing vocational focus of many courses, providing students with ready access to current ‘real’ workplace issues and addressing the desire of employers who want ‘industry-ready’ graduates. While such rhetorics are used to increase student enrolment, Alice detects conflicting discourses when it comes to being seen as a ‘good academic’. She states:

I mean our core business here is teaching and learning and it isn’t valued, certainly it is not reflected in promotion that’s for sure. If you want to be a teaching scholar don’t think that you will get promoted. Promotions in this university are all about research and the biggest thing about research is: Have you a PhD?

Alice highlights the requirement of a PhD for an academic body to be seen as a legitimate or ‘good academic’ in this workplace. Contemporary employment practices at MU are therefore creating the academic workplace as a site of multiple bodies; however, only a specific body is constructed as a good academic. This has consequences for those lecturers without PhDs, such as the perception that they have more interest in teaching than research and subsequently could be understood as being ‘good teachers’ but ‘bad academics’.

Feminist research highlights universities as masculine spaces where women’s experiences and skills have either been ignored or marginalised.19 As Craig McInnis points out, there is continuing gender segregation, with more women located in teaching roles and forming part of the feminised casual labour market.20 He goes on to warn that universities are at a critical point where excessive workloads and the fragmentation of tasks seriously threaten the quality of teaching and research.21 According to the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Report submitted by MU, there are more men than women employed as academics, with 73.1 per cent of the senior academics male, and 64 per cent of these men in management roles.22 While there may be increasing numbers of women entering the MU workplace as academics, there is a pattern emerging where women academics are highly likely to be positioned at Level A and B scales, and so be responsible for teaching large first-year undergraduate classes, as well as attempting to combine postgraduate study and family responsibilities, and are often employed on contracts or in casual jobs, thus undertaking a ‘portfolio career’.23 MU, as a place of business as well as a place of learning, creates a new entity, the entrepreneurial university, where globalisation and technology are changing the meaning of education, educational delivery and academic work. The entry of women as academics to this university workplace challenges a traditional representation of the academic as a male body. The discourses of the women participating in this study provide an alternative figuration, that of the entrepreneurial academic woman.

Constructing the entrepreneurial academic woman

The subject positioning ‘academic woman’ is a site to explore feminist desires for cultural transformation.24 The women in this research can be read against the broad concepts of transformative figurations. Here, Rosi Braidotti’s25 notion of the ‘nomadic subject’ is a useful ‘political fiction’ or device to demonstrate the complexities and differences among academic women. As Braidotti states:

though the image of nomadic subjects is inspired by the experience of peoples or cultures that are literally nomadic, the nomadism … here refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thoughts and behaviours. Not all nomads are world travellers; some of the greatest trips can take place without physically moving from one’s habitat. It is the subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling.26

Feminist nomadism can be divided into three phases concerning sexual difference that can coexist simultaneously and chronologically.27 These phases are: differences between men and women; differences among women; and differences within each woman. These phases highlight the complexity of an embodied subjectivity where issues of age, race, sexuality, physical ability, class and experience come together as each woman negotiates her lived experience, constructing and re-constructing subjectivity. This negotiation takes place in a context where expectations, values, beliefs and norms interplay with the woman’s consciousness.

This concept of nomadism allows an explanation of the way that the four women who were the subject of my research negotiate and reconcile the positionings that they construct and that are imposed by others within their workplace. The women are able to move in and out of specific locations, thus establishing agency, and to recognise the dissonance between how they experience their workplace and what is expected of them in their ‘work’. Using the women’s narratives, the multiple ways that Tamaly, Alice, Veronica and Madonna construct their workplace become apparent, and the differences among the women can be illustrated. It is also possible to detect the differences within each woman as they think about their own positioning and the expectations they perceive as required by MU as they perform as academic women in this context.

For Tamaly the ‘good academic’ needs to have the ability to attract students within the competitive market of tertiary education through the provision of relevant courses in formats that students find useful:

You are dealing with individuals who have different circumstances, for starters. Secondly, they’re got different learning styles … so my argument has been that we’ve got to provide the normal printed material. We can provide it on a downloadable file and, yes, we can provide it online. We can provide it in a variety of different ways so that if one method doesn’t suit, you can go to another method. It gives them [the students] options for their self-directed learning, which I think is what we’ve got to be promoting anyway, because by the time they finish the course, everything will have changed, especially the technology.

It can be argued that Tamaly is promoting multiple deliveries of materials, thus showing flexibility of delivery by academics as a key discourse in an entrepreneurial environment.

For Alice, the use of technology such as email and voice-mail enables her to keep in contact with students: ‘I do like e-mail I must admit, but I like voice mail too because it means that I don’t miss a student. … They are always appreciative if you get back to them very fast’. Alice embraces the speed of the communication technology now available because it helps her to assist students with their queries. In this practice she has adapted the technology to serve a purpose that aids her self-identity as the entrepreneurial academic and thus, in her eyes, she is a ‘good academic’ as defined within the institutional discourses of MU.

Similarly, Madonna sees the use of particular technology as a high priority in being a ‘good academic’ in her faculty. However, the technology that is valued by the faculty dean is limited to that associated with the world wide web, in particular, web pages and email. In this instance Madonna feels that her male colleagues who have web pages are held in high regard, raising their status in the faculty, and her position is devalued because she chooses alternative communication means with her students, as she states here:

I always ring them [students] back. I don’t hold that technology [web sites] in high regard because I think that it is quite impersonal, but David would see that as personal communication with the student because they can get into the site and see his photo … even though I don’t know what they look like and they don’t know what I look like, I talk to them [individual students] enough to develop a professional relationship with them.

While Madonna can be described as a ‘good woman’, she is not exhibiting the practices of a ‘good academic’ as defined by this faculty. She is, however, forming a professional relationship with the students, something that is required by the entrepreneurial academic woman. From this, I argue that Madonna challenges the constructions that seek to position her in a limited construction of the nurturing woman; rather, she can be described as an entrepreneurial academic woman through her development of professional relationships and the use of emotional intelligence28 and communication skills that are sought after in the contemporary workplace.

The academic women in this study can be seen as a contradictory, fragmented representation — both ‘good women’ and not ‘good women’, and both ‘good academics’ and not ‘good academics’ — thus demonstrating the potentially transformative nature of this discursive construction. The different performances demonstrate that the notion of ‘woman’ can be read as a historical construct29 and as a cultural fiction; by changing this fiction to a model, it can be used to explain moves toward transformation by the women themselves.30 While alternative narratives can be identified in the ways that these academic women engage, resist and transform their personal contexts as women, I would argue that any transformation of their public contexts is constrained by the continued presence of powerful dominant hegemonic discourses circulating at MU.

Transforming the academic workplace

In this section I argue that within the narratives of the women, differences between men and women are constructed by the institutional discourses circulating within this site. One way in which women are often positioned differently to male colleagues is through conditions of employment and in the kinds of employment pathways they are placed on. Veronica found that she was the lowest-paid academic in her school:

I came in on a low level and worked for three years before I was told that I was the lowest-paid academic in the faculty … I now know that when one of my colleagues, who works in a similar area, was offered a position here, he said, ‘I’ll only come if you give me blah, blah, blah’ and he negotiated a good set of conditions for himself.

From this it could be extrapolated that some men know the ‘rules of the game’ better than Veronica, and she felt her acceptance of conditions was because historically women have not been in a position to negotiate, and it never occurred to her that she could do this. This ‘lack of knowledge’ could be why many women are often in low-paid positions, in low-status ranks and on short-term contracts. This kind of workplace participation is being increasingly normalised, as illustrated by Madonna’s comments:

I’m only on a short-term contract and I am led to believe that this is a fairly usual situation for women in universities … with the assumption being, I presume, that that’s okay because they have a husband to support them. There’s no security for me to stay longer … certainly within our team, there are seven of us, and only one has permanent tenure.

While Madonna’s comments reflect the changing nature of the broader contemporary workplace with more part-time, casual and contract workers, it also reinforces the notion of women as a ‘reserve army’31 who supplement the family income and smooth out seasonal work demands. Madonna is worried by the lack of job security for herself as a single person. Similarly, Alice has concerns for her career pathway and is attempting to finish her PhD. She has a full teaching load and comments on the difficulty of juggling all expectations:

I mean it’s [teaching and writing] extremely difficult to juggle. I harp on about Joe, but he’s been here for four years now and has had one subject each semester to teach to enable him to finish his PhD … now I’ve got four subjects going this semester … and [I’d] like [to] finish my PhD … I can’t do it.

Alice felt that she was positioned differently to her male colleague, but there were the same expectations regarding her PhD completion. Implicit in her statement is discrimination being played out through bodies. This supports what Leonie Rowan clearly means when she states that even when men and women have identical professional qualifications, and thus technically the same career opportunities, there are still significant differences in the way that women and men experience the workplace.32 Alice states that she is:

on tenurable track at the moment, which means basically that I’m on probation to be a ‘good girl’ for three years and then if there’s a position available, then you go onto tenure.

This has implications for Alice’s performance within her faculty. She indicates that if she performs in the way that her senior managers expect, she will be rewarded — but there is no promise.

As Clare Burton suggests, there are pressures to conform to particular faculty environments and to overall university culture, particularly if the academic woman is on short-term contracts or, as in this case, on tenurable probation.33 In one instance Alice:

was told that our students apparently are feeling a sense of not belonging in the school, so now I send each student in our school, and there’s over 300, individualised birthday cards.

Implicit in Alice’s statement was an expectation that she attend to this lack of belonging by sending out birthday cards. This action was not expected of her male colleagues, and it positions Alice as the nurturing teacher who cares for the students. While Alice has respect for her students and attends to their pastoral care needs, she sees this ‘work’ as disproportionately allocated to the women in her school — and as time that is, in effect, gained by her male colleagues for other activities. This compulsory caring has consequences in extra and invisible work that Alice is expected to perform in this school. I argue that this expected performance re-inscribes women’s bodies as sites of maternal care. This extra work takes up time that Alice could put toward finishing her PhD, which, in turn, has implications for both promotion and tenure, as Tamaly points out:

People are looking for a PhD at level B. Traditionally this was not the case and it varies among the disciplines … you find for example in the Business Faculty people are taken into academia from a successful business career … they don’t have the same level of PhD and nursing has the same sort of problem, so you see differences, whereas if you look at the sciences they’ve always had PhDs.

It is possible, therefore, to identify two significant issues in relation to women academics and professional advancement. Firstly, Tamaly’s comments illustrate the presence of multiple bodies within the academic workplace and signals that one requirement of a ‘good academic’ is to have a PhD. In institutions claiming equal opportunity and affirmative action policies, such as MU,34 the lack of a PhD is possibly seen as being due to personal failure, rather than organisational/ structural obstacles such as high teaching loads, casual employment arrangements and the hidden work of nurturing. The second issue relates to the way in which these women are positioned as complementary to male academics. While MU can be considered as a site that is not readily inclusive of difference, women are still present, but only on precise terms or conditions, regardless of how these women see their own performances. In the broader picture, positioning such as this could contribute to material consequences that see academic women being:

• continually over-represented in the lower ranks;
• on short-term or fixed-term contracts;
• either overlooked for, or progressing more slowly in terms of, promotion; and
• continually under-represented in senior continuing positions.35

Significantly, Braidotti feels the security of a permanent job enables the expression of dissatisfaction and dissonance between her own subjectivity and the traditional discourses of ‘woman’. As she discloses here:

It was not until I found some stability and sense of partial belonging, supported by a permanent job and happy relationship, that I could actually start thinking adequately about nomadism. Which is not to say that the act of thinking about it actually spelled out its end as a ruling existential habit of mine, but rather this notion became visible and consequently expressible only when I was situated enough to grasp it.36

This hints at disturbing implications for those academic women who find their options limited to casual or contract employment; at the same time, a permanent job does not always signal security. In relation to their male colleagues, my participants are positioned in precise ways that demonstrate varying degrees of phallocentrism.37 This positioning, I believe, contributes to the lack of transformation of masculine workplace culture.

Where to from here?

This in-depth case study provides localised insights and understanding of how four academic women respond to organisational change, but it also confirms that not much has changed in relation to overall institutional and societal expectations for the four academic women interviewed. My research draws attention to the covert continuation of gender-based disadvantage in this site, a reality for many women, both despite and because of the enactment and current interpretation of various gender-reform interventions, such as equal opportunity and affirmative action. It is possible to detect an underlying assumption that since the 1980s, when these interventions were set in place, some kind of level playing field or equality of opportunity was reached. While much early feminist research indicated the need for state intervention via legislative means to alter messages of sexism and prejudice, unfortunately time has shown that legislation alone does not alter cultural attitudes. What this means for me is that, while some may argue that the subject position ‘woman’ may be considered post-feminist, the context is certainly not post-patriarchy.38

My research challenges the suggestion that transformation occurs when phallocentric discourses are made visible and resisted; clearly, the process is not as simple as that. What is needed to achieve this transformation is an ongoing critique of the phallocentric discourses and practices that are deeply entrenched within all layers of Australian society. This involves what Braidotti39 refers to as ‘metabolic consumption’, where issues concerning women’s positioning have to be engaged with, interrogated and consumed, and involves investigation of attitudes toward ‘others’ who are seen as different from so-called ‘mainstream’ society.

The transformation was experienced differently by each of the women, and this transformation was demonstrated at a personal level. The answer to women’s exclusion in any sphere is not simply to ‘get more women in’; rather, the answer lies in changing the gendered norms and representations around real women and men who make up our communities. In other words, in order to address women’s positionings, both men and women need to be involved. As Judy Wajcman asserts:

men too find themselves constrained by idealized male constructs and are acutely aware of other men’s scrutiny. Not all men endorse or aspire to the dominant male model.40

Indicated here, then, is the negotiation of contested terrains among the constructed representation of hegemonic masculinity, men and women working in organisations, and the power of organisations to correct inappropriate norms.41 It also points to the possibility of transformation as the gap between the ideal and the real, for both men and women, is exposed. Wajcman goes on to say that ‘organisational re-structuring is having a major impact … on the nature of the employment relationship itself’.42 This also points to possibilities of transformation as both men and women negotiate what it means to be a worker in the twenty-first century.

The changing nature of the workplace offers continued opportunities for research, especially that which explores women entering this sphere, the decisions they need to make about how they engage with the public sphere and negotiate family responsibilities. More significantly, Wajcman states that:

Women are not responding to the demands of full-time work by re-negotiating the ‘sexual contract’ of marriage. Indeed that option is clearly one that women are backing away from … Men’s refusal to play an equal part in all forms of domestic labour is one of the key mechanisms through which gender inequalities are reproduced.43

This is evident in the ways that some professional women are perceived to be contracting out domestic work — such as shopping, cleaning, sending out laundry, ultilising day-care centres, the hiring of a nanny and after-school care — rather than confronting male power in the home. In other words, these professional women are adopting a male style of ‘work’ where caring is outsourced to labouring women. Negotiating the competing and ambiguous discourses around domesticity, motherhood and paid work44 often results in women putting their careers on hold to accommodate the society in which they live. This signals the continuing need for much more open and vocal debate and research within Australian society about embodiment, identity and positioning in the private and public spheres of both men and women. This includes talking about men’s contribution to the home and about issues of men’s domesticity and caring for family members.

Conclusion

This article has explored some contemporary workplace discourses circulating within a specific academic site. These discourses both positioned and shaped the performances of four academic women as they negotiated this workplace through a period of ongoing organisational change. This case study has presented a discourse analysis that unmasks specific gendered performances happening within MU, a context where the four academic women felt constrained by dominant discourses and expectations set out by the university, and their own desires as academic women. Clear and precise messages about gender expectations were attached to their bodies; this embodiment has consequences when bodies perform ‘wrongly’.45 This implies and confirms that performances by women are always tied to their bodies. However, also present in this analysis were discourses that constructed an alternative figuration: the entrepreneurial academic woman.

The subject position of the entrepreneurial academic allowed these women to challenge phallocentric positionings and narrow images of what it meant to them to be an academic woman at this specific site. This is the risky and ambiguous space created through the narratives of Tamaly, Veronica, Alice and Madonna. While it can be argued that these women experience multiple subjectivities and construct themselves as entrepreneurial academic women, dominant institutional discourses re-inscribe traditional images of the nurturing teacher to their bodies. This illustrates a gap between the hope that feminists held for transformation when phallocentrism was exposed and the experience of working life. In particular, this analysis highlights the gap between private (subjectivity) and public (institutional) transformation. While the notion of the entrepreneurial academic woman offers a new way of valuing women’s contributions and value- adding to the contemporary academic workplace, further research is needed concerning the gap between the hope for transformation and the realities of contemporary Australian society.

Notes

1 J Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labour Force and the Dawn of the Post- Market Era, G P Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1996.
2 B Probert and B Wilson (eds), Pink Collar Blues: Work Gender and Technology, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1993; Grazyna Zajdow, Women and Work: Current Issues and Debates, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1995.
3 I Watson et al., Fragmented Futures: New Challenges in Working Life, Federation Press, Leichhardt, NSW, 2003.
4 Michelle Gunn, ‘Women on Top, Men on Slide’, Australian, 21 June 2000, p 14; Michelle Hele, ‘Women Pushing up the Glass Ceiling’, Courier Mail, 24 August 1999, p 5.
5 Jan Currie, ‘The Effects of Globalisation on 1990s Academics in Greedy Institutions: Overworked, Stressed out and Demoralised’, Melbourne Studies in Education, vol 37, no 2, 1996.
6 Anna Yeatman, ‘The Gendered Management of Equity-Orientated Change in Higher Education’ in Diana Baker and Madeleine Fogarty (eds), A Gendered Culture Educational Management in the Nineties, Victoria University of Technology, St Albans, 1993, p 14.
7 Rifkin, op. cit., p 92.
8 A Strauss and J Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, 2nd edn, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998.
9 N Edley, ‘Analysing Masculinity: Interpretative Repertoires, Ideological Dilemmas and Subject Postions’ in Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor and Simeon Yates (eds), Discourse as Data a Guide for Analysis, Sage, London, 2001; Leonie Rowan, Write Me In: Inclusive Texts in the Primary Classroom, Primary English Teaching Association, Newtown, NSW, 2001; Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor and Simeon Yates (eds), Discourse as Data, Sage, London, 2001. 10 Edley, op. cit.
11 ibid., p 198.
12 S B Merriam, Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education, Jossey-Bass, San Fransico, CA, 1998.
13 Teresa Moore, ‘The Gap Between Hope and Happening: Feminist Consciousness Meets Phallocentric Smog in a Regional Australian University’, PhD thesis, Faculty of Education and Creative Arts, Central Queensland University, 2003.
14 E A Grosz, ‘The in(Ter)Vention of Feminist Knowledges’ in B Caine, E A Grosz, and M de Lepervanche (eds), Crossing Boundaries Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988; Elisabeth Grosz, ‘Inscriptions and Body Maps: Representations and the Corporeal’ in Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis (eds), Feminine Masculine and Representation, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990.
15 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994.
16 Dean Ashenden and Sandra Milligan, The Good Universities Guide — 2002 Edition, Hobsons Australia, Melbourne, 2001, p 77.
17 ‘Milton University’, University Handbook, MU Press, 2001, p 11.
18 ibid., p 10.
19 Jan Currie, Patricia Harris and Bev Thiele, ‘Sacrifices in Greedy Universities: Are They Gendered?’, Gender and Education, vol 12, no 3, 2000; Terry Evans, ‘(En)Countering Globalisation: Issues for Open and Distance Education’ in ed. Leonie Rowan, Leo Bartlett and Tery Evans (eds), Shifting Borders Globalisation, Localisation and Open and Distance Education, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1997; Leonie Rowan, ‘Cabbages Grow on the Tundra yet the Moose Feeds by Night: Feminism, Universities and Other Cultural Mysteries’ in Leonie Rowan and Marie Brennan (eds), Cultural Transformation: Essays in Culture and Change, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, 1998; Leonie Rowan and Leo Bartlett, ‘Feminist Theorising on Open and Distance Education: Local and Global Perspectives’ in L Rowan, L Bartlett and T Evans (eds), Shifting Borders: Globalisation, Localisation and Open and Distance Learning, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1997); Zoe Sofia, ‘Of Spanners and Cyborgs: “De-Homogenising” Feminist Thinking on Technology’ in Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1995; Cherie Sutherland, ‘Feminist Research: A Voice of Our Own’ in H Marchant and B Wearing (eds), Gender Reclaimed — Women in Social Work, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1986; Sue Wise, ‘What Are Feminist Academics For?’ in Liz Stanley (ed.), Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories and Tribes, Sage, London, 1997; Yeatman, op. cit. 20 C McInnis, ‘Towards New Balance or New Divides? The Changing Roles of Academics in Australia’ in M Tight (ed.), Academic Work and Life: What It Is to Be an Academic, and How This Is Changing, International Perspectives in Higher Education Research, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, 2000, p 136.
21 ibid., p 144.
22 Equity and Diversity Division, Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency Report 2001–2002, ‘Milton University’, ‘Milton’, QLD, 2002.
23 Noel Waite, ‘Fine Balance: Family, Consultancy, a Seat on the Board and Time to Play Tennis. By Going “Portfolio” Perhaps It Is Possible to Have It All’, VIVE, 2002.
24 Elisabeth Hills, ‘The ‘Ripley’ Effect: Action Heroines and the Transformation of Feminist Film Theory’ in Leonie Rowan and Marie Brennan (eds), Cultural Transformations: Essays in Culture and Change, Central Queensland University Press, Rockhampton, QLD, 1998, p 127. 25 Braidotti, op. cit.
26 ibid., p 5.
27 ibid., p 155.
28 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 1996.
29Moira Gatens, ‘Power, Bodies and Difference’ in Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 1992. 30 Braidotti, op. cit., p 164.
31 Veronica Beechey, Unequal Work, Verso, London, 1987.
32 Leonie Rowan, ‘“Human” Resource Management, “Flexible” Learning and Difference: A Feminist Exploration’ in Viktor Jakupec and John Garrick (eds), Flexible Learning, Human Resource and Organisational Development: Putting Theory to Work, Routledge, London, 2000, p 153.
33 Clare Burton, ‘Gender Equity in Australian University Staffing’, Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra, 1997, p 30.
34 ‘Milton University’, ‘Equal Employment Opportunity (Affirmative Action for Women) Policy Statement’, ‘MU’, 1995. Accessed 5 November 2001.
http://www.MU.edu.au/documents/unipol/equal_employment_women_-_policy.htm ‘Milton University’, ‘Equity Policy Statement’, ‘MU’, 1996. Accessed 10 June 2002. http://www.MU.edu.au/ppmanual/staff/equitystatement.htm
35 Margaret Allen and Tanya Castleman, ‘Fighting the Pipeline Fallacy’ in Ann Brooks and Alison Mackinnon (eds), Gender and the Restructured University, Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, Buckingham, 2001; Margaret Allen and Tanya Castleman, ‘Gender Privilege in Higher Education: Examining Its Dimensions and Dynamics’, conference paper, Women, Culture and Universities: a chilly climate?, University of Technology, Sydney, 1995; Burton, op. cit.
36 Braidotti, op. cit., p 35.
37 Grosz, ‘The in(Ter)Vention of Feminist Knowledges’, op. cit.
38 Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms, Routledge, London, 1997; Hills, op. cit.
39 Braidotti, op. cit.
40 Judy Wajcman, Managing Like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate Management, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998, p 160.
41 Moira Gatens, ‘Institutions, Embodiment and Sexual Difference’ in Moira Gatens and Alison Mackinnon (eds), Gender and Institutions Welfare, Work and Citizenship, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
42 Wajcman, op. cit., p 160.
43 ibid., p 164.
44 N Aveling, ‘“Having It All” and the Discourse of Equal Opportunity: Reflections on Choices and Changing Perceptions’, Gender and Education, vol 14, no 3, 2002; B Probert, ‘“Grateful Slaves” or “Self-Made Women”: A Matter of Choice or Policy’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol 17, no 37, 2002.
45 Betsy Lucal, ‘What It Means to Be Gendered Me Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System’, Gender and Society, vol 13, no 6, 1999.

Originally published in Backburning: Journal of Australian Studies no 84, Helen Addison-Smith, An Nguyen and Denise Tallis (eds), Perth, API Network, 2005.