In November, Professor Nokuthula Sibiya started her tenure as vice-chancellor and principal of Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT). She is a nurse by profession and contributes to the health sector through her research.
That she is the first woman to hold the position in MUT’s 45-year existence is an indictment of the state of transformation in our universities. She is one of only seven women vice-chancellors in South Africa’s 26 public universities. This figure is even more unsettling when one considers universities as the custodians of knowledge production.
As communities of reason which pride themselves on promoting the free pursuit of rational inquiry, it is not out of order to expect universities to lead the way as examples of more equal institutions in society.
After all, these are institutions where rationality is supposed to trump all forms of discrimination. For the fact that universities have a noble role as the country’s brain trust, it is important to assess how they promote equitable participation based on race and gender.
With its dubious title of being the most unequal country in the world, South Africa’s inequality has infiltrated all aspects of life. Not even our universities have been spared. Statistically, these institutions are the sad microcosms of the country’s racialised and gendered inequality. They mirror many of our country’s realities, and more so the underrepresentation of women.
Women’s underrepresentation in public universities takes on many forms. According to the then Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation Dr Blade Nzimande, women made up 43% of permanent academic staff. In senior academic positions, women accounted for 18.5% of full professors and 29.8% of associate professors.
Speaking at the UN Women’s Participation in Higher Education in Southern Africa webinar last year, Nzimande explained that this underrepresentation meant that “women have no choice but to navigate their way through an environment that does not fully hear or see them”.
As we celebrate 30 years of democracy, it is important to acknowledge that the policies and mechanisms to transform higher education have paid greater dividends to some and not so much to African women particularly.
Universities must play an even bigger role in promoting the advancement of women within individual institutions. This is where the registrar’s divisions of universities come into play. As policy custodians and guardians of universities, the role of developing policies that intentionally eliminate barriers that impede women’s progress through academia largely rests with registrars.
Registrars should be as intentional and uncompromising in developing policies that promote women just as they do when it comes to race and gender quotas in their registration policies. The fact that there are more female students than their male counterparts in our universities today is a work of internal university policies and their goal of representing the country’s demographics.
This is what is missing in the quest for a more racial and gender-representative academic and research staff complement. It is encouraging to see more women being appointed to the position of university registrar within universities, challenging the unfounded perception of the university registrar’s position being a male domain.
The next step will be to develop policies that turn universities into women-friendly spaces. There is still a great need for women’s advocacy groups to communicate the plight of women.
With the slow pace of gender transformation, we run the risk of implicitly accepting the lack of women’s representation as the nature of academia.
We need more women’s solidarity and advocacy groups within and outside the university.
These organisations will do a better job of holding universities accountable and reminding them that the under-representation of women cannot be business as usual.
Only a deliberate and uncompromising commitment to equitable gender representation in research and academia will deliver much-needed gender redress in our universities.
• Sandile Zungu is the chancellor of Mangosuthu University of Technology
