Resource Archive

The Resource Archive is a digital archive of work carried out for the ACU Gender Programme. Read about the history and background to the programme, as well as explore some of its successes. There are past news stories and events, surveys, reports and other documents previously published about Gender. You’ll also be able to find and download some of the free training modules which explore key issues encountered by women in higher education leadership and management.

History and background

To address the problem of enhancing the participation of senior women in higher education institutions, in 1985 the ACU initiated the Women's Programme, as it was then called, and launched a series of training workshops.

By 1989 the Commonwealth Secretariat was also planning a Women in Higher Education Management Programme. The initiatives started by ACU and the Secretariat received support through the mandate derived from the Commonwealth Standing Committee on Student Mobility and Higher Education Co-operation when, in June 1989, it proposed the creation of the Commonwealth Higher Education Support Scheme (CHESS). The report of the CHESS Expert Group in 1990, 'CHESS: Strengthening Capacity for Sustainable Development', identified a pilot project for the training of women academics. A CHESS Planning Meeting in 1991 supported in principle the concept of a co-ordinated plan of action for the training of senior women administrators. ACU's offer to be the co-ordinating and implementing agency for this CHESS activity was accepted.

Known at that time as the ACU-CHESS Programme, it brought together the irregular and ad-hoc activities of both organisations into a cohesive range of activities. The ACU and the Commonwealth Secretariat (under the aegis of CHESS) worked closely together in developing the remit of the Women's Programme; and from 1991, when ACU, the Commonwealth Secretariat and UNESCO entered into a Memorandum of Understanding for the establishment of a cooperative programme of activities, these three organisations for some years collaboratively planned, and gave financial support to, a wide variety of projects.

The ACU-CHESS Steering Committee in its report in 1993 "affirmed that the purpose of the ACU-CHESS Women's Programme is to facilitate... the development of women in Commonwealth universities so that they can use their academic, administrative and above all, their management skills in contributing to the institutional development of universities, thus securing a significant increase in the number of management positions women hold, as universities redefine and develop their role to face the twenty-first century".

A 1993 UNESCO-Commonwealth publication on women in higher education management showed that "in spite of advances which women have made in many areas of public life in the past two decades, in the area of higher education management they are still a long way from participating on the same footing as men. With hardly an exception the global picture is one of men outnumbering women at about five to one at middle management level and at about twenty to one at senior management level. Women deans and professors are a minority group and women vice-chancellors and presidents are still a rarity" (Dines E (Ed.), Women in Higher Education Management. UNESCO-Commonwealth Secretariat: 11).

A survey conducted in 1998 by the Commonwealth Higher Education Management Service (CHEMS), A Single Sex Profession? : Female Staff Numbers in Commonwealth Countries provided information on the status of women in Commonwealth countries. The results of the survey "confirm that women are still under-represented among full-time staff in both the academic and administrative hierarchies of Commonwealth universities".

Two subsequent surveys, conducted for the ACU by Jasbir Singh and published in 2002 (Still a Single Sex Profession?) and 2008 (Whispers of Change) demonstrate that, while developed Commonwealth countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom were performing somewhat better than developing countries in advancing women into senior positions, bringing about change in the gender balance is still a painfully slow business.

Funding was initially obtained from CIDA, but subsequently other agencies became involved (notably the British Council, UNESCO, ODA, the Rockefeller Foundation and the German Foundation for International Development). The Commonwealth Secretariat's Management and Training Services Division, and the Education Department in the Human Resource Development Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat collaborated with ACU in its early workshops and other initiatives. In recent years, The Carnegie Corporation of New York was able to support a number of the acitivities and outputs of the Gender Programme which have been in line with the Corporation's priorities. For all of this support, the ACU has been profoundly grateful.