Image: Christoff Pauw
Women are still marginalised in African research, Stellenbosch meeting hears
Women still battle to get their voices heard in African research despite some gains and inclusivity drives across the continent, a meeting has heard.
The sentiment emerged as the dominant theme during a panel discussion about gender issues in African research hosted by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa on 22 October.
Aretha Phiri, a senior lecturer at the Department of Literary Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa, said that women researchers are locked in an “aggressively competitive environment” where they have to fight for limited resources while also dealing with added responsibilities such as motherhood.
Attitudes towards women scientists remain a barrier, she added: “You are always patronised, it doesn’t matter if you have a PhD.” The only recourse for women when faced with “institutionalised patriarchal and masculine spaces and a hierarchical and territorial old guard” is to be disruptive, she said.
Sarah Howie, director of the Africa Centre for Scholarship at Stellenbosch University, said that challenges differ across the continent. There is “gross under-representation” of women in science in certain African countries, she said. For example, women made up only a couple of more than 100 Ethiopian participants at her centre’s African Doctoral Academy training programme over the last three years.
Howie agreed with Phiri about the challenges young women researchers face and said that established women researchers should lend more support to younger ones since they “have learnt to work around the barriers”.
Universities should aim for “equity, not just equality”, Howie added. Whereas equality means treating everybody the same, equity means favouring certain groups to help them gain an even footing with more privileged peers. To this end, political will must be “provoked and stimulated”, she said.
She added that African research administrators should also think about gender fluidity and non-binary identities, and how this fits into empowerment schemes.