Solitudes of the Workplace: Women in Universities ed. by Elvi Whittaker (review)

Solitudes of the Workplace, edited by Elvi Whittaker, provides a much needed and refreshing volume focused on the university and its exclusionary dealings with women in the multiple roles they occupy on Canadian campuses. It is inclusive of women administrators, full-time and contractual faculty, staff, students, and researchers. It examines both policy and process in the form of new and changing curriculum, as well as federal policies favouring workplace inclusivity. In weaving together the diverse female voices and their everyday experiences in the corridors of academia, the writers highlight detailed patterns of the ways in which women are subjugated, devalued, silenced, and excluded as they undertake their work and education through the university labyrinth. Their feelings of individual solitude become collective forms of agency as they learn to garner strength negotiating social and structural barriers and injustices such as systemic discrimination. One can only wonder if the ivory towers of learning in Canada will continue these toxic practices and disturbing challenges facing women, particularly given the context of increased fiscal restraint, decreased government funding, reduced workforce participation, and corporatization in the learning and working milieu of the university system. It is a vulnerable time in the history of advanced education, given that some university administrators are busting the financial bubble with egregious incomes, double-dipping pay enhancements, lack visibility on their campuses, and often neglect and disregard the faculty, staff, and researchers who work for the advancement of the university system.

The book opens with an interview by Sally E. Thorne with Martha Piper, former and first female president of the University of British Columbia. As a powerful woman at the helm of a large Canadian university, she highlights how the variable of gender placed under close scrutiny her personal presentation of self, and her lifestyle, as well as the pushback she experienced, both within and outside of the university system. Her nine years of dedicated hard work and the contested terrain of an engaged university leader are delineated.

The book is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, the authors note how disciplines incorporate new knowledge and changing epistemologies, as well as how federal policies are put in place for public sector workers who deal with issues of equity and diversity. Annalee Lepp writes on the changing landscape of women’s studies and how the discipline has been developed and refined according to university programming and politics. Some programs have been sustained, others have been reworked, renamed, or merged with other disciplines, while some have been dismantled. Winnie Lem accounts for how feminism was introduced into the discipline of anthropology in Canada, and the important need for these epistemological changes as they intersect with advances in teaching, learning, and research.

Joan M. Anderson, in dialogue with Noga Gayle, notes how the Federal Contractors Program, put in place to make for equitable public sector workplace practices for visible minorities, often overshadows their experiences and does not make for meaningful distinctions between those women and men of diverse class, race, ethnicity, disability, and/or sexuality. Hence, their work struggles may continue given that the federal policy lacks precision and fine-tuned designations and categories as they relate to the fabric of human’s lives.

Part Two of the book captures women’s everyday lived experiences and their identity transformations. Pauline Palulis bravely relates her struggle in attaining tenure and her outside status given the unsecure, in-between, place she occupied in contesting the feeling of otherness as she was initially denied tenure. The work to successfully overturn the decision demonstrates the unfair and discriminatory processes that collude against worthy women faculty. Cecilia Maloney captures the feeling of isolation faced by female scientists as they teach and research in male dominated fields. In their quest for objectivity, publishing, and undertaking appropriate amounts of service, their hard science voices are re-worked, and their research is greeted with bias.

If women faculty continue to struggle for academic success, so too...