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Vol 22 No 1
March 2002

Legal Studies
The changing university and the (legal)
academic career - rethinking the
relationship between women, men and
the 'private life' of the law school
Richard Collier
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne**

This article seeks to contribute to a growing debate within legal studies about
the relationshipbetween women, men and the 'privatelife' of the law school. Via
an explorationof the economic, politicaland culturalshifts presently transforming
understandingsof what academic life entails, the article seeks to unpack the
contoursof the materialand emotionaleconomy in which (legal) academiclabour
now takes place.As a particularkind of knowledge worker within an increasingly
corporatised university environment, a shift in the dominant gender
configurations of higher education (marked notably, I suggest, by the rise of
'entrepreneurialmasculinities') has itself resulted in a complex shift in the
landscape of doctrinaland socio-legal legal scholarship,in the hierarchyof law
schools more generally and in understandingsof what a 'successful' legal
academic careerentails. Conclusions address the possible implications of these
developments for legal academics seeking to re-negotiatea growing tension
between 'work/life' commitments at a time of rapidchange anduncertaintywithin
academic life. Importantly, these are changes which, I argue, have a gendered
dimension and are themselves playing out in some unpredictable and at times for both women and men - frequently contradictoryways.
* This paper has benefited from many conversations with other legal academics. I would
like to thank everyone who has shared their views on issues discussed in this paper with
me. I would, in particular, like to express my gratitude to Norma Dawson, Alison Diduck,
Katherine O'Donovan and Helen Rhoades for their helpful and insightful comments on an
earlier draft of this paper. The views expressed in what follows are, of course, my own.
** Richard.Collier@ newcastle.ac.uk.

2 Legal Studies
INTRODUCTION
This paper begins from a paradox. Notwithstanding the now well-established
nature of gender and law scholarship within legal studies,' relatively little is
known about the connections between gender and what has been termed, in the
context of recent discussion of women legal academics in the United Kingdom,
the 'private life' of the law school.2 Internationally, there exists a rich theoretical
and empirical body of research concerned with social relations between men
and women 'inside' the diverse organisations concerned, in different ways, with
the teaching of, and research into, law.' Equally, and perhaps understandably
given the relatively high status and cultural and political profile of the legal
profession, much is known about issues of gender inequality and discrimination
as they relate to many aspects of the work of solicitors and barristers.' Here,

1. This is evidenced not just by the sheer quantity of research in this area- the numerous
books, articles and journals produced- but by the now routine inclusion of gender issues,
perspectives and so forth in most, if not all, law schools in the United Kingdom.
2. F Cownie 'Women Legal Academics -A New Research Agenda?' (1998) 25(1) J Law
and Society 102 at 4, citing M Trow 'The Public and Private Lives of Higher Education'
104 Daedelus 113. See also J Pierce Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary
Law Firms (Berkeley CA: California University Press, 1996).
3. See eg, M Thornton DissonanceandDistrust: Women in the Legal Profession(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996); C Haight Farley 'Confronting Expectations: Women in
the Legal Academy' (1996) 8 Yale J Law and Feminism 333; R Chused 'The hiring and
retention of minorities and women in American law school faculties' (1988) 1137 UPaLR 537;
L Guinier et al 'Becoming Gentlemen: Women's Experiences at One Ivy League Law
School' (1994) 143 Penn LR 51; The Chilly Collective (eds) Breaking Anonymity: the
Chilly Climatefor Women Faculty (Waterloo Ontario: Wilfred Laurier Press, 1995);
S McIntyre 'Gender Bias within the law school: The "Memo" and its impact' in The Chilly
Collective, ibid, ch 7; M Fineman 'The New "Tokenism"' 23 Vermont LR 289; L Bender
'For Mary Joe Frug: Empowering Women Law Professors' (1991) 6 Wisconsin Women's
Law Journal 1.An excellent account of the account between men and legal feminism can
be found in P Halewood 'White Men Can't Jump: Critical Epistemologies, Embodiment,
and the Praxis of Legal Scholarship' (1995) 7(1) Yale J Law and Feminism 1.
4. This literature is now voluminous. Questions of gender have informed, in a particularly
clear way, the development of policy initiatives, the contours of internal organisational
politics and understandings of the various 'day to day' employment practices of legal
professionals. See further H Sommerlad and P Sanderson Gender Choice and Commitment:
Women Solicitors in England and Wales and the strugglefor equal status (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1998); C McGlynn The Woman Lawyer: Making the Difference (London:
Butterworths, 1998); J Brockman Genderin the Legal Profession:Fitting or Breaking the
Mould? (British Columbia: UBO Press, 2001); C McGlynn 'The Business of Equality in
the Solicitors' Profession' (2000) 63 MLR 442; 1 Hagan and F Kay Gender in Practice:
A Study of Lawyers' Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); K Hull and
R Nelson 'Gender Inequality in Law: Problems in Structure and Agency in Recent Studies
of Gender in Anglo-American Legal Professions' (1998) Law and Social Inquiry 681;
D Ross Bridging the Gap: A Report on Women in Law (London: Quarry Douglas
Consulting Group, 1990); D Podmore and A Spencer 'Gender in the Labour process - the
case of women and men lawyers' in D Knights and H Wilmott (eds) Genderand Labour
Process(Aldershot: Gower, 1986); M Harrington Women Lawyers: Re Writing the Rules
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992); E Skordaki 'Glass Slippers and glass ceilings: Women
in the Legal Profession' (1996) 3 IJLP 7.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

research has explored, for example, such issues as the 'gendering of

commitment' 5 and the 'baby bar' 6 - the well-documented marginalisation of
mothers and the career disadvantages widely seen to follow for women from
'starting a family'. It is intriguing in such a context, therefore, how it has become
increasingly common in recent years within legal scholarship in the United
Kingdom to state, not simply that there has in the past been few studies of law
teachers 7 but that there has been very little research into gender relations within
the law school itself.
The claim that there has been 'very little research which examines the
position of British women academics', and almost none into 'the everyday
experience of male legal academics', 8 has led to a number of recent calls from
scholars in the United Kingdom that this is an absence which needs to be
addressed by the undertaking of small-scale qualitative and/or ethnographic
research into the contemporary university law school. This paper represents
an intervention into this growing debate about women and legal education
in the United Kingdom. 9 What follows seeks, more specifically, to contribute
to a debate in legal studies which has taken the form of an attempt to 'work
out' women in the law school; to explore, that is, women legal academics within
the 'gendered' law school.'"
I shall argue in this paper that it is necessary, at this stage of the debate, to
integrate into analyses of gender and the law school an appreciation of the
interconnections between the 'everyday' practices of male legal academics,
the changing nature of higher education" and, in particular, the powerful
economic, political and cultural shifts which have transformed, and are
transforming, understandings of employment, 'family life" 2 and what is
5. Sommerlad and Sanderson, n 4 above. This issue has secured a high media profile
over the past decade. See eg, 'Mothers, Lawyers and Jugglers' The Times, 23 November
1990; 'My Learned friends Want to be More Flexible' The Times, 14 April 1998; 'A Friend
of the Family' Law Society Gazette, 14 April 2000.
6. McGlynn (1998), n 4 above.
7. Although see eg P Leighton, T Mortimer and N Whatley Today's Law Teachers:
Lawyers orAcademics? (London: Cavendish, 1995).
8. F. Cownie, n 2 above, at 102 and 104.
9. C Wells 'Working Our Women in Law Schools' (2001) 21 LS 1 at 116; Cownie, n 2
above; F Cownie 'Women in the Law School - Shoals of Fish, Starfish or Fish Out of
Water?' in P Thomas (ed) DiscriminatingLawyers (London: Cavendish, 2000). Also
C Wells and B Felsteiner 'Remains of the Day: The Women Law Professors Project' (1999)
Paper presented at the Law and Society Association Annual meeting, Chicago, May.
10. Wells, n 9 above.
11. On which, see generally T Becher Academic Tribes and Territories : Intellectual
Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1989);
A H Halsey Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Professions in the

Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); T Becher and M Kogan
Processand Structure in HigherEducation (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1992); P Scott

The Meanings of Mass HigherEducation (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995);

C Bargh, P Scott and D Smith Governing Universities: Changing the Culture?
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996); M Trow Managerialismand the Academic
Profession: Quality and Control (London: QSC, 1994).

12. In using this term it is not my intention to take the parameters of 'family' for granted.
See E Silva, E and C Smart (eds) The 'New'Family?(London: Sage, 1999); C Smart and
B Neale Family Fragments(Cambridge: Polity, 1999). See further below.

4 Legal Studies
increasingly being depicted within a diverse literature as the 'work-life'
relation. 3 In order to understand why a debate about 'women and the law
school' should have emerged at this time, and why it has taken the form that
it has, it is necessary to unpack the complex relationship between the changing
nature of the legal academy and what is, I suggest, the transformation presently
underway in the material and emotional economy in which (legal) academic
labour is undertaken. This is a shift which is, I shall argue, playing out in some
unpredictable and at times - for both women and men - frequently
contradictory ways.
I THE UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL AND THE 'NEW RESEARCH
AGENDA': WOMEN LEGAL ACADEMICS
(a) University law schools
There is, of course, no 'one' type of university law school. Law schools vary
in terms of their institutional contexts, academic standing and broader
function within the distinctive legal, political and wider communities in which
they exist.' 4 Law teachers in the United Kingdom are equally diverse.
Although a relatively homogeneous employment grouping in terms of
ethnicity and socio-economic background, 5 the everyday experience of legal
academic employment is mediated by (amongst other things) the
contingencies of personal biography, professional status and stage of life
course, as well as the specific cultures of the law school and wider university
in which an individual works.' 6 In recognising such diversity it is, none the
13. See n 46 below.
14. On British law schools generally, see eg, A Bradney 'Law as a Parasitic Discipline'
(1998) 25 J Law and Society 71; A Bradney 'Legal Education in the 21st Century' in
J Grant et al Legal Education2000 (Aldershot: Gower, 1988); A Bradney 'Ivory Towers
or Satanic Mills: Choices for University Law Schools' (1992) 17 Studies in Higher
Education;R Brownsword 'Where are all the law schools going?' (1996) The Law Teacher 1;
F Cownie (ed) The Law School: Global Issues, Local problems (Aldershot: Gower, 1999);
R Brownsword 'Law schools for lawyers, citizens and people' in Cownie, ibid; A Bradney
and F Cownie 'Transformative Visions of Legal education' (1998) 25 J Law and Society 1;
A Bradney and F Cownie 'Working on the Chain Gang?' (1996) 2 Contemporary Issues
in Law 2 at 15; P Harris and M Jones 'A Survey of Law Schools in the UK' (1996) 3 Law
Teacher91; W L Twining 'Thinking About Law schools: Rutland Reviewed' (1998)
25 J Law and Society 1; W L Twining Blackstone's Tower: The English Law School
(London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1994).
15. As Celia Wells concisely puts it, 'Readers of this journal [Legal Studies] most likely
work in a law school. Readers of this journal most likely are male, pale, middle-class and
able-bodied. True, there is more chance that they are female than there would have been 20 years
ago, but those women will almost invariably be fit and white': Wells, n 9 above, at 116.
16. There is reason to believe, eg, that the experience of Oxbridge as a 'total institution'
facilitates a distinctive lifestyle in relations with colleagues and students and is qualitatively
different from many (if not all) other United Kingdom universities. On the 'macho' and
'intimidating' culture of Cambridge University, where it has been reported 66% of women
lecturers have felt at some time excluded: 'Macho Dons get equality training' Times Higher
EducationSupplement, 2 February 2001; 'Cambridge Machismo 'Intimidates' Minorities'
Independent, 31 January 2001.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

less, possible to see the university law school as a creature of two domains. It
is part of the legal profession, a vital component within a wider community
in relation to which it plays a key role in the production of future generations
of lawyers (as a gatekeeper, transmitter of 'foundational' knowledge,
inculcator of appropriate values and so forth). And it is part of a university,
having historically evolved, for some, in an uncertain intellectual and
political relationship to other disciplines which have been concerned, perhaps
more unambiguously it has been argued at times, with the disinterested pursuit
of knowledge. 7
The academic case for studying the law school has been well-made by
advocates of research into women legal academics. 8 Beyond this central gate
keeping role to legal practice (and, with it, the upper echelons of the judiciary),
legal academics, at least in certain prestigious law schools, 9 retain an ability
in the research they produce and their other professional activities to contribute
to political, legal and cultural agendas. The most obvious example of this,
perhaps, is in influencing debate about law reform. To stress the importance of
the law school in such a way, however, looks 'outward', as it were, to some
external validation of the importance of the institution and its members (such
as the contribution it makes to political culture and/or debate). The emerging
agenda around women and the law school begins from a related, but in fact very
different, focus; one which looks 'inward', and in a self-reflective way more
commonly associated with disciplines other than law, to the social practices of
the institution and the networks of power within the law school itself.
The emerging body of scholarship on women legal academics has been
marked, perhaps above all, by a concern to explore the connections between
power, knowledge and the development of the legal discipline: 'the behaviour,
values and attitudes of legal academics have implications for the future
development of the discipline of law.' 2 Studying women legal academics will
thus 'advance our knowledge of the discipline of law'."I In making such links
it is who we (legal academics) are as individuals and as a collectivity which:
'will have a profound effect on the research which is carried out and valued,
the subjects which are taught, the people who are influential in this sphere;
to acknowledge this is to indicate the importanceof studying ... the 'private
life' of higher education.'22
Accordingly, the '... ways in which particular groups of academics organisetheir
professional lives are intimately related to the academic tasks on which they
are engaged' (emphasis added).23
17. See Bradney, n 14 above; Becher, n 11 above, p 30; Twining (1994), n 14 above.
18. Wells, n 9 above, Cownie, n 2 above; also C McGlynn 'Women Representation and
the Legal Academy' (1999) 19 LS at 68. Whilst recognising there are dangers indrawing
wider inferences from the study of one discipline, the exploration of a distinct subject area
has a potential analytic use for developing an understanding of the changing nature of
academic work more generally (apoint made by both Wells and Cownie, ibid).
19. The shifting hierarchy of law schools in the United Kingdom is discussed below.
20. Cownie, n 2 above, at 103.
21. Cownie, n 2 above, at 109.
22. Cownie, n 2 above, at 103-104.
23. Becher, n 11 above, quoted in Cownie, n 2 above, at 109.

6 Legal Studies
The kind of disturbing of the dualism between the public and the private
spheres, implicit in the notion of the 'private life' of the law school, is of course
a well-established feature of feminist thought and politics. 4 And, indeed, there
is a case to be made that the questions of equality and ethical dimensions of
gender relations which have been raised by feminism are now common features
of liberal political discourse across western democracies. The debate about
women and law schools thus, on one level, embraces, just as it contributes to, a
wider cultural and political conversation about equality of opportunity. Both
the legal profession and the university sector have themselves become
significant locales within, and have secured a relatively high media and political
profile in relation to, a wider cultural conversation about women, work and
gender equity in recent years. This debate has involved such questions as how
gender equity might relate to business efficiency25 and how the public and
private responsibilities, commitments and dependencies of women and men
might be regulated by law (in the form, for example, of promoting 'family
friendly' policies). It is to be remembered that each of the above concerns
resonate with the present policies of the British government in a number of
respects, as we shall see, with regard to seeking to promote a desirable 'balance'
between the demands of employment and 'family life' .26
A question remains however. If it is the case that there now exists a general
political recognition that discrimination on the grounds of gender is undesirable,
how is the picture of contemporary legal academic life being painted by some
women scholars to be understood? What happens,as it were, to the ideals of equality
that the vast majority (if not all) women and men within today's law schools, as
well as the university as an institution itself, would appear publicly to adhere?
Keeping in mind the social importance of the university law school, as discussed
above, there are a number of cultural, political and economic developments taking
place in relation to higher education in the United Kingdom which suggest that
the time may be propitious to reassess the past, present and future direction of this
growing research agenda around women and the law school. First, it is necessary
to explore just what has been said about men in this debate.
(b) A 'new research agenda'?: women legal academics
A range of concerns about gender have coalesced in recent years within
universities around a series of events, political campaigns and other
interventions designed to address what is now widely seen to be the continued
existence of discrimination on the grounds of sex difference in higher education
in the United Kingdom. 27 The vast majority of university employers, it is true,
24. See generally M Thornton (ed) Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995); S Boyd 'Can law challenge the public/private
divide? Women, work and family' (1996) 15 Windsor Yearbook ofAccess to Justice 161.

25. McGlynn (2000), n 4 above.

26. See R Collier 'Feminising the Workplace'? (Re)constructing the 'good parent' in
employment law and family policy' in A Morris and T O'Donnell (eds) Feminist
Perspectiveson Employment Law (London: Cavendish, 1999).
27. Eg recent years have witnessed industrial action on the part of the Association of
University Teachers (AUT) concerned, at least inpart, with redressing the well-documented
and pervasive pay disparities between men and women academics.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

make claims about the promotion of equal opportunity policies. Many employ
officers charged with seeing through such policies. There is thus a recognition,
of a kind, that a problem exists which needs to be addressed.2" Yet the available
evidence suggests that not only does a broader perception exist that a problem
remains in this area, there is a growing feeling on the part of many women that
'something' must be done to address such inequalities. Thus, and by way of
illustration, across disciplines various academic networks have been established
aimed at supporting women who are employed in universities; women working
in environments which, albeit in ways mediated by discipline and the
contingencies of departmental cultures,2 9 are seen to have historically evolved
in ways hostile to women academics. A considerable research literature has raised
questions about such issues as the gendered dynamics of recruitment and
promotion within academia, pay differentials," the gendering of 'core' academic
work (teaching, research, administration, pastoral responsibilities and so on)
and the gendered nature of the university as an organisation (it's governance,
management cultures, dominant practices and so forth: see further below).3
It is unsurprising, in the light of the above, that a broadly similar agenda
should have evolved in relation to the law school and legal studies. Whilst

28. That gender equity is an ethical question is thus accepted by those universities which
publicly ally themselves to declarations of equal opportunity. Both employers and university
teaching and support staff have developed policies aimed explicitly at an overhaul of those
recruitment and promotion procedures which have been seen to discriminate against women
and ethnic minority staff: Independent,8 August 2000.
29. On the Athena Project for the advancement of women in Science and Engineering and
Technology, eg, see further www.athena.ic.ac.uk. Note also the CVCP (now Universities
UK) funded Women in Higher Education Register, open to all women working in higher
education in the United Kingdom.
30. Women in academic jobs in the United Kingdom are paid on average 18% less than
their male counterparts: AUT Analysis of staff record datafor 1998-9providedby HESA
(London: AUT, 2001). There is much evidence to suggest that women predominate in the
lower status and less secure positions in universities: W Woodward 'Gender pay gap at
universities widens' Guardian, 17 July 2001; 'Women lose out as university pay gap
widens' Independent, 24 May 2000.
31. On women academics generally, see S Acker 'Contradictions in Terms: Women
Academics in British Universities' in M Arnot and K Weiler (eds) Feminism and Social
Justice in Education (London: Routledge Falmer, 1993); S Acker Gendered Education
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993); A Brooks Academic Women (Milton Keynes:
SRHE and Open University Press, 1997); D Malina and S Maslin-Prothers (eds) Surviving
the Academy: Feminist Perspectives (London: Falmer Press, 1998); H Bannerjhi et al
UnsettlingRelations: The Universityas a Site of FeministStruggle (Toronto: Women's Press,
1991); L Morley and V Walsh (eds) Breaking Boundaries: Women in Higher Education
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1996); L Morley OrganisingFeminisms: The Micropoliticsof
theAcademy (London: Macmillan Press, 1999); A Statham, L Richardson and J Cook Gender
and University Teaching (New York: SUNY, 1991); J West and K Lyon 'The trouble with
equal opportunities: the case of women academics' (1995) 7 Gender and Education5 1;
C Overall A FeministI: Reflectionsfrom Academia (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press,
1998); B Bagilhole 'Being Different is a very difficult roe to hoe: survival strategies of women
academics' in S Davies, C Lubelska and J Quinn Changingthe Subject: Women in Higher
Education(London: Taylor and Francis, 1994); L H Collins et al CareerStrategiesforWomen
in Academe (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, 1998); L Vasil 'Social Process Skills and Career
Achievement among Male and Female Academics' (1996) 67 J Higher Education 103.

8 Legal Studies
'women and the law' is, of course, a well-established subject in legal scholarship,
there has occurred in recent years what is, I would suggest, a distinct heightening
of gender issues as they relate to the practices of the law school within the United
Kingdom legal academia. This is evidenced by the formation of groups,
organisations and networks within the legal academy, as well as a series of
academic and other cultural events designed to support, encourage and bring
together women legal academics. The establishment of the Women Law
Professors Network in 1998 has been followed by a number of major conferences
supported by the leading professional associations of legal academics in the
United Kingdom." Alongside the formation of a National Network of Women
in Legal Education, these bodies have themselves established networks and
groups33 for women legal academics, organised workshops and seminars, set aside
time at annual conferences and responded to a number of developments in the
legal academy which have been seen as of particular concern to the community
of women legal scholars.34 At the same time a distinctive research agenda around
women legal academics is being developed, one which, it is argued, will add to
existing knowledge about legal scholars, and law, more generally.
It is not possible to do justice to the many issues and concerns raised by
these attempts to challenge the practices which are seen to have impacted
negatively on women's career progression and opportunities for advancement
in legal academic life. It is possible, however, by way of identifying some of the
recurring themes of this work, and linking this development to what I wish to
say later about the changing culture of universities, to draw out in an explicit
way what is being said about men. For the purposes of this paper I will focus on
three key themes.
(c) Gender, the law school and the practices of men
(i) The gap between formal and substantive equality
The most readily observable theme of the current debate is, perhaps, a need to
account for the continued relative absence of women within senior positions in
the United Kingdom law schools (and, indeed, the university as a whole). That
men continue to dominate such positions seems incontestable in the light of
available research evidence.36 Notwithstanding the transformation in the
gender-ratio of the intake into university legal education over the past twenty

32. WLP 'Working With Women Workshop: The Cat-Rap inthe Glass Ceiling' (June
1999: ALT/SPTL sponsored); 'Strategic Thinking for the Millennium: Women and Law
Conference' University of Westminster, London, 2000.
33. Eg the SLSA Women's Network
34. In the form, eg, of developing a mentoring 'buddy' system for women legal academics.
These networks paid an active role in mobilising the responses of women academics in the
United Kingdom subsequent to the publication in 2001 of publicity material by Cavendish

Publishing which was widely seen to be sexist and offensive (Cavendish themselves have
been the publishers of a major series of books on 'Feminist Perspectives ...' on law). In the
light of protests Cavendish Publishing withdrew the advertising and offered a full apology.
35. The argument of Cownie, n 2 above.
36. McGlynn, n 18 above; Cownie, n 2 above. In the vast majority of law schools there
are few women heads of department and few women law professors.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

years, law schools remain, in one sense, predominantly male spaces at least in
as much as the majority of institutions remain, numerically, dominated by men,
especially at senior levels. Stating as much is not to argue that things have not
changed and are not changing. What is being suggested is that, notwithstanding
the 'cat-flaps in the glass ceiling', the glass ceiling remains.37 In beginning to
question why this position should continue, given that women have for some
time made up the majority of new entrants into the law school - why the
much-heralded 'trickle up' effect has been so slow in achieving results38 - a
range of men's practices have been singled out as problematic: for example, the
nature of short-listing, recruitment and promotion procedures, the allocation of
tasks and the distribution of responsibilities. In many accounts, however, the
problem is seen to lie in something which is, at once both more ephemeral and
yet also more powerful than the question of what an individual man or group of
men might do in positions of power: it is what has been termed the 'masculine
culture' of the law school itself.
(ii) The 'masculine culture' of the law school
Feminist legal scholarship has produced, internationally, a rich and persuasive
account of the multi-layered and complex nature of law school cultures. In this
literature men's practices, taken together and cumulatively, are understood to
have reproduced distinctive cultural forms and belief structures. It is these which
are seen to have ill-served women. Common themes here include: the
marginalising effects of homosocial and homophobic cultures (at all levels of
the law school);39 the routine sexualisation of women's bodies and the denial
of women's corporeality within the legal academic workplace;" the dissociation
of women from authority and, in particular, from the possession of the
'authoritative speaking voice' - the voice, that is, deemed essential to being a
successful academic lawyer in terms of performance in meetings, interactions
with students, colleagues and so forth;4' a routine association of women with
normative gendered ideals which, in turn, inform opportunities for promotion; 2
37. M David and D Woodward (eds) Negotiating the Glass Ceiling: Careersof Senior
Women in the Academic World (London: Falmer Press, 1998).
38. For up-to-date data on intake into the law school and the legal profession more
generally, see further Thomas (ed), n 9 above; 'Girls Take Over the Academy' Times Higher
Education Supplement, 5 May 2000.

39. C M Bell 'All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten (playing soccer): A
feminist parable of legal academia' (1995) Yale J Law and Feminism 7 at 133-136; S Bird
'Welcome to the Men's Club: Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic
Masculinity' (1996) 10 Gender and Society 2 at 120-132; R Collier 'Nutty Professors",
"Men in Suits" and "New Entrepreneurs": Corporeality, Subjectivity and Change in the
Law School and Legal Practice' (1998) 7 Social and Legal Studies 27; R Collier 'Masculinism,
Law and Law Teaching' 19 Int J Sociology of Law 427; M Thornton 'Hegemonic
Masculinity and the Academy' (1989) 17 Int J Sociology of Law.
40. An excellent account of which can be found inThornton, n 3 above.
41. M Thornton 'Authority and Corporeality: The Conundrum for Women inLaw' (1998)
6 Feminist Legal Studies 147. This concern is encapsulated by a recent cartoon in the
newsletter of the British Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) concerning the
establishment of the SLSA Women's Network entitled 'Speak Up, I Can't Hear You'.
42. Eg the link between women and 'caring', pastoral roles and the common association of
assertion and self-promotion on the part of women, in contrast to men, with aggressiveness.

10 Legal Studies
and a persistent benchmarking and assessment of women against a normative
'ideal' employee, a figure understood simultaneously (and somewhat
paradoxically) to be both distinctively gendered (as male/masculine: assertive,
rational, competent, unemotional and so on); and, equally, to be somehow
gender-neutralin terms of the commitments and dependencies which are seen
as 'outwith' the field of paid employment.
(iii) Gender-neutralityand the work-life debate
Bound up within and fundamental to this masculine culture, therefore, has been
a particular understanding of the interrelation between 'work' and 'home';
something which, I have suggested above, is itself increasingly central to
debates about promoting gender equity at broader governmental policy levels
in the United Kingdom. And this is an issue which has become increasingly
visible in the growing literature concerned with exploring the interconnections
between discourse and practice, structure and agency in developing accounts
of women's experiences and the 'everyday life' of the law school. The
relationship between employment and 'family life', 3 and in particular the
'unresolved dilemmas' of work/family conflict," is of course a long-standing,
controversial and contested 45 topic within both feminism and sociology. In this
scholarship it has been in the continuing double-burden faced by women in
combining employment with the major responsibilities for domestic labour and
child care that a range of barriers to equality in the workplace have been seen to
lie. And, in what is now more generally conceptualised as a work-life issue (as
opposed to the earlier, and for some increasingly misleading, question of
work-family), 46 two principal 'dimensions of domesticity' 47 have surfaced as
problematic for women. First, the idea that all employees should be, and
employers are entitled to, 'ideal workers' somehow immunised from family
responsibilities. And, secondly, the belief that the choices individual men and
43. K Abrams 'Cross-Dressing in the Master's Clothes' 109 Yale LJ 745.
44. See further A R Hochschild The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home
Becomes Work (1997); A R Hochschild The Second Shift: Working Parents and the

Revolution at Home (London: Piatkus, 1989); C Epstein, C Seron, B Oglensky et al The

Part-Time Paradox:Time Norms, ProfessionalLives, Family and Gender(New York:
Routledge, 1999); J Williams Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and

What To Do About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

45. See eg, C Hakim 'Five feminist myths about women's employment' (1995) 45 BrJ
Soc; C Hakim Key Issues in Women's Work: Female Heterogeneityand the Polarisation
of Women's Employment (London: Athlone, 1996).

46. The term 'work-family' is understood to encompass more complex and multi-faceted
issues than simply those around child care. Work-family refers to any connection between
the work and personal domains of an individual, involving both structural (time commitmentgeographical location-family size) and psychological aspects (job/life satisfaction, stress,
general health and well-being). The evolving work-family paradigm embraces issues of
legislative change, organisational policies, procedures and programmes. See further
T Hogarth et al Work-Life Balance 2000: Baseline Study ofwork-life balancepracticesin

Great Britain (London: Institute For Employment Research/DFEE, 2000). See further
S Lewis and J Lewis (eds) The Work-Family Challenge:Rethinking Employment (London:
Sage, 1996); S Campbell Clark 'Work/family border theory: a new theory of work/family
balance' 53 Human Relations 6 at 747.
47. Williams, n 44 above.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

11

women make in relation to their employment and wider responsibilities and

commitments are themselves somehow autonomous; that is, without or beyond
the social context in which they are made (sometimes referred to as the
autonomous choice or human capital model)."
That such choices are in fact gendered in distinct ways is now widely agreed
in the literature. It is men, and not women, who have historically been understood
to be ideal workers, free from family responsibilities and expectations and
entitled to act in ways regardless of familial commitments around caring and
dependency. Women's labour around the inevitable dependencies49 of family
life, in contrast, has been routinely commodified, characterised as the expression
of a (naturally-given) love and commitment. The 'innate' characteristics of the
sexes, the fact that it is women who tend to remain primary care-givers regardless
of their employment status '... and the incontrovertible needs of corporations
and of small children' have thus merged in a complex matrix of gendered beliefs,
practices and structural arrangements.50
These are concerns clearly beyond the scope of any consideration of the
university law school per se. Yet it is imperative that they are identified clearly at
this stage of my argument, for they are central to what I wish to say about
understanding the nature of the many changes which have taken place in legal
academic life. Tackling women's double-shift, Williams has cogently suggested,
is not simply addressed by institutional experiments such as family leave, flexitime
or the provision of parental leave, however desirable these may be in and of
themselves. 1 What needs to be addressed, rather, is the entire 'gender regime' 52
of organisations themselves - let us say, of universities - the complex system of
cultural norms and institutional arrangements 'that keeps men tethered to an
increasingly demanding workplace [and] women professionally marginalized and
economically dependent'."3 Accordingly, Abrams suggests,5 4 any programme
concerned with changing existing practices must itself address both attitudes and
institutions; that is, it must work at the levels of agency, structure and culture.
The remainder of this paper is concerned precisely with the 'gender regime' of
the university law school and, in particular, the shifting relationship between
'work' and 'home' at a time of what is now widely agreed to be rapid change in
universities. In the following section I wish to ground these more general issues
in the more specific context of the changes taking place within higher education
in the United Kingdom. I wish to focus, in particular, on how relationships between
women and men are being transformed in complex ways within a university law
school which is itself, I argue, in the midst of a profound process of change.

48. See further J Radford (ed) Gender and Choice in Educationand Occupation(London:

Routledge, 1998); McGlynn (1998), n 4 above; K Abrhams 'Cross-Dressing inthe Masters

Clothes' (2000) 109 Yale LJ 4 at 745.
49. M Fineman The NeuteredMother, The Sexual Familyand OtherTwentieth Century
Tragedies, (New York: Routledge, 1995).

50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.

Abrams, n 48 above, at 750.

Williams, n 44 above, at 1.
R W Connell Genderand Power(Cambridge: Polity, 1987).
Abrhams, n 48 above, at 746.
Abrhams, n 48 above, at 746.
A threefold classification utilised by Wells, n 9 above.

12

Legal Studies

H1THE NEW EMOTIONAL ECONOMY OF THE LAW SCHOOL:

RECONSTRUCTING THE 'SUCCESSFUL' LEGAL ACADEMIC
'Gender is far more than an individual trait somehow connected with bodily
difference, like red hair or left-handedness. With gender, we are dealing with
a complex, and powerfully effective, domain of social practice.' 56
'... academic careers share many characteristics with other employment careers.
They are lived within organizational and social networks which have
particular rules, hierarchies, culture and politics. The academic world, like
other areas of employment, is highly competitive.... It requires, among other
things, a similar range of administrative, organizational and personal skills
to many other professional careers. Being an academic is a job, with core
tasks, as well as a way of life.' (emphasis added)5"
As a 'job ... like other areas of employment', one which '... shares many
characteristics with other employment careers', it should not surprise that many
of the changes in academic life which have taken place in recent years map
onto the social, economic and technological shifts transforming the structure
of the economy and labour market. 8 The shifting gender profile of universities
both reflects, and is an integral element of, the broader increase which has taken
place in the number of women in employment and education.59 And the
confusions and uncertainties which have resulted from the dissolving of hitherto
normative gendered ideals in the context of both employment and 'family
practices' 60 (not least around the shifting negotiations of child care and domestic
labour) are, it would seem, many. 6' However, whilst much of the literature on
56. R W Connell The Men and the Boys (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) p 18.
57. Blaxter et al The Academic CareerHandbook(Milton Keynes: Open University Press,
1998) p 3.
58. See eg R Crompton, D Gallie and K Purcell. Changing forms of employment:
organisation,skills and gender (London: Routledge, 1996); J Rifkin The End of Work
(New York: Tarcher Putnam, 1996); S Walby (ed) Gender Segregationat Work (Milton
Keynes: Open University Press, 1988).
59. A shift interlinked with the now dominant belief that a flexible, efficient and appropriately
credentialised workforce is essential to the competitive future of post-industrial, service-based
economies such as Britain: 'Higher Education has become central to the economic well being
of nations and individuals. The qualities of mind that it develops will be the qualities that
society increasingly needs to function effectively. Knowledge is advancing so rapidly that a
modem competitive economy depends on its ability to generate that knowledge, engage with
it and use it to effect. Above all, the country must enable people, in large numbers and throughout
life, to equip themselves for a world of work which is characterised by change' National
Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education Higher Education in the Learning Society
(Norwich: HMSO, 1997) at 51 (henceforth the Dearing Report).
60. On the idea of family practices see further D Morgan 'Risk and Family Practices:
Accounting for Change and Fluidity in Family Life' in Silva and Smart, n 12 above.
61. Changes which have been explored in a growing scholarship concerned with the
relationship between gender, work and organisation See eg, J Hearn and W Parkin 'Sex' at
'Work': The Powerand Paradoxof OrganisationSexuality (London: Sage, 1995); J Acker
'Gendered institutions: from sex roles to gendered institutions' (1992) 21 Contemporary
Sociology 5 at 565; J Acker 'Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A theory of gendered organizations'
(1990) 4 Gender and Society 2 at 139; P Nicolson Gender, Work and Organizations:A
PsychologicalPerspective(London: Routledge, 1996); M Savage and A Witz (eds) Gender
and Bureaucracy(London: Blackwell, 1992).

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

13

gender and employment has tended to focus on the social, political and cultural
consequences of the collapse of traditional working-class male jobs,62 there is
also much evidence to support the claim that many middle-class men have also
been challenged to some degree by 'career women' and what has been termed
the 'feminization of the workplace'. The broader context of gender change here
is one in which the changing experience of the 'new' middle-class has
increasingly been marked over the past twenty years by the effects of downsizing,
de-layering and organisational change; and one in which a range of diverse
professionals (not least the legal profession and university academics) have
experienced increased competition, a decline in state support and growing
regulation. In this process, the North American writers Kimmell and Kaufman
observe:
'Although ... economic, political and social changes have affected all
different groups of men in radically different ways, perhaps the hardest hit
psychologicallywere middle-class, straight, white men from their late twenties
through their forties. For these were the men who not only inherited a
prescription for manhood that included economic autonomy, public
patriarchy, and the frontier safety valve, they were also men who believed
themselves entitled to the power that attended upon the successful
demonstration of masculinity.' (emphasis in original)63
64
In what follows I do not wish to efface the importance of generational change,
something to which Wells alludes when she cites specific examples of men's
attitudes to women legal academics in her recent discussion of 'working out'
women in law schools in this journal.65 Far from it, what interests me is how the
changes which have taken place in higher education in recent years have been
experienced by different groups of men and women in such a way, I want to
suggest, as to transform understandings of what legal academic labour entails.
This is something which, we shall see, would appear to have a distinct and
important generational dimension. I wish in what follows to recognise, that is,
something of the complexity of changes over the life course with a view to
understanding how cultures, practices and structures have, over the past fifteen
years, come to produce a marked shift in normative notions of gender practices
in relation to the law school; and how they have resulted in a position in which,
notwithstanding lip-service being paid to formal equality, the pervasive
inequalities outlined at the beginning of this paper would continue to appear
to persist.
62. It is inthis context, eg, that a wider 'crisis of masculinity' has been identified, not least
in relation to debates about crime and criminality: R Collier Masculinities, Crime and
Criminology (London: Sage, 1998).
63. M Kimmell and M Kaufman 'Weekend Warriors: the new men's movement' in M
Kimmell (ed) The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic
Men's Movement (and the mythopoetic leaders answer) (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 1995) p 18. See further B Martin 'Knowledge, Identity and the
Middle-Class: From Collective to Individualised Class Formation?' (1998) The Sociological
Review at 653-86.
64. This is issue to which scant attention has been paid. By way of exception see L Segal
'Opinion' Guardian,8 May 2001.
65. Above n 9.

14

Legal Studies

(a) Bureaucracy, accountability and the Research Assessment Exercise

a gender issue?

Recent scholarship on women legal academics has noted, in different ways,

and by observing differing nuances of change, how the transformation of
higher education in the United Kingdom provides an important backdrop
against which relations between men and women in the academy are presently
being played out. It is vitally important to recognise the scope and scale of
these changes, however familiar (and all too real in their consequences) they
may be for all legal academics. In the rendering asunder of many traditional
elements of the idea of the university as liberal institution, and in making no
claims to comprehensiveness, universities have experienced (amongst other
things): the removal of the binary divide between universities and
polytechnics; the loss of the right to tenure; the impact of labour-intensive
and (for many) divisive assessments of teaching quality; a shift in the balance
of power between staff and students, part of a purported move towards greater
'accountability' in higher education between the 'producers' and
'consumers';66 a real-terms cut in pay; 67 an advance in information and
communications technology (ICT), the scale of which has revolutionised the
everyday experience of legal academic work over the past decade; and a decline
in the unit of funding per student;68 widespread benchmarking, internal
institutional audit and the emergence of the 'new managerialism' (see further
below);69 a massive expansion in student numbers within the higher education
70
system, resulting (amongst other things) in a rapidly rising staff: student ratio;
a real-terms decline in the amount of research funding available, at the very
moment when the securing of external research funding is itself increasingly
seen as an esteem indicator and sign of 'research culture' in its own right; a
'downloading' of the costs of higher education onto the student and a (related)
66. In this process students are increasingly seen as stakeholders and to whom academics,
as producers, should be accountable. This shift is embodied in the 'Student Charter',
published in1995 by the then Department of Education, setting out the 'entitlements' students
can expect from institutions intheir higher education.
67. A UT Pay Claim 2001-02 (London: Aut, 2001). See also D Watson 'Opening up pay
and promotion' (2001) AUTLook 219 at 10-12.

68. On the latter see Dearing Report, n 59 above, chart 3.16. On the impact of ICT on
universities, see G Noble and D Lupton 'Consuming work: computers, subjectivity and
appropriation in the university workplace' (1998) Sociological Review 803-827. This is

something which has itself, of course, been seen by some to have a downside: 'Stressed
Managers complain of e-mail overload' Independent, 24 February 2000.
69. On the 'new managerialism' inuniversities and the increase inthe power of managers
vis-A-vis academic staff, see further J Dearlove 'The Academic Labour Process: From
Collegiality and Professionalism to Managerialism and Proletarianisation?' (1997)
30 Higher Education Rev I at 56-75: See also D Farnham Managing Academic Staff
(Buckingham: Open University Press/SRHE, 1999); H Willmott 'Managing the Academics:

Commodification and Control in the Development of University Education' (1995)

48 Human Relations 9 at 993-1027; C Bargh, P Scott and D Smith Governing the
Universities:Changing the Culture? (Buckingham, Open University Press/SRHE, 1996);
P Trowler Academics Responding to Change: New Higher Education Frameworksand

Academic Cultures(Buckingham: Open University Press/SRHE, 1998).

70. AUTHigherEducation in the New Century (London: AUT, 1999) p 10; HESA (1999)
'Higher Education Management Statistics Sector Level 1997/98', p 23 .

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

15

greater focus on the regional economic role of universities in a context of

university mergers 1 ; an increase in short-term contracts;72 and last - and by
no means least - the far-reaching consequences wrought by the Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE), introduced in 1986, as the cornerstone of research
funding policy and practice.73
Summarising the effects of the above, which have been experienced in
different ways across disciplines and higher education institutions, is of course
difficult. What can be said with some confidence about law schools, however,
is that for all institutions whose ambition is to be seen as part of a research-led
university in the United Kingdom, it is now beyond question that the performance
and research productivity of all legal academic staff has become crucial to the
status, financial health and, perhaps, the very future of the law school itself.74
In the case of law, like other disciplines, this has been a process in which the
'performativity' of academics, determined via a calibration of quantitative,
observable (short to medium-term) output with the assessment of research
productivity, has become of increasingly importance in recruitment and
promotion practices and in institutional determinations of career 'success' or
'failure' .

The above changes, taken together, have been seen by many scholars to be
part of a wider process - one which has been termed the corporatisation of
universities; that is, the application of business practices and managerialism to

71. P McCarthy and R Humphrys 'Debt: the reality of student life' (1995) 49 Higher
Education Quarterly 78. On the growing agenda of mergers 'Let's Work Together'
Guardian, 18 September 2001.
72. A UT Trends in CasualEmployment in HigherEducation (London: AUT, 2000) Table 7.
73. See further J Barnard (1998) 'Reflections on Britain's Research Assessment Exercise'
48 JLE 4 at 467-95; M Bush 'Grading and Degrading the Dons' Times HigherEducation
Supplement, 7 March 1996. Also D Vick et al 'The Perceptions of Academic Lawyers
Concerning the Effects of the United Kingdom's Research Assessment Exercise' (1998)
25 J Law and Society 4 at 536. The consequences of selectively funding academic research
have transformed the ethos and practices of law schools, not least the relatively low priority
now given to teaching in the development of an academic career: S Court 'Negotiating the
Research Imperative: The Views of UK Academics on their Career Opportunities' (1999)
53 Higher Education Quarterly 1 at 65-87; S Court Opportunity Blocks: a survey of
appointment and promotion in UK HigherEducation(London: AUT, 1998). Also, on the
implications for law journals in the United Kingdom, K Campbell, D Vick, A Murray et al
'Journal Publishing, Journal Reputations and the United Kingdom Research Assessment
Exercise' (1999) 24 J Law and Society 4 at 470-501. An overview of different frameworks
for measuring research 'quality' can be found in R Boaden and J Cilliers 'Quality and the
RAE: Just one aspect of performance?' (2001) 9 Quality Assurance in Education I at 5-13.
74. 'Administration, the third part of the trio of major academic activities, is rarely
mentioned' (Court, n 73 above, at 65). It is not argued that research did not figure in
promotions before the first RAE took place in 1986. However, there is evidence that the
research ethos is now fundamental to the academic career and that the majority of academics
as well as the academic institution itself in terms of its mission see it as such (the Dearing
Report, n 56 above, Report 3, p 108). Cf Halsey, n 9 above, at 189).
75. See further M Thornton 'Among the Ruins: Law in the Neo-Liberal Academy' (2000)
Paper presented as keynote address at 'The Challenge of Change: Rethinking Law as a
discipline', Workshop on Legal Knowledge and Legal Education in the Twenty-first Century,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 14-15 April.

16

Legal Studies

higher education in a broader context of neo-liberalism and globalisation.76

Within the new marketised world, it is argued, university education is being
transformed into an industry preoccupied with economic rationalism, efficiency
and the generation of income.77 The consequences of this include many of the
developments noted above, not least in the repositioning of the student as
demanding customer of the services provided by the academic as 'new
knowledge worker'; 78 the 'withering away' of 'non-market friendly' sectors of
the university79 (and the law school curricula?);8" and the undermining, across
the higher education sector, of collegiate self-governance by the emergence of
the 'top-down' styles of management with which these changes have appeared
at times symbiotically linked. In sum, and for many observers, one result of this
process has been that the traditional idea of a university based on the
disinterested pursuit of knowledge is itself, in Readings phrase, 'in ruins'.81
How does this relate to gender and the law school? What we have here are
changes in academic life which would, on the surface, appear to have impacted
on the lives of women and men alike. Each are, formally, gender-neutral.
Sex-status is, for example, seemingly, irrelevant in the evaluation of research
and teaching quality. And, unquestionably, within the present legal academy
it is possible to support Walby's suggestion that a 'gender convergence' has
been under way in career terms for credentialised individuals - women and men,
straight or gay - who, let us say, fit the model of the 'committed academic'
emerging from this process (see further below).82 For those women and men who
are willing or able to adapt to the temporal and spatial demands of contemporary
academic life,83 and who culturally 'fit' the legal academy within prestigious
76. See further J Currie and J Newson (eds) Universities and Globalization: Critical

Perspectives(Thousand Oaks, Sage, 1998). For an alternative critique of the assumptions about
a 'golden age' underlying the 'McDonaldisation' of higher education thesis see A Hudson
'Power Plays To Market Moves' Times HigherEducationSupplement,7 July 2001. Cf R Boden
'Corporate Crackdown' Times Higher EducationSupplement, 20 April 2001.

77. S Marginson Markets in Education (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997); J Currie et al
Global Practices and University Responses (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press,
forthcoming 2002); J Currie et al GenderedUniversities in GlobalizedEconomies: Power,

Careersand Sacrifices (Langham, Maryland: Lexington Books, forthcoming 2002).

78. See n 66 above.
79. J Kelsey 'Privatising the Universities' (1988) 25 J Law and Society 51. One result for
law schools, Thornton suggests (n 75 above), is the increasing marginalisation of noncommercial subject specialisms. Experience in Canada would support this view: S Boyd
'Privatization, Law and the Challenge to Feminism: Reflection on Legal education as a Site
of Struggle' (2001) Paper presented at Feminist Political Economy and Law: Revitalizing
the Debate, Osgoode Hall Law School, 24 March 24 (copy with author).
80. Thornton, n 75 above.
81. B Readings The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996).
82. On the complexity of these economic and life trajectory polarisations between
generations of women and men in the context of the globalisation of the economy and a
politics of post-welfarism, see S Walby Gender Transformations(London: Routledge,
1997). It has been suggested that some gay men and women, eg, have seen the legal academy
as a place in which they can flourish, evidenced by the rich body of work which has been
produced at the interface of queer theory and legal studies.
83. By this I mean that the demands are such that it is increasingly necessary for academics
not only to work longer hours but also to be geographically mobile both in career terms and
in relation to the formation and sustaining of academic networks: S Court 'The Use of
Time By Academic and Related Staff' (1996) 50 Higher Education Quarterly 4 at 237.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

17

research-led universities (which remain, it is important to remember, largely

middle-class and white in terms of their staffing and the dominant codes of
cultural capital), the opportunities and potential rewards are arguably similar,
at least at lower levels of university hierarchies, for both sexes. To pursue this
theme of convergence, the complex and evolving shift in the hierarchy of law
schools, and the related moves to local pay bargaining which are underway at
present8 4 - the sorting of the weak from the strong, the wheat from the chaff, the
'cutting-edge' from the intellectual backwater - is a process which is
experienced by women and men academics alike. Both must psychologically
manage the pressures and demands, the advantages (and disadvantages?) of being
(seen to) be in relatively low or high-grade law departments.85 Both negotiate,
albeit in ways mediated by stage of career, social background and personal
ambition, the consequences of collective and individual research success or
failure in terms of their everyday experiences of the legal academic life.86
And it is therein - in the nature of this everyday experience - that recent
research points to the limits of the gender convergence thesis, suggesting, rather,
that gender continues to mediate women's and men's lives within a rapidly
changing university, albeit in some rather complex ways.87 United Kingdom
scholars such as Wells and Cownie have identified, we have seen, common
features of contemporary legal academic life which, it has been suggested,
continue to be gendered in some distinct ways.88 And of particular concern in
such accounts, I have argued, has been the way in which academic labour is
seen to relate to shifting social commitments and responsibilities which lie
beyond the workplace setting.
In what follows, and drawing on this emerging research base around gender
and the law school, I wish to contribute to knowledge of how meanings are given
to sex difference in specific organisational contexts - and to how an ostensibly
gender-neutral change in legal academic life can in fact be highly gendered by focusing on a number of issues which, I suggest, have been less visible in the
debate to date.
(b) The 'new knowledge worker' and the new academic career
'What makes academic life a pleasure is not just what we do, research and
teaching, but the atmosphere in which we do it. What makes academic life a
pleasure is the practice of collegiate governance ... the notion that everyone
84. 'Elite Plans to go it alone over pay' Times HigherEducationSupplement, 8 December
2000.
85. Bradney has commented 'There are happy law schools as well as unhappy ones: those
which are collegiate and those which are not' (1999) 18 SPTL Reporter, Spring, at 2.
The reasoning processes of academics indealing with research, academic culture and identity
has been explored by M Wager 'Emotions and Professional Identity in Academic Work'
(2001) Paper presented to the Higher Education Close-Up Conference 2, Lancaster
University, 16-18 July.
86. 'Excellence Comes Through Diversity' Times Higher Education Supplement,
2 February 2001.
87. J Currie et al Gendered Universitiesin GlobalizedEconomies (Maryland: Lexington

Books, 2002 forthcoming).

88. Cownie, n 2 above; Wells, n 9 above.

18

Legal Studies
in the law school is bound together in common enterprise with an equal say
in its overall direction and an equal responsibility for its success of failure.' 89

The processes of corporatisation outlined above have transformed understandings

of what being a 'successful' academic entails and, in the context of an increasingly
bureaucratised academy, have had an impact on the gender dynamics of higher
education far beyond any question of the erosion of collegiate governance (which
has, to date, formed the focus of much of the critique of corporatisation). Nor can
what is at issue here be confined, say, to the fact that there is growing evidence to
suggest that the 'pleasures' of academic life referred to by Bradney (above) may
be, for many academic women and men in the United Kingdom at least,
increasingly few and far between.9" Remembering that power is not always
exercised by brute force and coercion, and that within the conditions of late
modernity '... the shaping of wills, desires, aspirations and interests' and 'the
formation of subjectivities and collectivities [may be] more typical than the brute
domination of one will by another' (emphasis added),9' the changing nature of
academic commitments both to knowledge in a particular field and to the
institution in which academics work suggests that there is something more at stake
than simply shifting modes of belonging and integration.
As what Thornton has termed 'new knowledge workers' within a global
economy, not only is the form and function of academic labour being transformed.
The subjective experience of 'being' an academic has itself been reconstituted in
some far reaching ways; and with it, I wish to suggest, new academic subjectivities
are emerging to which both individual men and women might aspire, identify
with or otherwise deem to be of some significance in grounding ideas of what it
means to be a 'successful' legal scholar (whether consciously or, importantly,
89. Bradney, n 85 above. Compare J Axtell The Pleasuresof Academe: A Celebration
and Defense of Higher Education(Lincon, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
It is,of course, important to recognise the broader context of a well-documented decline in
job satisfaction for public workers generally: Guardian27 March 2001. For a more
optimistic assessment see MPresdee 'Heart of Academic Continues to Beat' Times Higher
Education Supplement, 3 August 2001.

90. A recent survey of academics in the United Kingdom found that 25% had suffered
from a stress-related illness during the last 12 months which was serious enough to warrant
taking time off work. 53% of academics reported poor psychological health, including stress,
sleeplessness and depression, while 44% of university lecturers had seriously considered
leaving higher education and 49% had considered early retirement over the past few years:
G Kinman PressurePoints: A survey into the causes and consequences of occupational

stress in UK academic and related staff (London: AUT, 1998). Kinman also found that,
on average, more women academics than men reported that the pressure to publish had
increased significantly (para 9.11.2); and that women, rather than men, reported the difficulty
balancing family and workplace commitments as a source of stress (para 9.11.12). See also
I McNay The impact of the 1992 RAE on Institutionaland IndividualBehaviour in English
HigherEducation:The Evidencefrom a researchproject (Bristol: HEFCE, 1997). The

AUT itself runs a 24-hour stress-line for members: Tel 08705 234533.
91. N Rose 'Transcending the Public/Private' (1987) 14 J Law and Society I at 69. See
also N Rose and MValverde 'Governed by Law?' (1998) 7 Social and Legal Studies 4 at
541. Drawing on the work of Foucault, an attempt has been made to relate this theoretical
framework to the law school in the work of Bradney and Cownie. (1990), n 14 above;
M Foucault Disciplineand Punish(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); M Foucault Power!

Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980).

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

19

unconsciously). 92 A number of features of the legal academic as 'new knowledge

worker' immediately suggest themselves. We 93 are individuals who increasingly
exist in competition, in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, not just with
legal academics in other university law schools (for example, for the limited pot
of research funding available via the 'lavish competition' 94 of the RAE) but with
colleagues in our own institutions. This is a competition is not simply over obvious
esteem indicators (such as research grants, and for access to useful information
over how to obtain them) but over the very space and time in which it might be
possible to produce research in the first place. 95 If one individual is regularly
'bought out', who is left to 'take up the slack' (in meeting teaching demands,
dealing with pastoral issues and so on)?96 If the market is the measure of all things,
and if only the 'fittest' institutions and individuals are likely to survive, where
does this essentially economic rationalist discourse (as Thornton observes, in effect
a competition policy)97 leave the 'inquiring soul' of the academic?99 If it is the
case, as some have long argued, that a narrowly doctrinal legal education is one
which impoverishes the questioning spirit of both law student and teacher, what
is left for the academic who aspires to be something more than being simply the
producer of more new knowledge workers (lawyers), functionaries and facilitators
of the neo-liberal market economy? What does this mean for the academic who
retains an interest in the pursuit of knowledgefor its own sake? As the move to a
contract-research structure gathers pace, one in which individual academics are
increasingly relied on to generate not only research funding but also their own
salaries, 9 what does this mean for control over knowledge production?"
92. 'Successful' is, of course a problematic term. See R Pahl After Success (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995). For a different view of the 'inevitability' of academic failure C Elliot
'Flophouses' The Australian,20 June 2001, pp 36-37. See generally M Henkel Academic
Identitiesand Policy Change in HigherEducation(London: Jessica Kinsley, 2000); A Talib

'The Continuing Behavioural Modification of Academics since the 1992 Research

Assessment Exercise' (2001) HigherEducation Review 30-46.

93. I do not wish to absent myself from this argument. It is also recognised that not all
readers of this journal will be legal academics.
94. Vick et al, n 73 above, at 554.
95. There is a strong argument to be made that many women and men in the legal academy
have, to varying degrees, given up collegiality in favour of self-promotion.
96. Vick et al, n 73 above, at 552, suggest that women in law schools have been more
likely than men to believe that their department's approaches to the RAE has discouraged

departmental cohesiveness and teamwork, in so doing damaging inter-departmental

relationships and increasing stress.
97. Thornton, n 75 above.
98. Bradney (1998), n 14 above, at 76. Also P Goodrich 'Of Blackstone's Tower:
Metaphors of Distance and Histories of the English Law school' in P Birks (ed) WhatAre
Law Schools For? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
99. 'Pay Rises will be linked to performance' Times HigherEducationSupplement, 22 June
2001.
100. See further, for an excellent account of this process, P Hillyard and J Sim 'The Political
Economy of Socio-Legal Research' in P Thomas (ed) Socio-Legal Studies (Aldershot:
Dartmouth, 1997). The argument that the increasingly close relationship between universities
and commerce poses a threat to long-term innovation is well-made by J Rutherford 'Uncreative
Friendship' Times HigherEducationSupplement, 27 April 2001. For an alternative view see
M Wicks 'We Must Work Together' Times HigherEducationSupplement, 5 May 2000. See
also M Garber Academic Instincts (Princeton University Press, 2001).

20 Legal Studies
It is not only the 'student as consumer' who has been reshaped by this process
therefore. What has also been transformed are the loyalties and forms of bonding
of legal academics themselves when seen as 'new knowledge workers'; employees
whose primary existence in the university is to satisfy increasingly predetermined
ends within the new 'industry' of higher education.'"' And it is at this point that
the 'question of gender' retains, I wish to argue, a striking relevance in seeking to
understand how these changes are playing out 'on the ground'.
Notwithstanding what has been suggested above about degrees of gender
convergence in relation to certain academic practices, this new knowledge
worker continues to be gendered in some far-reaching ways. And, if it is the
case that the primary role of the legal academic is indeed to be one of contributing
to the excellence of the university in a competitive market, what we have here
is a process which also has potentially far reaching consequences for
understanding the aforementioned dimensions of work-life balance in the
'everyday' lives of legal academics themselves.

III 'IT AIN'T WHAT YOU DO, IT'S THE WAY THAT YOU DO IT':
PERFORMATIVITY, ACADEMIC LABOUR AND THE
REMASCULINISATION OF THE (LEGAL) ACADEMY
It is instructive to consider more closely the model of academic performativity
this process has entailed, one which is itself premised on what can be seen as a
distinctly masculine notion of labour. A focus on achievements which are
quantifiable negates the importance of content in the name of productivity) 2
And, as Thornton suggests, work which cannot be measured in terms of 'outputs'
becomes formally invisible. As a result the very kinds of emotional management
work widely recognised to have been disproportionately undertaken by women
is devalued at the very moment, importantly, when teaching 3 itself has become
even more feminised.' At the same time the assessment of the worth of various
academic practices has been increasingly subject to the gaze of a more
masculinised university centre through a dominant culture which emphasises
not only visible outcomes but also one which produces a self-surveilling
performative self on the part of the academic. And what is being valued here is,
let us be clear, a model of performativity which '... encourages the relentless
promotion of the self at the expense of good citizenship.' (emphasis added)0 5
'It is official: I work 57.5 hours a week.' 6

101. Thornton, n 75 above.

102. Grants obtained, number of articles published, students taught and supervised and
so forth: Thornton, n 75 above. For some, of course, 'We would all be better off if academics
wrote fewer but better books': L Segal 'Opinion' Guardian,13 February 2001.
103. And, indeed, the role of senior academics themselves: Wells, n 9 above, at 124.
104. J Chrisler 'Teacher versus scholar: role conflict for women' in L H Collins et al
(eds) CareerStrategiesfor Women in Academe (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).
105. Thornton, n75 above. Understood, following Giddens, as a feature of a more general
'reflexive project of the self', the growing use of personal academic web pages provides,
in many instances, a spectacular example of the individual capacity for self-promotion.
106. SBassnett 'A Crushing Workload' TimesHigherEducationSupplement, 8December2000.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

21

It is in relation to how the temporal' 07 and spatial parameters of academic work

relate to relationships of dependency and caring in individuals' 'private' lives,
however, that the gendering of this new academic subject is, perhaps, most
clearly marked. Let us be clear, and to state what is, for many, now a 'common
sense' fact about the nature of contemporary academic life. To be free to travel
to national and international conferences, to 'work all hours' unconstrained by
the demands (and pleasures) of family and friends, entails the presence of material
and psychological networks of support which are not dissimilar from those
associated with the well-documented 'commitment question' in the careers of
many practising lawyers. 8 The flexibility of academic work in terms of
contracted hours has traditionally been seen to have permitted some leeway
around the negotiation of work-life conflict. One result of this, indeed, is that
an academic career might have appeared particularly attractive to some women
(for example, those leaving the profession) and men who have sought to avoid
the 'time-bind' and work with some autonomy. Yet the very indeterminacyof
academic labour in terms of time and commitment is proving double-edged
within the new emotional economy which is being fostered by the corporatised
university; one in which, I have suggested, and it is important to remember,
new subjective attachments to labour are themselves being reconstituted.0 9
Unsurprisingly, experiences of gender, employment and migration in higher
education suggest the tracks of promotion and career mobility in recent years
favoured men rather than women." 0 At the same time, there is growing reason
to believe that the physical and psychological costs of this form of academic
life - one which would appear to be increasingly marked by stress, exhaustion
and at times depression, at least judging by a range of surveys of academic wellbeing"' - is also playing out in different ways for women and men." 2 The effects,
in other words, are not gender neutral. They appear, in many respects, to be
gendered.

107. For a general account of the gendered temporalities of work in the United Kingdom
since the 1930s see M Glucksmann Cottons and Casuals: The Gendered Organisationof
Time and Space (York: Sociologypress, 2000).
108. Sommerlad and Sanderson, n 4 above.
109. M White 'Lets Bring Back the Weekend' Times HigherEducationSupplement, 8 June

2001.
110. For the view that this has inthe past, ineffect, produced a market inmale academics,
see J Gray 'Letter' Times HigherEducation Supplement, 17 November 1995; J. Barnard,
n 73 above, at 476; 'Women lost out when partners switch jobs' Independent, 24 February
2000.
111. See n 83 above.
112. See further Vick et al, n 73 above, at 554; on how the interaction of 'bureaucracy,
home and child care are damaging women's career prospects' in the academy, Bassnett, n
106 above; on the positive response of some women academics to Bassnett's argument, which
has been described as 'as welcome as a moan among friends', 'Letters' Times Higher
EducationSupplement, 15 December 2000; on women academics being 'held back by a fear
of failure' in making research grant applications the new climate, 'Risky Business' Times
HigherEducationSupplement, 17 October 2000; on the exclusion of women inRAE returns,
'Staff lose out inwily bids for RAE cash' Times HigherEducationSupplement, 6 July 2001;
'Tertiary system pumped by testosterone' The Australian, 15 August 2001. Also 'Women's
Enjoyment of Career Plummets' Guardian,13 June 2001.

22

Legal Studies

(a) 'Taking care of men?': paternal and entrepreneurial masculinities

in the corporatised university
The emotional economy and model of performativity I have outlined above
is not simply masculine in terms of the self it produces, however, the
subjective commitments it demands. The management culture with which
it is enmeshed itself exhibits a distinctly masculine ethos.'1 4 I have suggested
above that the model of collegiate governance, which I recognise some argue
still remains of value in academic life," 5 ill-fits a 'top-down' mode of
management in which authority is conflated with command, and in which a
particular kind of 'masculine voice' is valorised."16 In many universities the
scrutiny of senior managers has diminished, if not effectively disappeared
altogether, as a growing bifurcation has occurred between university
management and academic staff. In this process a hard-pressed 'middle
management' - heads of department - have become the individuals who
increasingly appear to carry the administrative burden and, importantly,
emotional fall-out of these restructured, 'leaner and meaner' outcomefocused educational systems. Yet there is, I would suggest, more at issue
here for a gendered analysis than the changing nature of governance; and
that is, I would suggest, the important and revealing synergy which exists
between the way in which predominantly male senior managers have been
empowered by these changes and the enthusiasm with which this culture
has been embraced institutionally.
To clarify. Several commentators have, in responding to changes in higher
education across western countries, depicted the new managerial style within
universities as culturally masculinist in nature; aggressive, top-down, resistant
to dialogue and exchange and lacking in empathy as to the human costs of
the changes which have been (and are being) instituted in many institutions
(not least, as in a growing number of cases in the United Kingdom, in the
administering of redundancies). It is a style of management which, I would
add, exhibits characteristics which from a psycho-social perspective raise
interesting questions about the intersections of gender, socio-economic and
educational background in the career trajectory of men in the academy (issues
113. This term echoes the title of A McMahon Taking Careof Men: Sexual Politics in the

Public Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), the argument of which will
be discussed and developed below.
114. L Bowen 'Beyond the Degree: Men and Women at the decision-making level in
British Higher Education' (1999) 11 Gender and Education I at 5-25. On masculinity and

management generally, see JHearn 'Men, Managers and Management: the case of higher
education' in S Whitehead and R Moodley (eds) Transforming Managers:Engendering
Change in the Public Sector (London: UCL Press, 1999); D Collinson and J Hearn Men
as Managers,Managersas Men (London: Sage, 1996). Also C Itzin and J Newman (eds)
Gender, Culture and OrganisationalChange (London: Routledge, 1995); J. Wajcman
Managing Like A Man: Women andMen in CorporateManagement(Cambridge: Polity,

1998).
115. Bradney and Cownie, n 14 above.
116. Thornton n 75 above. See also A Sinclair Doing Leadership Differently: Gender,
Powerand Sexuality in a Changing Business Culture(Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1998); K Jones, CompassionateAuthority: Democracy and the Representation of

Women (London: Routledge, 1993).

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

23

beyond the scope of this paper)." 7 Yet it is important to recognise how the
cultures and practices of universities are not, I would argue, equally male or
masculine in the same way as they have been in the past. Within literature on
education more generally what has been termed a 'structural backlash' has
been identified as having taken place in contemporary schooling," 8 one in
which a restructuring of educational systems has been seen to have served to
reinstatemen and, importantly, new forms of entrepreneurial,"9 rather than
older style paternalistic, masculinities at the core of policy making in
education. 120 Whilst recognising many differences between higher education
and other sectors of education, the notion of structural backlash has a certain
purchase for understanding the gendered dynamics of what is happening in
universities. Crucially, paternalistic masculinity - more commonly associated
with the culture in universities of, say, twenty years ago - is now seen to be
broadly incompatible with formal gender equality. It is the product of a
historical moment marked by clearer gender divisions of labour (personified
in many institutions, perhaps, by the presence of the University Wives Club).
It is something which frames and runs through the comments cited by Wells,
albeit that these are men characterised variously as kindly, paternalistic,
protective or else blatantly sexist in their diverse 'demonstrations of
masculinity'.' The entrepreneurial man, in contrast, is a product of more
liberal times, one in which a general acceptance of the ideals of gender equality
has become the norm in a context in which women have entered the academic
work force in far greater numbers.
This idea that dominant forms of masculinity are themselves in a process
of change is, to a degree, a theme which writers on women legal academics

117. For a rare recognition of how biography has informed both the career trajectory of
a male legal academic and, inparticular, his personal relationship to feminism, see P Goodrich
'Barron's Complaint: A Response to 'Feminism, Aestheticism and the Limits of Law'
(2001) Feminist Legal Studies 9 at 149-70. Given the structuring of the academic career,
the later shift into an essentially managerial role within many university structures presents
(some) men with understandable financial and psychological rewards. For an excellent
account of the structural and psychological dimensions of this process, see P Redman and
M Mac an Ghaill 'Educating Peter: The Making of a History Man' in D Steinberg et al
(eds) BorderPatrols:Policingthe BoundariesofHeterosexuality(London: Cassell, 1997).

An attempt to 'make visible male sexualities infurther education' is contained inC Haywood
and M Mac an Ghaill 'A Man in the Making: Sexual Masculinities Within Changing
Training Cultures' (1997) Sociological Review 576-590.
118. B Lingard and P Douglas Men Engaging Feminisms: Pro-feminism, Backlashes
and Schooling (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999).
119. Entrepreneur: 'an individual who organises, managers and assumes the risk of the
business enterprise' OED. It is generally understood that this individual operates in the
for-profit world, undertaking activities for personal benefit or for the benefit of shareholders.
This can be distinguished from the notion of 'social entrepreneur' who might, whilst engaging
inthese tasks, operate in a non-profit area to benefit a target group or community.
120. See S Whitehead 'From paternalism to entrepreneurialism: the experience of men
managers in UK post compulsory education' (1999) 20 Discourse:Studies in the Cultural
PoliticsofEducation 1.It is possible to map these changes onto a not dissimilar process in
relation to the legal profession: see eg, M Burrage 'From a Gentleman's to a public
profession: status and politics in the history of English Solicitors' (1996) 13 IJLP 45.
121. Wells, n 9 above.

24

Legal Studies

have observed. Wells, again, for example, drawing on Hearn's work on

management structures in universities, notes 2 2 how a 'white middle-class,
male collegiality (one which marked universities of the 1970s and early
1980s) has been disrupted by the new managerial controls from
government'. 23 Yet, crucially, I would argue, a distinctively masculinist
culture has not only been maintained, it has arguably been heightened by
the thrust towards corporatisation. To adapt this argument more specifically
to the case of the university law school, what is being charted here is a shift
in the form of cultures and practices, from the 'fairly liberal', autonomous
regime of the old universities - of 'managerial control, largely by men, and
largely of men' 12 4 - to a new bureaucratic managerialism which, it would
seem, continues to male-dominated, fratriarchal in nature'25 and, the research
legal academics would suggest, frequently marginalising of
on women
26
women. 1
My argument at this stage can be summarised as follows. First, I have
outlined a process of change in which a style of paternalistic masculinity,
one more commonly associated with the ideal of the university as a liberal
institution, has given way to the 'new entrepreneurial' commitment to the
processes of corporatisation. Importantly, however, the broader context in
which this entrepreneurial culture exists is one marked by a formal acceptance
of ideals of formal gender-equality. Yet, it is also clear, a condition of
substantive equality between men and women does not appear to have been
achieved in law schools. Indeed, there is evidence that something like pay
differentials have in fact widened between men and women.' 27 There is strong
reason to believe, I have argued, that the changes taking place in universities
(whether or not they are to be usefully conceived of as a 'structural backlash')
are inhibiting moves towards equality in this area because of the ways in which
a range of university practices and cultures are themselves being
remasculinised.
Secondly, and following on from the above. There is reason to believe that
it is predominantly, though by no means exclusively, women rather than men
who perceive there to be a problem with the more general corporatisation of
universities presently underway. This should not, perhaps, surprise. At a
broader level, sociological analyses of the 'transformations of intimacy' have
for some time characterised the demand by women for reconstituted intimate
and sexual relationships with their partners, and for full citizenship and
122. Wells, n 9 above, at 129.
123. Wells, n 9 above. An empirical study of this process can be found inD Kerfoot and
S Whitehead 'Boys Own Stuff: Masculinity and the Management of Further Education'
(1998) Sociological Review 436-457. See also S Whitehead 'Men, Managers and the
Shifting Discourses of Post-Compulsory Education' 1(2) Research in Post-Compulsory
Education at 151-168.
124. J Heam, quoted in Wells, n 9 above, at 129.
125. Thornton (n 75 above) observes the way inwhich these senior managers, who are
almost invariably male, surround themselves with men who possess similar characteristics
to themselves. On homosociability and the academy generally, see n 39.
126. Currie et al, n 87 above.
127. 'Gender pay gap at university widens' Guardian,17 July 2001, reporting a pay gap
in some universities of over 30% between women and men.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

25

participation in the workplace, as important engines of social change.' 28 Much

research on men, employment and family practices suggests, in marked
contrast, that far from pushing for change many men continue to stall and resist
in the face of women's demands, whether it is for an equal share of domestic
labour or for equality in the workplace. 29 On the argument presented in this
paper concerning the gendered dynamics of contemporary academic life, and
leaving aside here the difficult question of whether 'success for women is not
necessarily synonymous with the idea of success for men',' 3 0 the views of senior
university managers can be seen to reflect what appear to be the perceptions
of many men in general; that they do not, in effect, 'see' that there is a problem
of gender in this area.' 3' Gender continues to be marginalised from 'serious'
discussion of what is seen to be at issue in discussing the changing nature of
(legal) academic life.
IV 'RUNNING FASTER, STANDING STILL': CONCLUDING REMARKS
'The existence of women in law as practitioners, judges, and teachers, and
the fledgling movement among some female legal academics to develop
feminist legal theory, have yet to substantially alter the nature of legal
discourse or the dominant legal concepts and constructs. An overriding
commitment to the equality objective seems to preclude ... from
conceptualizing and becoming proponents of a gendered analysis of the
policy and politics offamilies.... This is an essentially assimilationist stance
that does not challenge existing structures of dominance and control." 32
This paper has embraced questions about gender and social change which, I
recognise, transcend a debate about the university and it's law school; issues
'... not simply [of] a scuffle over maternity leaves or flexitime schedules, but a
complex, multifaceted system that renders most women professionally
marginalized'.'I" I have sought to contribute to the debate presently taking place
about women legal academics by addressing how, in a context of formal equality,
certain changes may themselves be superficial '... merely altering form, while
128. A Giddens The Transformationsof Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity, 1992): U Beck
and E Beck Gemsheim The Normal Chaos of Love (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). Other
readings, couched more interms of the pragmatics of parliamentary politics, similarly suggest
that it is women, rather than men, who are exhausted, disappointed in existing relations
and, importantly, demanding change.
129. See further McMahon, n 113above; A McMahon 'Male readings of feminist theory:
the psychologization of sexual politics in the masculinity literature' (1993) 22 Theory and
Society at 675-95; C Cockburn In the way of women: Men's resistanceto sex equality in

organisations(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).

130. M Thornton 'Liberty, Equality and ?: Endowing Fraternity With a Voice' (1996)
18 Syd LR 4 at 566. See further M Markus 'Women, Success and Civil Society: Submission
to, or Subversion of, the Achievement Principle' in S Benhabib and D Cornell (eds)
Feminism as Critique:On the Politicsof Gender (Oxford: Polity, 1987).
131. P Koontz 'Gender Bias and the legal profession: Women "see" it, men don't' (1995)
15 Women and Politics 1.

132. Fineman, n 49 above, at 100.

133. Abrams, n 43 above, at 751.

26

Legal Studies

leaving aspiration and expectation undisturbed'.13 4 The argument I have

presented is not premised on a belief that 'family life' (itself, of course, a
contested and open-ended notion)'35 is in any way necessarily more (or, indeed,
any less) important than paid employment. Far from it, and following the
argument of Morgan,' 36 I am seeking to integrate into the debate in this area an
appreciation of difference and diversity by recognising that family life is itself
something that might itself usefully be:
'... considered through a variety of different lenses and from different
perspectives. Thus, family practices may also be gender practices, class
practices, age practices and so on ...family life is never simplyfamily life and
... is always continuous with other areasof existence. The points of overlap
and connection are often more important than the separate entities, understood
as work, family, politics and so on.' (emphasis added)' 37
From this perspective the relationship between 'family' and 'work' is itself
reconceptualised, in that there are seen to be multifarious ways in which diverse
social practices play a key role in the constitution of subjects; via processes,
for example, such as the encoding of cultural, social and economic capital,
the construction of family work as a form of emotional labour and via
normative notions of parental responsibility. Importantly, however, and what
has been argued most clearly within a growing body of feminist scholarship
in this area, what we are dealing with here are, ultimately, fundamental
questions of social reproduction and citizenship which have an ethical and
gendered dimension. To return to law, present research on women and the law
school has raised, we have seen, many concerns about the ways in which
academic legal work relates to the 'private life' of the individual. In so doing,
I have argued, it has engaged with new and complex issues about how women
and men might be understood to relate to the changing dynamics of the
workplace. It is crucial in the present climate of rapid change in higher
education, I have suggested, to recognise and address the interconnections
between the social, economic and cultural shifts which are impacting on and
transforming the legal academy in some far reaching and frequently
contradictory ways.
I would make three points by way of conclusion.
(a) (Re)Conceptualising gender
There is, within both legal studies and gender and social theory scholarship
more generally, an urgent need to rethink and adequately to conceptualise the
way in which the masculine subject is understood. There now exists a
considerable interdisciplinary literature on the structural and, increasingly,
psycho-social dimensions of what are experienced at different moments and
134. Abrams, n 43 above, at 6.
135. As Gerson observes, men, women, family and, indeed, 'work' are categories which
need to be treat cautiously: K Gerson No Man's Land: Changing Commitments to Family
and Work (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
136. Above, n 60.
137. Above, n 60, at 13.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

27

contexts as gendered practices and subjectivities.' 38 The contours and themes

of this debate are beyond the scope of this paper. At the very least, however,
and remembering that gender is always relational, developing any meaningful
agenda of change around a question of 'women and the law school' also involves
addressing men as social subjects - and culturally masculine practices - in ways
which are grounded in actual social relationships, not in abstract notions of
gender ideals which would, so often, appear to 'float free' from what men
actually do.' 39
(b) Entrepreneurialman: shifting the landscape of legal scholarship?
Secondly, and perhaps more contentiously. The processes of change in higher
education charted in this paper, and what I have presented as an associated shift
from paternalistic to entrepreneurial masculinities in terms of university
management, has itself rewritten the terms of how legal scholarship is judged
and evaluated.
To clarify. The traditional argument from within broadly socio-legal and
critical legal scholarship has been, of course, that the legacy of doctrinal legal
thinking has been to exert an intellectual strait-jacket on understandings of law
and society. Yet whilst the self-conscious 'outsider status' of critical legal
studies continues to be subject to (an at times intemperate) debate, 40 it is
increasingly common to find statements in United Kingdom legal scholarship
that, if doctrinalism is not necessarily in it's final 'death throes',' 4' then there
has (at the very least) occurred a move away from the dominance of doctrinal
law in law schools and towards a more pluralistic approach - one which embraces
what were, in the past, seen as alternative approaches (notably, socio-legal
studies). Legal studies is unquestionably, as the results of the 2001 RAE reveal
42
in certain respects, now a far 'broader church' that has been the case in the past. 1
It is possible to go further, however, following the argument of this paper,
than simply stating that the processes of corporatisation - ones which fuse
interdisciplinarity with the importance of securing external research funding have shifted the balance of intellectual, economic and cultural capital between
the doctrinal and socio-legal and/or critical scholar.'43 The remasculinisation
of the academy and the rise of entrepreneurial masculinities outlined above has
cut across the internal disciplinary divides of law in some unpredictable ways.
Remembering that an academic career has historically exemplified many aspects
of the way in which a professional occupational structure has worked to

138. Without an adequately theorised notion of such a subject, for example, it is difficult
to see either how social change achieved in this context (presuming, that is, that there is
seen to be a 'problem' inthe first place and that some change within the working practices
of law school is itself a desirable end).
139. And which, ineffect, can excuse individual and group behaviour as manifestations
of a broader problem of 'masculinity': McMahon (1999), n 113 above.
140. See further P Goodrich 'The critic's love of the law: Intimate observations on an
insular jurisdiction' (1999) Law and Critique 1.
141. Bradney (1998), n 14 above.
142. Cownie (1999), n 14 above.
143. One of the clearest discussions of this can be found in Thomas, n 14 above.

28

Legal Studies

materially advantage some (middle-class, white) men, it is perhaps unsurprising

that a new generation of academics, regardlessof politicalor theoreticalhue,

should have in many respects reproduced - and in some ways, perhaps, actually
heightened - practices which have historically marginalised women.
Recognising that the relationship between socio-legal studies, critical legal
studies and feminism has long been contentious,' the cultural shifts around
the parameters of the 'acceptable masculine' which have taken place over the
past twenty years do not seem to have challenged existing structures of
dominance and control in universities.'45 There is no reason to believe, in short,
that the dominance of men has shifted simply because a new intellectual terrain
has evolved or because lip service is now paid to gender equity. Socio-legal
'status seekers', to adopt Goodrich's term, 46 might equally embody the
dominant values of the reasonable, rational middle-class male, engage in a selfaggrandising performativity and seek to combine economic success with the
accomplishment of a heterosexual family matrix which itself then reproduces
traditional gender divides. 147 A growing cultural salience of, and willingness
to speak and write about gender, does not, in other words, in and of itself indicate
a change in social practices surrounding knowledge-production. Gendered
discrimination is, as has long been clear, both subtle and pervasive, entwined
with conscious and, importantly, unconscious ways of thinking, organisational
practices and cultures.
Taking a broader view of law schools, there is little reason to suggest that
there has occurred any significant shift away from the socio-economic and
cultural homogeneity of the legal academic community more generally, as noted
48
by Wells as being predominantly white, middle-class and able-bodied. If
anything, the complex interrelation of the shifting hierarchy of the United
144. See K O'Donovan 'Fem-Legal and Socio-Legal: An Incompatible Relationship' in
P Thomas (ed) Socio-Legal Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997).

145. It is this 'failure to change' institutionally which informs, to a degree, Goodrich's

recent critique of the United Kingdom Critical Legal Studies movement: n 140 above.
146. Goodrich intriguingly suggests, in his recent (broadly) psychoanalytically-based
requiem for British critical legal studies (n 140 above), 'a degree of Oedipal acting out' in
the 'interventions' (p 12) of those (mostly) male legal scholars who engaged in 'internecine
critique' (p 8) with what was at least perceived during the 1980s and early 1990s to be the
jurisprudential establishment. Such '... critique was not predicated upon self-criticism', he
suggests, 'and the principal result of this was a largely unreflective exteriorisation of critical
analysis and polemic to address the work of contemporaries, peers, colleagues and fellowtravelling allies' (p 13). See further, by way of response and dialogue, A Barron 'Feminism,
Aestheticism and the limits of Law' (2000) 8 Feminist Legal Studies 3 at 275-317:
P Goodrich 'Barron's Complaint: A Response to 'Feminism, Aestheticism and the Limits
of Law' (2001) Feminist Legal Studies 9 at 149-170.
147. Following Goodrich's observations (n 140 above), a tradition that it is possible to
read as one in which a group of upwardly mobile male intellectuals succeed simultaneously
in retaining a class heritage whilst differentiating themselves from those who (selfishly?)
used their cultural capital to their own economic advantage. Compare the argument of S Hall
'Daubing the Drudges of Fury' (forthcoming) Theoretical Criminology.In the shifting
political economy of legal research there is a case to be made that it has been possible to
exploit intellectual and cultural advantages of an ostensibly 'outsider' status in the quest for
credibility amongst other academics.
148. Wells. n 9 above.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

29

Kingdom law schools with the move to a mass higher education system presently
underway means that what is taking place at present - and a process which will
in all likelihood be heightened in the future - will result in the further cultural
and financial empowerment of those who are alreadyprivileged in terms of their
social, economic and cultural capital. If it is indeed the case that 'Everyone's
going to law school' then, rightly or wrongly, and put bluntly, there appears to
be a growing perception on the part of many in the legal academic community
that 'there are only a few law schools worth going to'. " I It is not difficult to
foresee the potential implications of such a view, however accurate it may be of
what is actually happening, for many working-class and ethnic minority students
seeking a career in law.

(c) Imagining futures

Thirdly, following on from the above. The wider cultural conversation about
women and employment, of which the debate about women and the law school is
part, is one which engages ultimately with how we think about the gendered nature
of relationships of care and dependency. 5 These are issues which transcend
questions of child care, domestic labour or, for a growing number of people, eldercare. In relation to the law school, the concerns which are being voiced by some
women legal academics raise questions about quality of life and social justice
which embrace questions about both what we do as legal scholars and how we do
it. And in relation to both there is a case to be made that what is happening at the
present moment represents something of a critical juncture.
In terms of what we do, for socio-legal scholarship in the United Kingdom,
the on-occasion all too willing embrace of neo-liberal market agendas is one
which brings with it the well-documented, and very real, danger that the hand
that feeds academic respectability and career advancement (for example, securing
external research income) is itself one which is hungry for technocratic
conformism as the only legitimate (socio) legal knowledge.' 5' And in terms of
the 'everyday' experience of legal academic life, even if it is accepted that the
149. This term was used in a session at the Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual
Conference Bristol, April 2001. It is cited here (unattributed) as it captures what has become,
for many legal academics, a commonly held view of the consequences of the shifting
hierarchy. In a context in which universities will increasingly seek private income to fund
core activities ('Going it alone' Times HigherEducationSupplement, 18 December 2001),
and with varying degrees of success, it is unlikely that the grade inflation across law schools
in the 2001 RAE will result inany more general shift within this emerging hierarchy.
150. A recognition, eg, that the choice and commitment to care about is not necessarily
the same thing as caringfor. See further S Sevenhuijsen Citizenshipand the Ethicsof Care:
Feminist Considerationsabout Justice,Morality and Politics(London: Routledge, 1998);
J C Tronto Moral Boundaries:A PoliticalArgument for an Ethic of Care (London:

Routledge, 1993); J C Tronto 'Women and caring: what can feminists learn about morality
from caring?' inA Jaggar and S Bordo (eds) Gender,Body, Knowledge (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1989); S Benhabib Situating the Self: Gender, Community and
Postmodernismin Contemporary Ethics (London: Routledge, 1992).
151. M Thornton 'Technocentrism in the Law School: Why the Gender and Colour of
Law Remain the Same' (1998) 36 Os HLJ 2 at 369-398; Thornton, n 75 above. See also
Hillyard and Sim, n 100 above.

30 Legal Studies
purpose and scope of higher education is to be reduced to that of handmaiden
of economic growth, there are surely important lessons to be learnt from the
field of business about both the economic and personal costs of the processes
transforming academic life.52 In this regard it is, at the very least, ironic that at
the very moment when many other employment fields are struggling to address
issues of work-life balance in a meaningful way,' 53 albeit with some difficulty
and often little success, many universities in the United Kingdom increasingly
appear to assume they are employers entitled to 'ideal (academic) workers' free
from family responsibilities, and that both women and men should be expected
to perform in a way regardless of any 'private life'. I recognise that these are
questions which in many respects ill-fit the current direction of a model of
academic life obsessed with short-term production of 'useful knowledge' and
profit-maximisation. Yet they are issues which, I would argue, have a direct
bearing on imagining the possible futures of the (legal) academy.
What of the future therefore? On one level it is possible to read the development
of IT, law 'on-line', the 'virtual university' and so forth as bringing with it a
transformation in where legal academics do much of their work- something clearly
with potentially gendered implications. Equally, and bearing in mind the present
uncertainties (at the time of writing) about how the 2001 RAE will play out
financially,'-' there is a possibility that (in some institutions at least) the 'research
bubble' may, if not burst, then at least be accorded a rather different status relative
to teaching. Again, it is possible to see a gendered dimension to such a development.
Yet there is also an argument to be made that, whatever shifts might take place in
the temporal and spatial parameters of academic practices, the processes of
corporatisation outlined in this paper point ultimately, across the higher education
sector, to a diminution of autonomy and a greater rigidity in academic labour.
Bearing in mind the now well-documented 'proletarianisation' of university
academics in the United Kingdom, 55 and in recognising, in particular, the longstanding ambiguous professional status of law scholars vis-a-vis legal practice, it is
152. The clear lessons to date from the private sector on the benefits of promoting the familyfriendly workplace, and of taking issues of work-life balance seriously, are, eg, illuminating.
On the legal profession see F Kay 'Right from Law: a competing risks model of departures
from law firms' (1997) 31 Law and Society Review 2 at 728. For clear evidence, eg, that
management itself gains benefits from the provision of family friendly working arrangements;
that employee productivity increases; morale is improved, and that it iseasier to recrmit and retain
a motivated workforce, see JForth, S Lissenburgh, C Callender et al Family-FriendlyWorking
Arrangementsin Britain (London: DfEE Research Report No 16, 1997); S Dex and F Scheibl

'Business Performance and family-friendly policies' (1999) 24 JGeneral Management 4 at 34;

S Bevan, S Dench, P Tamkin et al Family FriendlyEmployment: The Business Case (London:
DfEE Research Report No 136, 1999). See generally T Hogarth et al Work-Life Balance2000:

BaselineStudy of work-life balancepracticesinGreatBritain (London: Institute For Employment

Research/DFEE, 2000); D Cohen 'Rich Man, New Man?' Independent, 4 March 1997.
153. Including, to a degree, the legal profession itself: M Chambers 'Part-Time partners:
the Linklaters Initiative' 19 Commercial Lawyer 21; D L Chambers 'Accommodation and
satisfaction: women and men lawyers and the balance of work and family' Law and Social
Inquiry 14; N MacErlean 'Long Hours: a sign of poor practice' The Lawyer, 6 October
1998; M Mullally 'Berwin Leighton re-evaluates "quality of life" for employees' (1999)
Legal Week, 22 April, at 7.
154. 'Top Class Research Faces Cash Squeeze' The Times, 10 December 2001.
155. Dearlove, n 69 above.

The changing university and the (legal) academic career

31

not difficult to envisage that the human resource implications of present

developments might be far-reaching. More senior legal academics, those perhaps
over (or in some cases under) the age of 50, are being presented with the attractions
of early retirement packages which might facilitate, for some at least, potentially
combining and continuing certain aspects of academic work in a less pressured
environment.'56 This is something which anecdotal evidence suggests is
increasingly taking place, illustrating not only an important demographic shift in
universities but also the erosion of the 'job for life' model in which new attitudes to
work and career, and innovative orientations to the labour market, emerge amongst
the middle-class more generally.'57 For a younger generation, and for early career
academics, when faced with the choice between 'shaping up' or 'shipping out' of
the emotional economy of the academic as new knowledge worker, leaving the
academy itself - regardless of whether it is to be into the harshly competitive, but
potentially financially lucrative, world of legal practice - may be, for some, an
increasingly attractive option. 58 If the growing body of research on academic 'wellbeing' and the workplace more generally represents anything like an accurate
measure of what is taking place at present, then what is happening 'on the ground'
for many academics at least - both women andmen - involves issues about 'work/
life imbalance;' 59 a lack of collegiality within an increasingly low-trust
environment;" 6 long hours; 6' an unsympathetic corporate culture and increasing
156. Eg, whilst continuing to take on teaching responsibilities and other professional
commitments on an ad hoc basis.
157. Martin, n 63 above.
158. It has become commonplace to state that the 'brightest' and most (financially)
ambitious law students have, over the past thirty years, tended not to view a career as a legal
academic as a 'first choice' on graduation. Implicitly, there has been an assumption that
some other factor motivated those of us who 'became' legal academics. At the present
moment concern is being expressed that the best students are turning away from graduate
study across disciplines more generally: note, eg, the Bennett Inquiry survey of the humanities
and social sciences in the United Kingdom undertaken as part of the British Academy's
Review of graduate studies. It is important here not to underestimate the continued power
of corporate law firms in United Kingdom law schools or the lure of the large firms for law
graduates: see Thornton (1998), n 151 above, pp 382-386.
159. On the legal profession, eg, see C McGlynn 'The Business Case For Equality in the
Solicitor's Profession' (2000) MLR 63 at 442-457. CfJ Pleck 'Are Family-Supportive Employer
Policies Relevant For Men?' in J Hood (ed) Men, Work andFamily (London, Sage, 1993).

160. The erosion of collegiality experienced inthe higher education sector stands inmarked

contrast, eg, to governmental attempts to counter the decline of collegiality and foster

community inother contexts. FJ Lacy and B A Sheehan 'Job Satisfaction Among Academic
Staff: an International Perspective' (1997) Higher Education 34 at 305-322.
161. B Burchell et al Job Insecurity and Work Intensification:Flexibility andthe Changing
Boundariesof Work (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1999), reporting that two-thirds

of surveyed employees say they 'always' or 'regularly' work longer than their basic working

hours: Also 'UK's work burden grows fastest in Europe' Guardian,21 June 2000;
'Workforce Close to Breaking Point over Britain's long hours culture' Independent,
I1 June 2001; 'Fear at the top' Guardian,12 May 1999. Bradney has neatly, light-heartedly,
summed up what is happening in United Kingdom universities: 'In the universities, families
are frowned upon; new academics have to take an oath to abstain from all personal
relationships for the first ten years of their careers, agree to take their meals by intravenous
injection and promise to go to the toilet only on every second Sunday' A Bradney 'Rejoice,
Rejoice' (2001) SPTL Reporter 23 at I.

32 Legal Studies
weight of workload';'62 at times, issues of physical and psychological health;'63
the quality of and, indeed, ability to sustain interpersonal relationships;161 and, that
'old (gendered) chestnut', of the sacrifice of familyi 61 in order to pursue a 'successful'
career - issues each of which, I have argued in this paper, continue to be gendered
in some far-reaching ways.

162. Ceridian Performance Partners The Priceof Success - Beyond the Great Work Life
Debate (London: Ceridian Performance Partners and Management Today, 1999).
163. F Thorsen 'Stress in Academe: What Bothers professors?' (1996) 31 Higher
Education at 471. Generally, L Worrall and C Cooper The Quality of Working Life: A Survey
ofManagers' ChangingExperience (London: Institute of Management, 1999). Cf K Coxon
'Vanishing Calm' Guardian,12 June 2001; 'Stressed Dons Left Suicidal' Times Higher
EducationSupplement, 31 March 2000 (reporting the Australian study UnHealthy Places
ofLearning, National Tertiary Education Union, 2000).
164. 'Half of all managers said they don't have time to build relationships outside work
and a quarter of the men and a third of the women said work was harming their sex life' The
Priceof Success, n 162 above.
165. lam grateful to Katherine O'Donovan (private communication, 3 August 2001) for
pointing out that the term 'sacrifice' is, perhaps, misleading in this context. If it is the case
that subjectivities are socially formed, and desires/aspirations shaped in particular discursive
and structural contexts, it is not difficult to anticipate that gender will not (and, evidence
suggests, has not) prevented some women from adapting to a masculinist managerial culture.
On this view, women who do enter law teaching may have their desires so shaped that they
do not opt for parenthood. It has been suggested by some legal academics (private
communications with author), following on from the above, that the behaviour of women
in universities has changed, with women at times adopting, within an increasingly competitive
academic environment, what have been culturally understood as masculine practices (eg, in
self-promoting, bullying behaviour). More generally, a heightened desire for and perceived
institutional pressure to obtain 'early promotion' (what one colleague has termed the 'Baby
Professor' Syndrome) is something which has been reported as widespread amongst both
male and female legal academics. Such developments can, it could be argued, be seen to be
bound up with wider processes of individualisation, the fracturing of traditional promotion
procedures fostered by the new managerialism and the erosion of collegiality within the

academy more generally. As noted above, however, this is something which would also
appear to have favoured men rather than women: 'Men [remain] the overwhelming
beneficiaries of this system' D Aitkin, quoted in The Australian, 15 August 2001.