Engaging feminist pedagogies to support equality bargaining in academia

Abstract

Despite decades of Equal Opportunity legislation, gender inequality persists in Australian universities. This is largely due to the shaping of universities by new market principles, discourses of individualisation that render the asymmetry of gender relations invisible, and privileging masculine epistemologies. Concurrently, industrial relations have been decentralised, and individual universities negotiate staff pay and working conditions through local Enterprise Bargaining (EB). Whilst EB mitigates the development of a national gender-equity framework for universities, trade unions operating through inequality regimes rarely prioritised gender equity even when they did lead national negotiations. Therefore, within a context of complex inequalities in higher education and trade unions, this paper explores how feminist pedagogies can facilitate equality bargaining and gender equality in academia. It also suggests that equality bargaining is especially important during (current) times of austerity when the removal of gender-equality support structures within trade unions generally occur.