Masculinism, institutional violence and #MeToo: understanding Australian University responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article offers an analysis of data from the project Sexism, Higher Education, and Covid-19: The Australian Perspective. The authors argue that the gendered impact of the pandemic in Higher Education Institutions constitutes a form of institutionally perpetrated sexist harassment, and that raising awareness of the ways in which institutions themselves enable and perpetrate such harassment is consistent with the aims of the #MeToo movement. This article is intended to act as testament to the ways in which Australian universities function as masculinist institutions that, during this time of crisis, deployed tactics that were experienced by women and minority-identifying research participants as sexist and violent. The article illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and university responses to it, are evidence of the everyday sexual violence that women and gender-diverse academics experience due to inherent norms about the labour that ‘counts’ in the masculinist, neoliberal academy.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexism
• higher education
• COVID-19

Introduction: masculinism, higher education and COVID-19

The #MeToo movement achieved global interest following a series of rape allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in 2017. Hailed as a ‘modern-day reckoning with sex discrimination in the workplace’ (Wexler, Robbennolt, and Murphy 2019, 45), the #MeToo hashtag, understood to represent survivors of sexual assault feeling heard, was used 12 million times in the first 24 h, and led to the development of support networks for survivors (Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller 2018), as well as to cultural shifts in the way that sexual harassment and assault is understood and actioned by workplaces (McDonald 2020). The movement in its contemporary form is not without criticism; whilst it is acknowledged that the #MeToo movement actually began in 2006 and was founded by African American rights activist Tarana Burke, sexual violence perpetrated against African American and women of colour globally receives very different treatment in the popular press than did the largely white-led version of the movement that erupted in 2017 (Rodino-Colocino 2018). In Australia, ‘notoriously complex’ anti-defamation laws prevented the landslide of #MeToo stories that have been generated by the movement in Hollywood and beyond (Hill 2021).

Higher Education (HE) in Australia is yet to have a #MeToo moment. The closest it has come to this is that in 2017, the Australian Human Rights Commission published a report entitled Change the Course (Australia Human Rights Commissions 2017). Conducted at the request of the 39 public universities in Australia, the report is a survey into ‘the nature, prevalence and reporting of sexual assault and sexual harassment at Australian universities’ (ibid.). The survey measured the experiences of over 30,000 students across all 39 universities and the findings are significant, disturbing, and relevant including that:

• 21% of students were harassed on campus

• Women were twice as likely as men to be harassed at university

• 44% of students who identified as bisexual and 38% of students who identified as gay or lesbian were sexually harassed in a university setting in 2016, compared with 23% of students who identified as heterosexual.

• Trans and gender-diverse students (45%) were more likely to have been sexually harassed in a university setting in 2016 than cisgender students.

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are more likely to be sexually harassed than non-Indigenous students

• Students with a disability are more likely to be sexually harassed than students without a disability.

• Postgraduate students were more likely to have been harassed by a staff member than undergraduate students.

The report makes it clear that the problems related to gender equity and justice in our society are reflected within Australian universities: women and marginalised staff are more likely to experience disrespect, harassment and other oppressions. In response, universities across Australia revised and refined their various Gender Equity Plans, Reconciliation Action¹ Plans and other policy guidance documentation to ensure equity of access and experience to all students and staff. Whilst important work, Change the Course does not examine the experiences of staff, nor does it address the micro-aggressions we refer to in this article as ‘everyday sexisms’ that impact staff and students within Australian universities. Everyday sexisms contribute to what Alison Phipps (2020) refers to as ‘patriarchal normalisation’ (232) within Higher Education Institutions (HEI), as they normalise patriarchal gender-based assumptions, actions and behaviours. By everyday sexisms, we mean the gender-based microaggressions experienced by women, non-binary and gender-diverse people as part of their daily workplace routines (Gray, Knight, and Blaise 2018). Often fleeting and seemingly banal, everyday sexisms accumulate over time and, as this article attests, create feelings of resignation, exhaustion and rage for those subject to them. The fleeting moments where experiences are shaped in gendered and also racialised, sexualised and ableist ways have been labelled by Savigny (2014) as ‘slippery sexisms’. The authors demonstrate throughout this article that such slippery sexisms are perpetrated by Australian universities as corporate machines, as well as by individuals working within them, and that these were amplified during the early stages of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic when work-at-home orders were issued.

The article draws from data from a project entitled Sexisms, Higher Education, and Covid-19: The Australian Perspective. It is intended to act as testament to the ways in which Australian universities failed, and continue to fail, to adequately support academic workers during the crisis. More than this, an insistence on a ‘business as usual’ approach that was juxtaposed with frequent ‘well-being’ advice and messaging about being ‘in this together’ led to a loss of trust in the sector writ large. The impact of this sense of betrayal amongst university staff should not be underestimated, and we show the devastating effects on the mental health of the crisis, effects that could have been avoided if universities had demonstrated understanding, care and compassion for their staff who are, as one Aboriginal woman participant articulated, ‘broken but alive’ in the aftermath of, at the time of writing, over 3 years of uncertainty, loss, grief and change (Gray et al. 2023). Following the work of Alison Phipps (2020), higher education as an institution is understood in this article as behaving in sexist and discriminatory ways. Phipps argues that such an analysis is necessary in order to ‘uncover deep truths, encourage institutional honesty and shape constructive critiques of […] the neoliberal university’ (2020, 239), and as a call for sectoral change.

This research also adds to a growing field examining the gendered impact of the pandemic, and whilst the article does not take sexual harassment and assault as its topic, we argue that the gendered impacts of the pandemic in HEIs constitute a form of everyday sexist harassment, and that shining a light upon this is consistent with the aims of the #MeToo movement as well as to Phipps (2020) call. Research into the gendered experiences of COVID-19 has thus far illustrated how the many and layered impacts of COVID-19 were disproportionately experienced. The reasons for this are numerous, and include that women were more likely to be employed in ‘frontline work’ such as healthcare, grocery retail, or in businesses that were the most severely affected by lockdowns and social distancing, like hospitality (Alon et al. 2020). Women were also involved in unpaid care and volunteer community work, meaning that they experienced a ‘double burden’ as they were also more likely to be doing the majority of childcare and domestic labour in the home (McLaren et al. 2020). The closure of childcare centres and schools during periods of lockdown, meant that working mothers in heterosexual relationships were managing homeschooling to enable male partners to continue working both inside and outside of the home (Alon et al. 2020; Del Boca et al. 2020; Sevilla and Smith 2020). Feminist work conducted during this time examines the racialised, classed as well as gendered impacts of COVID-19 demonstrating how ‘it became visible that women, especially women of colour in paid and domestic care work and key worker roles were keeping the system running’ (Swan 2020, no page). COVID-related research has also demonstrated that women were more likely to have experienced adverse effects on their mental health and well-being during the pandemic and related periods of lockdown (Ausín et al. 2021; Czymora, Langenkamp, and Cano 2020; Song et al. 2020). This was caused by increasing domestic labour combined with the likelihood of being employed in insecure or precarious work. Most disturbingly, there was an increase in domestic violence and many women found themselves trapped within the domestic sphere with their abusers during lockdowns (Roesch et al. 2020).

Global HEI research illustrates how existing gender-based inequalities and intersectional inequalities within the academy were amplified. For example, Oleschuck (2020) illustrates the specific ways in which Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) women were specifically disadvantaged during the pandemic. This was the result of both systemic racism and a lack of understanding within North American higher education of the emotional care work taken on by women in general, and BIPOC women particularly. In Australia, Aboriginal scholars illustrate the specific challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university workers, and the ways in which they supported each other when institutional support for the specificities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing were lacking (Bennett et al. 2021; Carlson et al. 2021; O’Sullivan 2021).

International research into the impacts of COVID-19, gender and higher education provides evidence of a decrease in research productivity for women (Cui, Ding, and Zhu 2020). Accompanying this drop in research-related outputs was an increase in domestic, childcare and caring responsibilities as families lived and worked at home. The ‘business as usual’ approach adopted by many Australian universities meant that the quantifying of research outputs and assessment of teaching quality did not change, and this has been shown to result in a significant drop in the mental health and wellbeing of university workers during the pandemic (Gray et al. 2023; Malisch et al. 2020). This article offers a close engagement with the gendered impacts of working in higher education in Australia during the pandemic, and demonstrates how participants in our research experienced their workplaces themselves as enacting sexist harassment and gender-based discrimination. Our work shows that everyday sexisms are part of the #MeToo picture, and one which has thus far been overlooked within Higher Education in Australia.

The article is foregrounded by discussing the theoretical framework used to analyse the data where we draw from masculinism, neoliberalism and feminism. This theoretical framework is shown to provide useful tools that have the potential to broaden understanding of the #MeToo movement for educational institutions, educational leadership and institutional policymaking. The article frames contemporary universities as sites that reinscribe colonial discourses, thus privileging particular epistemic standpoints within these institutions, creating hierarchies of knowledge within which Indigenous and feminist ways of knowing, being and doing, are subjugated (Moreton-Robinson 2004). Following this, the article outlines the methodology and methods used in the research. The authors then offer an analysis of two themes that emerged from the data: the gendered division of labour within Australian universities; and COVID-19 responses and trauma. We conclude by arguing that urgent and collaborative change is needed within the sector and that this change should begin with universities, their administrators, leaders and policymakers engaging in self-analysis (Phipps 2020).

The university as a masculinist organisation

It has long been articulated that the contemporary Australian (as well as British and American) university system is marketised and characterised by neoliberalism (Brown 2015; Sims 2020). It has also been argued that masculinism is also in the mix (Sims 2020), and that this triad creates a toxic working culture that constructs ‘privileged men (usually in well-funded subjects), as institutional breadwinners who contribute and matter more’ (Phipps 2020). Accordingly, this means that academics who ‘matter less’ within universities routinely experience their workplaces as hostile and marginalising places (Ahmed 2012).

Neoliberalism is understood here as a rationality of power that acts to transform ‘every human domain and endeavour, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic’ (Brown 2015, 10). Through the process of economic rationalisation, neoliberal discourse then masks its work towards the (re)production of an ideal type of human: white, male, able-bodied, middle class and heterosexual (Blackmore 2019). Due to their marketisation over previous decades, universities in Australia have adopted neoliberal governance techniques in order to maximise the economic productivity of their workforce. The supposed gender neutrality of the neoliberal subject is, however, revealed as chimeric within the Australian academy. For example, within the professoriate, men outnumber women 2:1; there is a ‘boys club’ culture where men are favoured for research only and/or capacity-building positions and workloads make a private/professional balance impossible, evidencing both the structural and everyday sexisms at play (Diezmann and Grieshaber, 2019, 2010; Gray, Knight, and Blaise 2018; Lipton 2020). A combination of the privileging of male-dominated disciplines and the masking of this through economic rationalisation works to promote a culture of masculinism, ‘an underlying ethos or totalising worldview that implicitly universalises and privileges the qualities of masculinity, and in doing so subordinates and “others” alternative ways of understanding, knowing and being’ (Nicholas and Agius 2017, 5). Higher Education Institutions can then be a hostile and toxic environment to work in if you do not possess universal qualities associated with masculinity.

Masculinism is a useful concept for our research because of the ways in which it ‘subverts and directs, as well as constitutes forms of violence, domination, and structural inequality across multiple axes of difference’ (Nicholas and Agius 2017, 5). Thinking with masculinism in this way allows us, as Nicholas and Agius (2017) suggest, to separate our gendered analysis from the individual, binary acts of men and women and instead to understand the ‘gendered frameworks that are persisting and resurfacing in increasingly covert ways that naturalise and maintain hierarchies’ within the Australian university system (Nicholas and Agius 2017, 6) itself. In this work, we understand neoliberalism and masculinism as dark twins that inflict symbolic violence upon those who find themselves falling outside of the dominant constellation of privilege within the contemporary university, namely: those identifying as women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people of colour, LGBTIQ+ people and people with disabilities. Within this context, it is important to give voice to those who are not only marginalised within Higher Education, but who also experience it as abusive, and it is here that our work in this article is aligned with the aims of the #MeToo movement, as we aim to illustrate how universities are made up of structures, cultures and practices (Phipps 2020) that enable gender-based oppressions, and tie the experiences of our participants together.

The structures, cultures and practices we allude to above are evident in the ways that the contemporary university operates to quantify, measure and assess the worth of work done within the academy (Collini 2012; Sims 2020; Watts 2017). It is well understood that a marketised version of higher education creates a workforce that is stratified along disciplinary lines, and that this creates an economic hierarchy within the institution (Brown 2015; Sims 2020). There is epistemological stratification at play here too, as the contemporary university is based upon ‘white Cartesian male ways of knowing’ (Moreton-Robinson 2004, 76) that exist in opposition to feminist and Indigenous knowledge practices (Fredericks and White 2018; Moreton-Robinson 2004, 76). Universities then not only (re)produce epistemological hierarchies along racialised and gendered lines, but they also actively work to devalue knowledge generated from beyond this norm. The marketisation of higher education then reflects and promotes neoliberal understandings of individual achievement, economic worth and entrepreneurism. Within this mix, universities work to maintain ‘a marketable appearance, to the detriment of [students’ and employees’] welfare’ (Phipps 2020, 229). The marketised, neoliberal university therefore requires a particular kind of leadership in order to function successfully as a business. According to Sims (2020), successful higher education management is increasingly masculinised, and aggression, competition and emotional coldness are seen as necessary and desirable leadership qualities. For people whose affective understandings of the world do not align, or who wish to lead differently, it is difficult to thrive within the contemporary university at the best of times, let alone the worst.

The research presented here will illustrate some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the neoliberal, masculinist orientation of Higher Education in Australia, and the stark differences between those that are able to ‘play the game’ within the contemporary Australian university and those who are not. This project provided space for women-identifying academics to, in various ways, articulate inequities and grievances that align with the broader aims of the #MeToo movement because it created space for them to articulate their experiences.

Methodology

Originally intended as a pilot study for a larger project researching everyday sexisms in Australian universities, the event of COVID-19 necessitated that the research team focussed on the gendered impacts of the pandemic as lived by Australian academic workers. This is because the effects of the pandemic on life in much of Australia, including within Australian HEI was profound. The team, therefore, designed a 2 phase project that aimed to capture the gendered and intersectional experiences of academic workers. The first phase of this research was a survey that was completed by almost 200 respondents. The survey research was conducted during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, where most states in Australia had some form of lockdown and varying degrees of COVID-19 associated regulations such as mask-wearing, social distancing and limits on public and private gatherings. Our survey showed that women-identifying participants articulated how working from home during lockdowns was complicated by childcare and homeschooling responsibilities. Nearly half of the cohort reported an increase in their caring responsibilities (n = 88, 49.7%) and almost a third reported ‘feeling overburdened by domestic duties for others’ (n = 55; 31.1%) (Gray et al. 2023, 4). While male-identifying academics participated in comparatively small numbers overall, it is notable that just 9.1% of this cohort reported feeling overburdened by domestic duties, as compared to 32.1% of the women participants. A sizable group of participants reported that domestic challenges were heightened by the worsening of their chronic health conditions over this period (n = 56; 31.6%) (Gray et al. 2023, 5). Our survey also contained a significant qualitative component, and we asked participants to articulate their experiences relating to COVID-19, sexism and their university’s response to the pandemic. We have written about the qualitative component of the survey elsewhere (Gray et al. 2023). The survey had written with it an option to participate in a semi-structured interview. Forty-four agreed and the second phase of the research saw the team carry out interviews with 10 survey participants who indicated a willingness to participate in this phase of the project following invitations from the research team.

When discussing participant data we use the language that participants use to describe themselves. This is part of the feminist ethic of the research we have done, and is in line with the #MeToo movement’s aim to hear stories as they are told. Two participants whose data are under discussion in this article identified as queer. As queer researchers, we did not ask participants to qualify exactly what queer means to them. We did not interview Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander participants, and whilst there was cultural diversity in our participant group, we did not interview people of colour. The table below offers an overview of the participants in terms of identity. Care has been taken to ensure the anonymity of participants and the institutions that they work for throughout the article. An outline of participants is offered in the table below (Table 1).

Table 1. Interview participants.

Pseudonym	Identity	Discipline	Location
Ange	higher educator, in a relationship with a women, carer	Education	South Australia
Annie	university educator, a researcher and a mother	Humanities Arts and Social Science (HASS)	New South Wales
Jane	cis-queer white settler woman	HASS	Queensland
Jessica	queer cis-woman	HASS	Victoria
Josie	Anglo white settler. Female, uses she or they pronouns, academic.
Roger	male	Education	Western Australia
Sally	Woman (she/her), single mother, academic	Interdisciplinary	Queensland
Sister Zero	artist and theorist	HASS	Victoria
Sonia	cis-woman, Italian background, Australian	HASS	Australian Capital Territory
Vanessa	cisgender, sexually fluid, white	HASS	Victoria

Interviews focussed on university life, COVID and the university, and participants’ understanding of how gendered relationships function at their workplaces. Interviews were transcribed using Microsoft Teams’ in-built transcription software, and data was uploaded into the qualitative software NVivo, where a descriptive thematic analysis was undertaken. To ensure trustworthiness, the two lead researchers adopted recommended strategies for qualitative thematic analyses (Nowell et al. 2017) including co-developing the coding frame; and cross-checking for researcher triangulation after each researcher independently applied this frame to the data. The initial engagement with the data highlighted general codes, for example, the issue of ‘increased labour’ was present across nearly all participant experiences. As a result, the researchers closely re-read and recoded the data specifically focusing on ‘increased labour’, then collaboratively recoded again to identify the central themes arising within this code (Saldana 2014). Themes discussed in the following sections are the gendered division of labour; and institutional violence. The following sections offer an analysis of these themes and discuss anonymised data from four participants: Jane, Annie, Josie and Sally. Data from these participants has been selected because it best illustrates the themes under discussion.

The gendered division of labour in Australian universities

That a gendered division of labour persists within contemporary higher education is not a new finding. Diane Reay (2004) for example writes about how academic success has always been dependent upon the invisible emotional labour of women within the academy. According to Reay, not only do women in the academy perform unofficial care work, they also prop up ‘successful’ (male) researchers because women are more likely to be precariously employed within the sector. The positioning of ‘woman as carer’ within the contemporary academy also reflects what Judith Butler (1990) terms ‘the heterosexual matrix’, in that it assumes that women have innate and essential characteristics and personality traits that include the will to care and to follow normative versions of the heterosexual family within and outside of actual family structures. The division of labour in higher education then replicates heterosexual family forms, and creates its own set of exclusions for lesbian and trans* women, non-binary people and those whose understandings of gender do not align. Reay (2004) argues that ‘we need to develop a critical lens on the myriad ways in which we are drawn into making masculinity powerful’ (38). A central argument of this article is that attention needs to be drawn to the ways in which masculinist ways of knowing, being and doing work with neoliberal management techniques to privilege the dominant, yet invisible normative subject within contemporary universities; the cismale, white, heterosexual and able-bodied academic. An example of how masculinism operates within higher education is through the division of labour, where women do much of the invisible and unquantifiable care work, and men are thus enabled to focus on the practicalities of their work. This is an example of how everyday sexisms operate in subtle and nuanced ways. In two of the interviews we conducted, women participants talked about how the men they worked with articulated 2020 as having been a ‘good/great year’, whilst their women colleagues conversely experienced it as traumatic. Jane, who identifies as a cis-queer white settler woman and works in Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) at a university in Queensland, illustrated her experiences of this as follows,

But academia’s awful, like, I mean it’s cutthroat. It’s competitive, it’s brutal, it’s a huge boys club like, and it’s become more of a boys’ club […] and then there’s a lot of people who would tread on the back of your neck for kudos […] And I guess particularly over the last year because, because it’s been such a such an intense time for so many people, so many students, so many staff, that support work, you know [is] super gendered, super undervalued and that then just kind of exacerbates that boys-clubby dynamic because they just get to focus on their own shit and then congratulate each other on it. And it’s like, well, that’s that’s great. I’m really happy that you’ve had a good year. That’s awesome, but like, look at the literal wreckage around you. Did you do anything about that?

Jane highlights here how the support work that keeps the system running during times of crisis (Swan 2020), such as student pastoral care and staff wellbeing initiatives, is visibly gendered. Jane’s statement also illustrates how universities are made within the heterosexual matrix, with men at the top able to get on with their work, and women left to perform whatever cleanup is required. This work goes unnoticed as there is no way, within Australia’s current system of neoliberal performance metrics, to account for institutional carework, as like domestic labour, it has no monetary or intellectual value within the institution.

Cui, Ding, and Zhu’s (2020) research evidences the gender disparity in research productivity caused by COVID-19 within the social sciences. Their findings show that during the ten weeks after the lockdown in the United States, although total research productivity increased by 35%, female academics’ productivity dropped by 13.9% relative to that of male academics. Cui, Ding and Zhu’s research also show that Australia’s gender gap in academic productivity showed a statistically significant decline. This statistical work, coupled with the qualitative data we have presented here demonstrates how the masculinist orientation of Australian universities allowed men’s work to flourish during COVID-19 lockdowns, and women’s work to suffer. Several participants reported, like Jane, that some of the men they worked with experienced the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 era positively, often self-reporting an increase in their research outputs. Annie, who identifies as a university educator, a researcher and a mother who works in a school of international relations at a university in New South Wales stated how

Quite a few men have openly said in front of me and other people they must know were struggling, what a great year it’s been for them because they’ve been at home and they haven’t been interrupted and they’ve been so productive and haven’t had to travel here, there and everywhere […] what a great year it’s been and y’know, two books out this year […] there’s then the other half of the room who’s sitting there thinking ‘are you kidding me?’ Like, y’know, I was trying to homeschool my children or whatever. So I think where you’ve got senior men who are free of caring responsibilities then the divide has been worsened, y’know if you look at it in that typical sense of erm younger female or earlier career female researchers and more senior men, without those responsibilities or whose wives, even if they’re not senior in age but their wives take these responsibilities […] the divide I think has been worsened.

If we are to understand Australian universities as institutions that are shaped by masculinist ways of being, knowing and doing, then the data under discussion here offers a glimpse into the frustrating and oppressive ways that gendered frameworks persist, the effect that they have, and the lack of space within the institution itself to challenge or even articulate everyday sexisms which means that gendered hierarchies are naturalised and maintained and continue to enable harmful everyday sexist practices. This lack of space is made evident by Annie’s assertion that women in the room were ‘sitting there thinking’ that 2020 had not been a good year for them.

Our data allows for a reading of everyday experience that moves beyond an individual, binary analysis of the actions of men and women (Nicholas and Agius 2017), and instead focuses upon the covert ways in which gendered hierarchies are naturalised and maintained within higher education, and where the institution itself becomes a sexist actor that oppresses, bullies and marginalises its employees. This is an example of how neoliberal masculinist management techniques create what Alison Phipps (2020) terms ‘patriarchal normalisation’ within HE, where sexist, oppressive and abusive tactics are deployed in order to maintain the productivity of staff. Participants articulated some of the ways in which the institutions that they work in regularly deployed contradictory and suspicious tactics in order to keep the workforce in check during periods of lockdown. Such tactics included generating a sense of fear for the future of current employment and the future of the sector. When talking about the university that she works for Jane stated that,

They definitely used the crisis to implement a bunch of changes that they wanted to do for a while but wouldn’t have been able to do beforehand. But once they got everyone good and scared for their jobs […] everyone’s just so grateful to have a job that they could push a bunch of really shitty things through. Exploitive, in terms of how […] you are overworked, not being paid for all your hours whether you are full-time or sessional or casual, like everyone was doing too much and the university kept saying that they would find a way to acknowledge all that extra work and they literally never have […] some of the ways that they’ve treated people are just really banking on the fact that they are vulnerable […] I mean and this also as part of where gender comes in, some of the areas that have been hardest affected and where people have been treated the worst, the worst, are areas where most of the staff are not full time employed, they’re women and some of those areas have been treated really badly, and just in really bad faith, yeah.

Jane’s statement is illustrative of neoliberal and masculinist management techniques that work to maintain gendered hierarchies within the university. Jane mirrors findings from research on the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on women. The most precariously employed people within the HE sector are women, particularly women of colour, and women are more likely to understand themselves as imposters within a Higher Education system that was not designed by or for them (Arday 2022; Bozzon, Murgia, and Poggio 2019). Therefore, women are likely to be the most fearful for their positions, especially as neoliberal management techniques that count only the economic worth of employees did not stop counting during the pandemic.

Participants also reflected upon the messaging that came from university management. Here, the neoliberal agenda of the contemporary university was visible in the messaging staff received. Josie, who identifies as an Anglo white settler, female, uses she or they pronouns, and who works as an academic in HASS at a university in Victoria stated that,

There were some appalling emails that went out around [about] wellbeing whilst working from home that were just ridiculous. And, you know, somehow suggesting that we’re still supposed to get everything done […] and I think, look, the biggest thing in relation to that, too, of course, is just absolutely no sense that university is properly taking into account the gendered aspects of what working from home [meant] for people who especially have kids, but even people who don’t have kids, the kind of extra emotional load that’s taken on managing partners and things like that from home […] and I noticed all of this sort of language around being like how to focus, how to be efficient, how to be productive. And then all the onus on us, the language was around onus on us trying to take care of our well being and that kind of thing […] I just remember being really frustrated by the responsibilisation of it on us to still do the same amount of work, but somehow making it look like the university cared about our well-being.

Michael Apple (2006) writes that for neoliberalism to properly function, people need to stop thinking about themselves as part of a collective, and instead to see themselves as individuals who should maximise their interests. Josie’s statement illustrates how such an ethos literally shaped COVID-19 responses within HEI in Australia. She repeats ‘the onus on us to take care of our well-being’, and articulates how empty of meaning institutional claims to care became during the pandemic. Understanding the self as an individual maximising your interests also accounts for the ways participants experienced their male colleagues as able to unashamedly articulate their successes without acknowledging the human wreckage around them – their interests had been maximised by the pandemic and the response to it by their universities. The illusion of care wrapped up in mixed messaging leads to the next section of this article which engages with the notion of institutional violence and how this was experienced by participants.

‘The actions of the university triggered my PTSD’: Institutional violence and COVID-19 response

Isaura Castelao-Huerta (2020) writes of how there is a ‘subtle violence’ in the application of neoliberal policies as they interweave with gender. For her, these are inflictions of moral injuries that provoke and accompany a disruption of academic performance, she writes that ‘subtle violence is not easy to perceive because there are practices that apparently do not have harmful intentions but […] occur as ‘natural’ consequences of the neoliberal context’ (6). The authors of this article understand the neoliberal underpinnings of the contemporary Australian university to also have been shaped by masculinism, which itself reproduces gendered hierarchies of knowledge and labour within the institution as if they were natural and normal. Within this mix everyday sexisms are part of the fabric of the workplace, so common that they can go unnoticed or seem innocuous or banal (Gray, Knight, and Blaise 2018; Savigny 2014). We argue that such perceptions reflect the masculinism inherent in the contemporary Australian university, and how masculinist neoliberal measurement techniques encompasses a form of symbolic violence (Nicholas and Agius 2017) akin to what was articulated more broadly as part of the global #MeToo movement.

Some participants in this research, however, experienced the ways in which universities managed the pandemic as less banal and every day and more overtly violent. The responses discussed below render it difficult to label this violence as ‘subtle’ as, for many, it was experienced as a form of coercive control. Coercive control encompasses a set of techniques deployed by (domestic) abusers that are designed to cause people to question their sense of reality. Tactics include lying, backtracking and gaslighting. Gaslighting is a term originating from Gaslight, a 1944 film directed by George Cukor in which a young woman is driven to insanity by her husband’s psychological torment. One of the ways in which he does this is to turn the gaslights in their home up and down, whilst convincing her he has done no such thing. Such coercive control techniques were perceived by several participants as characterising their university’s response to the pandemic. It is because of the masculinist orientation of Australian universities that our participants experienced the messaging, management techniques and approaches to the pandemic adopted by their workplaces as violent and abusive.

Sally is a single mother with a complex living arrangement that includes her ageing mother and a child recently diagnosed as neurodiverse. She works in HASS at a university in Queensland. The participant disclosed that she had first-hand experience of domestic violence, and that the way that her workplace responded to the pandemic had triggered the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) she has as a result of the violent relationship she was in,

I was in a pretty bad domestic violence relationship from 2000 to 2007, and just these last eight, nine months I have felt like I’m right back in that relationship. Just the fact that they look at you and lie and tell you well […] “Oh, we’re so supportive. Let me support you, I wanna be here for you and, and support you and help you grow. But, you know, you haven’t got enough research here and you haven’t got enough and you haven’t got enough” […] the actions of the University [triggered] my PTSD in terms of how they were […] it’s gaslighting and inhumane.

Sally therefore experienced the ‘mixed messaging’ that was illustrated in the previous section as gaslighting. Like a light turned up and down, the messages she was receiving simultaneously communicated a recognition of the workplace challenges created by the pandemic and that her work output was insufficient. Sweet (2019) writes of how gaslighting is a social phenomenon that has roots in unequal power relationships. She writes ‘Specifically, gaslighting is effective when it is rooted in social inequalities, especially gender and sexuality, and executed in power-laden intimate relationships’ (852). The authors argue that the neoliberal, masculinist orientation of Australian universities allows gendered inequalities to flourish and to be reinforced via coercive techniques during times of crisis. The inequalities within the contemporary university mean that structural inequalities and institutional vulnerabilities are used against vulnerable workers within universities in similar ways to those deployed by domestic abusers (Sweet 2019). The understanding of masculinism that shapes the analysis in this article allows us to understand that whilst individuals within universities behave in bullying and sexist ways, it is also the institution itself that operates abusively. Sally explicitly states that she understood that it was ‘the actions of the University’ that gaslit and triggered her, not an individual or group of individuals, but the structures, cultures and practices of the university.

Intimidation and provoking feelings of inadequacy are also gaslighting techniques, and feelings of not being or doing enough that Sally illustrates were also experienced by several other participants. For example, Jane articulated how the pandemic and the increased responsibilities of work exacerbated existing physical and mental health issues,

[During lockdowns I was] super depressed [laughs] I was in treatment for clinical depression and I guess burnout before COVID hit and, yeah, definitely made a lot of things worse and made it a lot harder for me to do the things that would normally help me feel a bit better […] I definitely had an escalation in suicidal ideation and feelings of worthlessness and those sorts of things. So it didn’t create those problems for me, but it did definitely heighten them and make them harder to manage.

Whilst we cannot claim that her workplace was the cause of the issues Jane describes, the business-as-usual attitude that her workplace adopted meant that the increase in work, coupled with the decrease in the availability of satisfying leisure activities meant that her mental health was seriously affected. It is impossible to make a complaint about an institution or a sector of employment, and so the institutional violence experienced by Sally and Jane and many of the participants in this research remains unspoken within their workplaces. This research offered them an opportunity to say ‘it happened to me too’, and offered us an opportunity to think about how the sector might respond.

Conclusion

This article demonstrates how masculinism and neoliberalism operated within Australian universities during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. It illustrates how structural and everyday sexisms, as well as more overtly abusive practices such as gaslighting, became part of the ‘business as usual’ of universities in Australia during this time. The analytic frame that we have presented allows us to think of sexisms as being perpetuated beyond the actions of individuals and to contribute to feminist work that understands HE institutions themselves as committing sexist and abusive acts (Phipps 2020). Women who participated in our research experienced their workplaces as reproducing a normalised gendered division of labour, as violent, and as behaving in confusing and contradictory ways during periods of lockdown. This article has deliberately framed the experiences it illustrates in the way that it has in order to emphasise that institutional violence is real, and that the pandemic exacerbated its felt affects amongst women and minority workers. As queer and women-identified academic workers, the authors of the article were experiencing the gendered effects of the HE sector’s response to COVID-19 whilst conducting this research, and in many ways, our participants’ experiences are our experiences. As universities struggle to return to ‘normal’, there is a sense that the pandemic has been, and should be, forgotten. This means that there are losses that remain unaccounted for, and grief that can’t be spoken. This article offers the reader a chance to pause, to reflect on their experiences during COVID-19 lockdowns and to perhaps think, ‘this happened to me too’. It is our way of working with the aims of the #MeToo movement and of letting the reader know that they were not and are not alone.

The authors call upon administrators, leaders and policymakers to engage in the kind of self-analysis proposed by Phipps (2020, 229), where institutions engage in deep reflective work and examine how their cultures ‘refract gender and other power relations and shape bullying, harassment and violence’ within their work spaces. Australian HEIs urgently need things to change, and we need our leaders to do things differently, to reimagine universities as fairer and more democratic workplaces. Therefore, we call upon higher education leaders to listen to the voices of women and marginalised staff, and more importantly, to hear what they say about the ways in which universities inflict institutional violence upon them. Ways forward are needed that account for and value institutional carework, that acknowledge the economic hierarchy of worth and which work to find new ways of understanding the different social, economic and intellectual benefits that different disciplines bring to the sector. We call upon higher education leaders to consider what it means that actions taken during the pandemic were experienced as violent and controlling, and how they might reimagine Australian universities as more democratic and egalitarian workplaces.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Gray

Emily M. Gray's empirically informed scholarship provides insights into educators' lived experiences in relation to gender, sexisms, sexualities and workplaces and she aims to illustrate how, where, and why educational inequalities occur as well as to shape responses to them. Her research is theoretically engaged, and she develops new ways of working with and thinking through social theory in its application to research problems and questions, as well as within knowledge translation mechanisms. The breadth and depth of Emily's research means that her work has impacted significantly in the fields of gender discrimination in higher education; workplace-based discrimination in relation to LGBTIQ+ educators in both schools and in higher education; sexisms in higher education and finally, popular culture and gender representation.

Jacqueline Ullman

Jacqueline Ullman's research focus links well to her teaching practice, as she examines issues of school climate, school-based social relationships and belonging, as they relate to motivation, academic self-concept and school behaviours for marginalised secondary school students. Her primary research focus is diversity of genders and sexualities and associated inclusive educational practices. A/Prof. She is a Senior Researcher in the Centre for Educational Research (CER), a founding member of the Australian Forum for Sexuality, Education and Health (AFSEH) and a member of Western Sydney University's Sexualities and Genders Research group (SaGR). A/Prof. Ullman is currently Chief Investigator on two Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects investigating (1) parents' attitudes towards gender and sexuality diversityinclusive curriculum [with Associate Professor Tania Ferfolja (WSU) and Professor Tara Goldstein (OSIE)] and (2) 'everyday sexisms' in higher education [with Professor Mindy Blaise (ECU) and Dr. Emily Gray (RMIT).

Mindy Blaise

Mindy Blaise is a Vice Chancellor's Professorial Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for People, Place & Planet at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. She is the cofounder of several feminist research collectives, including #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism, The Ediths, and The Common Worlds Research Collective. Her feminist, anti-colonial, and postdevelopmental research uses responsive, affect-focused, and creative methods to rework a humanist ontology. She is interested in how feminist speculative practices activate connections and relations that support ecologies for flourishing.

Jo Pollitt

Jo Pollitt is an interdisciplinary artist and Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University (ECU) with the Centre for People, Place, & Planet and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Her research is grounded in a twenty-year practice of working with improvisation as methodology across multiple performed, choreographic, curatorial and publishing platforms. She was an inaugural Forrest Creative and Performance Fellow (2022-2023), is co-lead of #FEAS: Feminist Educators Against Sexism, co-founder of The Ediths, and author of The dancer in your hands. Her current research is 'Staging Weather' which brings together artistic, meteorological, and First Nations weather knowledges, to develop nuanced human relations with place-based weather amidst the instability of climate change.

Notes

1 Reconciliation Action Plans are put in place to assist businesses to embed the principles of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (see https://www.reconciliation.org.au/reconciliation-action-plans/).