sexism

Image from Netflix series Adolescence

What happens when the manosphere goes to university

misogyny in higher education, misogyny in schools, sexism in schools, sexism in universities, , , , , , ,

We are part of a broader research team* investigating how online worlds are shaping Australian schooling. It’s a timely issue floodlit by the Netflix drama Adolescence. In 2024, our study contributed to a flood of reportage and academic research concerning a rise in sexist and  misogynistic encounters in Australian schools, and the broader social need for a coherent strategy around gender based violence (GBV) that challenges the power structures and rigid binary norms that underpin it. 

Universities are spaces where this work is both needed and occurs.

What universities should do

As social institutions and major providers of education, universities can and should play a role in promoting long-term social and cultural change through supporting diversity and justice oriented research and teaching. Indeed, universities are not only where specialists like teachers, lawyers, journalists, and health professionals are prepared to work in society, but where GBV itself is occurring to the extent that the Federal Government recently released its Action Plan Addressing Gender-based Violence in Higher Education. This is a welcome development but does not mean that education around gender justice has been mainstreamed. Nor has it manifested in greater institutional support for academics who teach this complex terrain. In fact, our research indicates that academics teaching diversity-related content are experiencing a sharp rise in GBV and ‘anti-woke’ backlash. 

The second phase of our research into digital worlds and their impacts on Australian classrooms turns to the university sector. It includes surveys and interviews with tertiary educators from across Australia. We ask if they have witnessed or experienced a rise in anti-social language or behaviours amongst tertiary students. Thus far, we have received 59 surveys and undertaken nine in-depth interviews, each approximately two hours long. While a modest sample, our data mirrors patterns playing out in schools and society more broadly. 

Diversity related content ‘woke’ and ‘politically extreme’

Most phase two respondents are women or culturally minoritised academics from across disciplines (i.e., education, politics, journalism, business, human resource development, health, and humanities). They teach diversity content relating to racial and gender justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, multiculturalism, First Nations sovereignty, and religious inclusion. As a dispersed teaching body, these academics share stories of the emotional burdens of this work. They describe this as having grown harder recently, and often having deleterious impacts on student evaluations of teaching which affect academics’ health and career progression.

As a casual academic in education explained:

“Over the past three years behaviour has grown progressively worse from largely Anglo Australian cohorts of … young men. They watch sporting matches and do online betting during class … They do not like strong female tutors who talk about Aboriginal education or inclusion. [They] hide these sentiments until anonymous feedback is due. Then they write about the tutor being ‘dangerous’ and opinionated and say that politics shouldn’t be part of education.” 

Academics across disciplines note diversity content is increasingly being framed by some students (and staff) as woke or politically extreme. The consequence for those who teach this content is a rise in feelings of precarity, anxiety, and frustration:

“I have stopped challenging students for fear of the feedback as I am on probation. I can’t do a good job ethically and morally. I don’t want to teach any more.” 

Student evaluations are a real problem in this context. They have always been problematic. But with an ever more polarised discourse and the necessity to take firmer stands in class which make you inevitably unpopular with some students it is now completely unacceptable for universities to continue using these tools to evaluate performance.

LGBTQIA+ and Gender Equity Backlash

Australian academics also speak of a rise in anti-LGBTQIA+ backlash and pushback against gender equity specifically:

“Every year I consider just not teaching anything about gender equality or diversity, to avoid the grief. But on I go … 

The anti-LGBTIQA+ backlash from students really shook me … There have been several examples of transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny in my classes especially in recent years, managing these interactions in class is getting increasingly difficult as opinions are becoming more polarised.

Just last week, a student expressed their opinion that it was ok to persecute lesbian and gay people because “they do not have children and contribute nothing to society, just like childless, single straight women” and therefore do not ‘deserve the protection of the law’.”

Lack of institutional and policy support

When asked if they feel supported by their institutions or what, specifically, is being done when challenging encounters arise, most respondents describe feeling insufficiently supported or institutionally gaslit, saying “nothing is ever done. Complaints get swept under the rug.” And “staff who experience bullying, harassment or mistreatment are made to feel they don’t know how to handle the situation.” Academics collectively speak of feeling alone, experiencing anxiety, and exhaustion.

But institutional inaction around GBV or anti-diversity backlash in classrooms links to a broader history of policy failure. This contributes to workplace cultures in which responses to such incidents are often ineffectual, absent, piecemeal, or left to individual teachers to resolve. This happens in schools and in universities. As funding to universities has been reduced, the higher education sector has grown more ‘masculinist’ and ‘business-like’. Courses centring diversity content are less institutionally prized than, for instance, the industry-aligned ‘hard’ sciences. This means academics who teach diversity content may often be working in isolation.

This also comes at a time when the manosphere (online groups unified by anti-feminist, right-wing populism) is shaping gender and racial politics worldwide through circulating extreme beliefs that many Gen Z boys and young men, in particular, are taking to be true. Common manosphere messaging includes the idea that feminism is a conspiracy, immigrants and cultural minorities are threats, social problems such as poverty or insecure housing are the result of women and minority groups advancing at men’s expense, and LGBTQIA+ people and single unmarried women are a threat to the natural order.

Diversity education for a strong social fabric

Universities are some of the last places where informed social critique and engagement across differences is nurtured. These are vital elements of a healthy democracy. Formal education should provide strong intellectual resistance to the polarised beliefs currently being amplified by digital worlds. Simply banning social media is insufficient. Yet, women and minority academics are increasingly carrying this work alone. They report feeling isolated, burnt out, and targeted by students labelling them ‘woke’ or ‘politically extreme’ – dynamics that will undoubtedly intensify with the Trump Administration’s blatant ‘war on woke’. Education is political and backlash against diversity is becoming extreme. Education must be part of the solution. Diversity work including gender justice must be valued as a core curriculum mandate across Australia’s pre-tertiary and tertiary education fields. Our social fabric depends on it.

* Professor Ed Palmer, Dr Eszter Szenes and Dr Daniel Lee all contributed to the research on which this article is based. Research ethics approval #2024-017.

Sam Schulz is an associate professor and sociologist of education at The University of Adelaide. Sarah McDonald is a lecturer at the Centre for Research in Education & Social Inclusion in UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia.

The header image is from the Netflix series Adolescence

Do elite private boys’ school alumni have justice politics?

Education of boys, Gender, sexism in schools, single sex schools, teaching gender respect, , , , , , , , , ,

Featured Symposium at AARE 2021: Elite private boys’ schooling, feminism and gender justice: reimagining research in a post #me too world

On November 30 2021, while many of us were in paper sessions at the annual AARE conference, the findings of a review of workplace culture in parliament house were released. The review, led by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins, was sparked by rape allegations made earlier this year by Brittany Higgins. The findings indicated that one in three people working in federal parliament has experienced some kind of sexual harassment there (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2021). What is also true is that a large number of MPs in the current parliament attended boys’ only schools, and recent revelations about the conduct of some boys in high fee-paying private boys’ schools have shone a negative light on them.

In September 2020, a year 12 muck-up day challenge at Sydney’s Shore school was made public which included such challenges as “spit on a homeless man”, “deck a stranger”, “sack whack a complete random walking past”, “get with someone below (age) 15”, and “get with an Asian chick”. In February 2021 Ms Chanel Contos, a former student at Kambala – an elite private girls’ school in Sydney – commenced a petition on social media for consent education to be taught earlier. This also attracted many testimonies from young women across the country regarding sexual assault from young men, many of whom attended elite private boys’ schools. 

A spotlight has therefore been focused on private boys’ schools and the male leaders they produce. All but two of Australia’s post war Prime Ministers (Bob Hawke and Julia Gillard) attended boys’ only schools, as did many men in the current parliamentary cabinet. Many of the men who attend boys’ only schools will come to occupy positions of significant privilege and power. There are crucial questions to be asked about the gender, class and race lessons being learnt by the young men attending such schools, and the way these travel with them as they come to occupy positions of influence in post-school life. Emeritus Professor Jane Kenway calls this the ‘misogyny pipeline’.

Published research shows us that such schools can be environments that are toxic for women teachers (Higham, 2018; Variyan, 2021) and indicates the sense of entitlement that can be fostered in such schools (Gaztambide-Fernández, Cairns & Desai, 2013). However it also indicates they are institutions that frequently engage in practices that are ostensibly about improving society and ameliorating justice (Kenway & Fahey, 2015). Indeed, how might these schools and their current and former students contribute to social justice rather than reproduce virulent forms of misogyny, classism and racism?

In response to such questions, AARE featured the research symposium Elite private boys’ schooling, feminism and gender justice: reimagining research in a post #me too world, at its annual conference. The symposium involved Drs Claire Charles and Lucinda McKnight, and Professor Amanda Keddie (Deakin University); Dr George Variyan (Monash University); Emeritus Professor Jane Kenway (Melbourne University); Professor Adam Howard (Colby College, USA), and Leanne Higham (LaTrobe University).

The symposium identified a range of challenges and opportunities for understanding questions of gender, class and race in elite private boys’ education both in Australia and the USA. A particular challenge identified was the ‘rules of entitlement’ that such schools implicitly teach their boys (Kenway). One such rule is that boys must know how to stay on top of all the hierarchies that matter. Given how strongly invested such schools, and their clients, are in hierarchies it was asked is it even possible to challenge this rule?

A key theme, in line with the conference title, was how we might re-imagine research in politically charged spaces, and in particular in/with elite private school boys and such schools’ alumni. Access to elite schooling for the purposes of research can be difficult. The symposium explored some different approaches to gaining insight into a culture where ‘what is part of the family stays with the family’. The schools were likened to a ‘secret brotherhood’ (Howard) where unsavoury are kept under a code of silence, although can sometimes be revealed to ‘insider’ researchers such as men who also attended elite boys’ schools, or by alumni who actively take up a more progressive justice politics. As part of re-imagining research in this space, the symposium also explored how researchers need to acknowledge their own positioning and investments (Charles, McKnight & Variyan).

A second theme was around how the schools themselves typically respond to revelations about their misogynistic cultures when they hit the media. Their crisis management techniques were identified. For example, they often respond by suggesting that such events are the result of a few ‘bad apples’ and are not representative of the broader culture or values of the school. A further strategy was their ‘dignified determination’ to address the issues. These defensive responses were described as a form of ‘misogyny masking’ (Kenway).

A key question, therefore, is how research, and the schools themselves, might address these problems. In particular, how research and teaching in elite private boys’ schools might seek to involve boys and men in working toward social justice. It is well established in research that involving men and boys in feminist projects can be a challenge yet one that is necessary if we are to change the status quo (Messner, Greenberg & Peretz, 2015). The symposium explored the discomfort and emotional intensities that boys and men often experience when they are invited to reflect on their complicity in perpetuating gender injustice (Keddie). It found that while such discomfort can be difficult, it is a necessary part of gender transformative work because you are dealing with personal violation. Such discomfort and emotions can be channelled in productive was for gender justice (Keddie). The role of researchers’ own relationships and emotions with regard to these schools was also explored (Charles, McKnight & Variyan).

In summary, recommendations arising from the symposium include the following:

·       That researchers continue to work with alumni from these schools to identify and further understand the factors that might assist some men to develop progressive justice politics both at school and later in life;

·       That further research is conducted into what may make elite private boys’ schools different from other elite schools that are co-educational or girls’ only schools, when it comes to addressing the problems outlined above;

·       That research and pedagogy continue to engage boys in working toward gender justice – including boys attending elite private boys’ schools.

Dr Claire Charles is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University. Her research advances understanding of the justice politics of privileged young people in an unfair world.

Dr Charles pulled together this overview of research, including her own, presented at AARE201. The other authors are: Dr Lucinda McKnight is a senior lecturer in pedagogy and curriculum at Deakin University. She conducts award-winning research into curriculum design’s role in teacher identity, autonomy and professionalism, especially in English.  Dr George Variyan is a lecturer in Master of Educational Leadership in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. George’s engagement in research is based on a critically orientated sociology, which explores human agency in the relationship between education and society. Amanda Keddie is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. She leads the program: Children, Young People and their Communities within the REDI (Research for Educational Impact) Centre. Her research interests and publications are in the broad field of social justice and schooling. Professor Jane Kenway is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences; Australia, Emeritus Professor at Monash University and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research expertise is in educational sociology.  Adam Howard, Ed.D., is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education and Chair of Education Program at Colby College, USA. Professor Howard’s research explores social class issues in education with a particular focus on privilege and elite education. Leanne Higham is a Lecturer in the School of Education at La Trobe University. A former secondary teacher, she is interested in the everyday practices of schooling and how these increase and enhance the capacities of those within schools, and/or limit and constrain them.