"And Still We Rise": Black British Female Professors' Survival in U.K. Higher Education

• In Event: 21.014 - Beyond Invisibility: The Experiences and Strategies of Black Female Faculty in the United Kingdom and United States

Abstract

In 2015/16, there were 13295 UK white Professors accounting for 11.1% of the white academic population. This compares with 1150 UK faculty from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds (faculty of colour) who make up 9.7% of all academics from this group. Further examination of this data reveals distinct disparities by race and gender. For example during 2015/16, 3260 (22.6%) of UK professors were white female. Female Professors of colour represented just 1.7% (250) of the entire UK professor population. Just 25 of these were Black.

This paper draws on data from the first British study to examine the career experiences and strategies of UK Black female professors. Twenty qualitative, semi-structured interviews were carried out with the respondent group during the 2017/2018 Spring and Summer terms. The objective of the research was threefold: to document the barriers facing these women and explore how they strategise to overcome them, to highlight the presence of a relatively invisible and under-examined group and, finally, for the findings to act as a source of guidance for scholars of colour at early stages of their career. Informed by Critical Race Theory and Bourdieu, particular attention is paid to how particular forms of knowledge and ways of being are legitimated within the academy and how structural inequalities and injustices operate at the intersection of race and gender. With the exception of those leading research centres, early findings indicate that UK Black female academics operate in relative intellectual, spiritual and professional isolation within their institutions but gain support (often fortuitously) from a small handful of allies within and outside of their university and the higher education sector more broadly. For those who entered the academy later in life, having already established themselves in a main career, higher education offers stability and a regular income. They recognise the value of having a profession within which they have gained recognition and credibility independent of the barriers presented by the academy. Achieving professorship was not necessarily the explicit ambition for those I describe as ‘career academics’. Their career trajectories are marked by a messy, sometimes non-linear route - for example, taking a demotion on appointment to a higher status university - as well as accounts of being undermined, overlooked at key junctures and of feeling undervalued by their faculty colleagues and, in some instances, the wider university. Some respondents shared explicit and shocking examples of bullying and harassment and in so doing reveal the tension between institutional claims of diversity and inclusion and the formal, mechanistic ways in which they strive to protect their reputations and select members of staff. Despite these continued challenges, the data reveal striking examples of defiance and resilience and solidarity (for example, offers of support to me as a female scholar of colour) and an astute ability to code-switch within the various academic spaces (committees, supervision, interviews) Black female professors are called upon to occupy as academics.

Author

• Nicola Rollock, Goldsmiths University