Gender Studies as a Profession

Abstract

The good news is that Gender Studies is bucking the trend. The trend I refer to here is the one outlined in the 2006 OECD report Women in Scientific Careers: Unleashing the Potential. That report is full of the woes of women’s underrepresentation in academe, their under-representation in absolute terms, in specific disciplines, in senior positions, in decision-making bodies, among PhD students – everywhere. Well, as was evident at the GenderChange in Academia: Remapping the fields of work, knowledge, and politics from a gender perspective conference held at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen in February 2009, the same cannot be said for Women’s and Gender Studies where, on the contrary, one might say, women are in fact over-represented.2 Women’s or Gender Studies is in that respect one of the true success stories of higher education. But, of course, this success is also regarded by some as its Archilles’ heal since the absence of men in the discipline has, arguably, led to Women’s Studies preaching its messages to the converted rather than converting the unconvinced, that is men – and, of course, some women – of the need to promote the rights of women across all spheres of activity. Well, I shall not pursue this argument here but I want to hang on to the notion of Gender Studies as a success story in higher education because I think we often lose sight of that in the dailiness of our labours.

A previous version of this paper was published as Griffin (2009).