In this week’s blog, Beth Price celebrates International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, reflecting on what still needs to be done.

March is Women’s History Month, and this Friday, 8 March, is International Women’s Day (IWD), so naturally I have been thinking about my existence as a woman in academia more than usual. The focus of 2024’s IWD is to #InspireInclusion and think about how we can break down barriers, promote diversity, and foster inclusion for women in every walk of life. 

Being a cisgender, able-bodied white woman in academia (cue the tiniest violin) can put you in a bit of a limbo. On one side, I can see the continued lack of women in professorial roles (less than 20%), the wage disparities (6.3% less than men on average), the sexual harassment (experienced by 62% of students), and the baked-in misogyny that every woman I know has encountered. 

On the other hand, you are three times more likely to secure a professorial job if you are white. Almost a quarter of students from an ethnic minority have experienced some form of racial harassment, rising to 45% for Black students. There are 23,000 professors in the UK and just 66 are Black women. That’s less than 0.3%. 

Similarly, 36% of trans university students report having experienced harassment and discrimination, and 7% have been physically attacked at university because of being trans. Lesbians and bisexual or pansexual women experience more sexual harassment in the workplace than straight women.

Even with the best of intentions, comparatively privileged women telling queer women, trans women, women with disabilities, or women of colour to Lean In and strike a pose for the official social media is not particularly helpful. Raising awareness about how difficult it is to climb the academic ladder from a place of already-being-successful doesn’t create change without accompanying action. 

As a woman doing a PhD on women in history, I have a soft spot for sharing the stories of women from history who were written out of the textbooks. I have received jigsaws, tote bags, and books full of so-called fearless women of history from friends and family. My bookshelf is stuffed full of nonfiction books about women which I willingly read on top of my research, all written to recentre women in art history, medical history, and politics. Most of these books are written by women in history or academia themselves. 

But if I read the books, like the Instagram posts, and promptly sit back and relax safe in the knowledge that I’ve done my bit for equality and inclusion by my sheer existence, I won’t be doing enough. The nice fluffy idea of inspiring inclusion is lovely and important, but it has to be matched by actual efforts for change. 

As PhD students pretty much at the bottom of the academic ladder, our capacity for driving systemic change is, well, limited. What we can do is challenge our own biases, speak up for ourselves and for our fellow researchers, and join societies and unions who advocate for change. When we’re leading tutorials or seminars, we can make sure that we don’t let students speak over each other, and not rely on students volunteering answers. If we take up roles like class representative, we can formally raise issues of inclusivity and inequality. 

IWD and Women’s History Month are great reasons to focus on the issues that impact the lives of women in academia every day. Let’s match the campaigns for awareness with campaigns for change. 

You can find out more about International Women’s Day on the official website here.

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