Women - don't buy this line

Performance-

related pay is bad for women - it will not promote equality, argues Natalie Fenton.

Women are paid less than men in virtually every grade in every academic post - this is one of the most explosive findings of the Bett report into higher education pay and conditions.

Ministers agree that universities must face up to the report's charges of discrimination and pay differentials. The government and vice-chancellors believe that the solution is not to give universities more money to even out the discrepancies but to demand the introduction of performance-related pay. But is this really the answer?

Performance-related pay is a populist policy - good academics should get more money and the "less good" should be encouraged to improve. But scratch the surface of PRP and you find a system that, far from reducing discrimination, actually expounds it.

Higher education - because of rapid expansion in the 1960s, followed by retrenchment, recruitment freezes and early retirement in the 1980s - has developed a badly skewed age profile. Lots of staff are bunched in the older age brackets. Most of these are men - men who still set the agenda, construct and maintain the dominant culture. Women are concentrated in the lower grades.

Moreover, the industrialisation of higher education has led to a work environment that is competitive, individualistic and often confrontational - a system that favours and is favoured by men. The split between high-status research and low-status teaching disadvantages women. Studies have also shown that women spend more time than men on administrative duties and pastoral work, neither of which is deemed worthy in terms of promotion.

Women's "performance", then, is low-grade and low-paid. The few winners are those who put in longer and longer hours. For many women, who still take most of the responsibility for children and home, this is an impossibility.

The research assessment exercise labels staff as either research-active or non-research active and stymies their careers at an early stage. The exercise does not allow for the effect of part-time work, career breaks or maternity leave on an academic's work. Your "performance" is assessed and you are written off as not being a "serious" academic unless you publish a lot of high-quality material.

An Association of University Teachers survey in 1994 showed that female academics work longer hours than their male counterparts to maintain a research output. If you look closely, you will probably find that most women academics do not have dependants. They cannot afford to. This may be good for the career development of the few, but it is exploitive of the many.

The production of academic work is reliant on all kinds of collaboration. Female networks are not as well developed as male networks. In addition to simply publishing one's work and getting known through the literature, informal networks bring invitations to speak at conferences, offers of particular pieces of work, requests to sit on editorial boards, to be external examiners etc.

Universities may not set out to be discriminatory, but the culture they are drenched in promotes discrimination. PRP will make things worse. If the culture in universities and the realities of women's lives outside work still operate to their disadvantage, formal procedures will not result in fairness. Performance-related pay will not promote equality - it is based on a liberal notion of fair access that is illusory and hides the real gender inequalities of power. PRP is bad for women. Don't buy it! Natalie Fenton is vice-president of

the Association of University Teachers and lecturer in social sciences, Loughborough University.

Is PRP bad for women?

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