‘Keeping your eye on the prize’: gender equality programmes in enterprise universities

This paper explores the material impact of major transformations in the Australian academic field upon a group of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse academic women leaders1 who, because of their varying degrees of seniority, were positioned as key ’change agen(ts)’ in their diverse locales (Yeatman 1995: 203). It examines two key questions. Firstly, despite long term policies of equity and diversity, how are such women leaders positioned in a field in which to be an academic leader/manager still requires that one both ’masculinises and whitens’? (Williams 1991 cited in Reay 2004: 31). Secondly, given the small amount of research upon such women and the largely unexamined assumption underpinning educational studies which posits white and middle-class as the naturalized subject location of leadership (Fitzgerald 2003, Wilkinson 2005), what learnings can we draw from these women’s experiences in relation to gender equality programmes in universities?