Dismantling the father’s house? Women as doctoral supervisors

Abstract

The traditional master–apprentice architecture of doctoral supervision is undoubtedly undergoing change. In the anglophone world, the father’s house of supervision with its almost exclusively male occupants was first established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It persisted, largely undisputed, until the final decades of the twentieth century, when doctoral numbers bloomed throughout the West and more and more women (and others) took occupancy of the house as students and supervisors (advisors). In this article, I sketch the gendered origins of doctoral supervision in the West and then review the extant (anglophone) literature on women doctoral supervisors. In examining that small body of work, I ask two questions: What are women doing to supervision? And is the woman supervisor really ‘just a man’? My conclusions underscore the complexity of ongoing efforts to dismantle the father’s house of supervision.