Home

Partners

Proposal

Proposal Summary

Meetings

Reports

Comparative Data Reports

Final Report

Publications

Contacts

Work Plan

Useful Links

Dissemination of Project

1.5 Policy implications 15

3.1 Introduction 23

3.2 Method/ology 23

3.6.1 Standing up for oneself or others when discriminated against 57

4.1 Introduction 84

4.2 The institutionalization of Women’s Studies 85

4.3 Employability of Women’s Studies graduates 87

4.4 Adaptability and entrepreneurship of Women’s Studies graduates 90

4.5 Equal opportunities and Women’s Studies training 92

4.6 Women’s Studies graduates and education- and employment-related migration 95

5.1 Dissemination strategy adopted during the lifetime of the project 98

5.2 Follow-up of results foreseen by each partner after the completion of the 98

project

6.1 Acknowledgements 100

6.2 References 102

7.1 Publications 106

7.2 Conference presentations 107

7.3 Other forms of output 109

7.4 Table of agreed deliverables 110

Table 1. Percentage of questionnaire respondents undertaking particular kinds of Women’s Studies training

Table 2. Factors impacting on the institutionalisation of Women’s Studies

Table 3. Degree of institutionalisation of Women’s Studies in the EWSI-partner countries in Europe

Table 4. Source of information about Women’s Studies according to questionnaire respondents in percentages

Table 5. Male and female employment rates (25 to 59 years), by education, 2000

Table 6. Factors influencing the choice of Women’s Studies in percentages

Table 7. Percentage of questionnaire respondents seeking to gain a qualification or improve job opportunities through undertaking Women’s Studies training

Table 8. Percentage of reported expected and actual impact of Women’s Studies training on women’s employment by questionnaire respondents

Table 9. Percentage of respondents reporting growth in critical thinking, gender awareness, and self-confidence following their Women’s Studies course

Table 10. Percentage of questionnaire respondents in employment prior to undertaking Women’s Studies training

Table 11. Average age of questionnaire respondents in 2002

Table 12. Percentage of questionnaire respondents who were current Women’s Studies students in paid employment during their studies (figures for 2002).

Table 13. Percentage of questionnaire respondents required to undertake work placements during their Women’s Studies training

Table 14. Male and female education levels, 2002

Table 15. Past Women’s Studies students’ employment performance relative to their parents

Table 16. Percentage of respondents reporting impact of Women’s Studies training on type of employment sought

Table 17. Past Women’s Studies students’ responses to how soon they looked for a job after completion of their training

Table 18. Project researchers’ education and employment, 2003

Table 19. First employment after Women's Studies training (secondary analysis).

Table 20. Women’s Studies students’ activities other than employment following their training

Table 21. Percentage of respondents reporting impact of Women’s Studies training on how they carry out their work

Table 22. Reported experience of transformation of female friendship networks through Women’s Studies training in percentages

Table 23. Degree of institutionalisation of equal opportunities in nine European countries

Table 24. Reported impact of Women’s Studies training on equal opportunities understanding/involvement (in percentages)

Table 25. Proportion of questionnaire respondents who studied abroad

Table 26. Patterns of educational migration of Women’s Studies students

Table 27. General student mobility through the ERASMUS program in Europe

Table 28. Outgoing ERASMUS students by gender

Table 29. Foreign enrolment by gender

Table 30. Type of course taken abroad

Table 31. Women’s Studies’ students’ funding sources for educational mobility in percentages

Table 32. Reasons for studying abroad

Contract no: HPSE-CT2001-00082

Project no: SERD-2000-00048

Title: Employment and Women’s Studies: The Impact of Women’s Studies Training on Women’s Employment in Europe

Project coordinator and Partner 1: Professor Gabriele Griffin, University of Hull, Gender Studies, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX. UK; Telephone: 0044 1482 466146; Fax: 0044 1482 466106 ; Email: G.Griffin@hull.ac.uk

Project Administrator: Fiona Mansfield, University of Hull, Gender Studies, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX. UK; Telephone: 0044 1482 465996; Fax: 0044 1482 466106; Email: F.S.Mansfield@hull.ac.uk

Partner 2: Professor Jalna Hanmer, University of Sunderland, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Priestman Building, Green Terrace, Sunderland, SR1 3PZ, UK; Telephone: 0044 191 515 3698; Fax 0044 191 515 2229; Email: Jh@jhanmer.fsnet.co.uk; Email: jalna.hanmer@sunderland.ac.uk

Partner 3: Professor Harriet Silius, Abo Akademi Univeristy, Institute of Women’s Studies, FIN-20500 Abo, Finland; Telephone: + 358 2 215 4328; Fax + 358 2 215 4668; Email: Harriet.Silius@abo.fi

Telephone + 31 30 2536507 (direct) Fax: + 3130 253 6134 ; Email: Rosi.braidotti@let.uu.nl

Fax: + 3130 2536167; Email: berteke.waaldijk@let.uu.nl

Partner 5: Professor Donatella Barazzetti, Interdepartmental Centre of Women’s Studies, "Milly Villy", Department of Sociology and Political Science, University of Calabria 87036, Arcavacata di Rende (CS), Italy. Telephone: + 39 984 492573; Fax: + 39 984 492598; Email: barazzetti@unical.it

Partner 6: Professor Carmen Leccardi, University of Milan-Bicocca, Dept of Sociology and Social Research, Via Bicocca Degu Arcimboldi, 8, 20126 Milano, Italy. Telephone: + 39 02 64487537; Fax: + 39 02 64487561; Email: Carmen.leccardi@unimib.it

Partner 7: Dr Nicky Le Feuvre, University of Toulouse- Le Mirail, Maison de la Recherche, 5 allee Antonio Machado, F-31058 Toulouse Cedex 1, France. Telephone: + 33 0561 504394; Fax: + 33 0561 503708 ; Email: lefeuvre@univ-tlse2.fr

Partner 8: Dr Eva D Bahovec, University of Ljubljana, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Askreva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. Telephone: + 386 61 14215190; Email: Eva.Bahovec@guest.arnes.si.

Partner 9: Dr Andrea Peto, ELTE Institute of Sociology Ethnic and Minority Studies, 1117 Budapest Pazmany Peter setany 1/1 email: petoand@hotmail.com; petoand@axelero.hu

Email: Gerhard@soz.uni-frankfurt.de.

Reference period: from 1 October 2001 to 30 September 2003

Starting date: 1 October 2001 Duration: 24 months Date of issue of this report: 1 November 2003

The Amsterdam Treaty (1997) identified a gap in the employment rates between women and men in Europe, resulting in the greater economic and social exclusion of women. This project on ‘Women’s Employment, Equal Opportunities and Women’s Studies in Europe’ (acronym: EWSI; website www.hull.ac.uk/ewsi) addresses the issue of women’s employment by focussing on a particular group of women, those with Women’s Studies training in Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK. Conducted between October 2001 and October 2003, and funded by DGXII (Research) of the European Commission as part of Framework 5, this is the first cross-European project producing systematic comparative research into the issue of what happens to women with Women’s Studies training in the employment market.

The project found that Women’s Studies as a discipline is not fully established in any European country, that most women take it as a module within a traditional discipline and come across Women’s Studies by chance once they are at university. Those who take Women’s Studies are more likely than students from other arts and humanities disciplines to want to remain in education. The latter is a key factor in determining labour market participation. The EU should therefore use the Bologna process to ensure that Women’s Studies as a discipline is fully established in all European countries.

Women with Women’s Studies training acquire skills and knowledges such as gender expertise, critical thinking, self-confidence, tolerance towards diversity, and the ability to argue effectively that are useful in a large range of occupations. Women’s Studies graduates enter a wide variety of occupations and do so to a significant extent at professional level. They tend to outperform their mothers, entering both a wider range of occupations than their mothers and at higher (professional/managerial) levels. Such students report that the greatest impact of their Women’s Studies training is on how they conduct themselves at work. This typically includes standing up for oneself and others when discriminated against; refusing to put up with sexism at work; feeling more confident in making applications for promotion and changes in jobs; carrying out one’s work in a self-consciously non-sexist manner; becoming more tolerant towards diversity; introducing gender issues into their workplace; and being more supportive of female colleagues. Such students thus function as change agents in the workplace. More research is needed to understand precisely how they operate in the workplace.

Educational migration benefits Women’s Studies students personally and professionally. Language deficits, insufficient finance, and family commitments act as a barrier to educational mobility, as do problems with having courses taken abroad recognized in the home university. The EU needs to promote the consistent applications of ECTs more effectively, and to encourage more women students to participate in educational mobility programs.

Women’s Studies postgraduates want to work, and indeed often do work, in three areas: feminist research/academe; women’s NGOs, equal opportunities. Equal opportunities, however, remain largely ineffective as a measure to combat gender discrimination, and gender expertise tends not to be required as part of an equal opportunities officer’s job profile. Both the EU and national governments need to do more to introduce effective sanctions for non-compliance with equal opportunities legislation, and gender expertise should be part of the job description of equal opportunities personnel. Women’s Studies might also disseminate equal opportunities knowledge more widely.

The Amsterdam Treaty (1997) identified a gap in the employment rates between women and men in Europe, resulting in the greater economic and social exclusion of women. This project on ‘Women’s Employment, Equal Opportunities and Women’s Studies in Europe’ (EWSI; website www.hull.ac.uk/ewsi) addresses the issue of women’s employment by focussing on a particular group of women, those with Women’s Studies training. Conducted between October 2001 and October 2003, and funded by DGXII (Research) of the European Commission as part of Framework 5, this is the first cross-European project producing systematic comparative research into the issue of what happens to women with Women’s Studies training in the employment market.

The fundamental objective of this project was to find out how Women’s Studies training affects women’s opportunities and interventions in the labour market. The fundamental research question of this project was: how does Women’s Studies training affect women’s opportunities and interventions in the labour market? In pursuing this question the project’s three working hypotheses were that

These hypotheses were supported by both the analyses of both the primary and the secondary data produced and utilized during the research process.

This report is based on empirical research carried out in nine European countries during 2002. It combined non-random quantitative data elicited through questionnaires from an average of 50 past and 50 current Women’s Studies students in each participating country with qualitative data derived from 30 semi-structured interviews (20 past and 10 current Women’s Studies students per participating country). The latter were carried out in order to establish the meanings of some of the answers provided in the questionnaires, and to lend depth to the data gleaned from the questionnaires. The project’s findings are thus based on over 900 questionnaire returns and 270 interviews. The questionnaire data were non-random, partly because universities in most European countries do not keep exit data about their students – apparently for data protection reasons – and partly because most students access Women’s Studies as modules within traditional disciplines, especially at undergraduate level, which renders these students invisible within the system.

The research process thus highlighted the following data collection-related issues:

The research process of the project was divided into four phases: the country-specific collection of background data on ‘Women’s Employment, Women’s Studies and Equal Opportunities 1945-2001’; the conduct of the empirical quantitative and qualitative research which generated country reports on both sets of data; comparative analyses of these data sets according to pre-specified dimensions which resulted in eight comparative reports; the production of the final report on the basis of the work carried out in the first three phases.

The rest of this executive summary is divided into ‘Conclusions’ and ‘Policy recommendations’, each grouped under the following five headings:

1.4.1.1. Women’s Studies as a discipline is vital to changing the ‘durable dispositions’ (Bourdieu 1998) which govern gender roles in contemporary Europe and which serve to curtail women’s ability to participate to the full in the employment market. However, the institutionalization of Women’s Studies is unevenly developed across the European countries and its full institutionalization should be promoted through the Bologna process and by ministries of education in the EC member countries.

1.4.1.2 At present Women’s Studies as a discipline is predominantly taught in higher education, as part of traditional disciplines at undergraduate level, and also as a discipline in its own right at postgraduate level. To maximize its potential impact it is important that all European countries are encouraged to establish Women’s Studies as an autonomous discipline at undergraduate as well as at postgraduate level.

1.4.1.3 Women’s Studies as a discipline lacks recognition and visibility in many European countries including Hungary, Slovenia, Italy, and France (Barazzetti and Leone 2003). Students therefore tend discover the subject by chance while at university.

1.4.1.4 At present Women’s Studies does not form part of teacher training education despite the fact that teachers are vital for facilitating learning and change, including around gender roles, in primary and secondary education. Gender issues are rarely included in any school curricula. Since, however, 50% and more of the total of the European population do not enter tertiary education, it is vital that the changes in gender roles needed in twenty-first century Europe be inculcated at education levels that the vast majority of European Union citizens have access to, that is primary and secondary education levels.

1.4.1.5 Women’s Studies is a vital source for the dissemination of equal opportunities knowledge.

1.4.2.1 Women’s Studies as a discipline attracts women who are keen to participate in the labour market.

1.4.2.2 Women’s Studies students acquire a significant number of important key knowledges and skills during their training including knowledge of gender and diversity issues, equal opportunities, critical thinking, self-confidence, and the ability to argue effectively. However, students sometimes think that their subject, Women’s Studies, is viewed with hostility in the employment market, and they therefore sometimes deny the fact that they took this subject.

1.4.2.3 Employers appear to have little understanding of the knowledges and skills Women’s Studies students acquire.

1.4.2.4 Our data suggest that careers advisors, in the countries where they exist, do not practise equal opportunities in relation to their clients, instead encouraging girls simply to move into traditionally feminized occupations, and have no or very limited understanding of the skills and knowledges Women’s Studies students acquire. They also have little knowledge of the kinds of careers that require gender expertise.

1.4.2.5 Few Women’s Studies courses require in-course work placements but students who have had such placements report a more realistic view of the job market and also in some instances acquired opportunities to be employed in the place where they had undertaken their work placements.

1.4.2.6 In most European countries participating in this project, Women’s Studies training encourages the professionalization of its students, not least through its high retention rates into postgraduate level which as EU data show is a key factor in labour market participation.

1.4.3.1 Since Women’s Studies still lacks full recognition both inside academe and outside, its students are characterized by their independent-mindedness, their willingness to try new and unfamiliar terrain and thus take risks, and their focus on wanting to make a difference and achieve change. This makes them ideal participants in the current labour market with its need for flexibility, adaptability, and the willingness to strike out on your own.

1.4.3.2 Women’s Studies training provide women with key knowledge and skills for the labour market. These include:

1.4.3.3 Women’s Studies students are more willing to go into less established, innovatory work environments where work cultures are less entrenched.

1.4.3.4 Women’s Studies training impacts most significantly on how women carry out their work, making them potential change agents in the workplace.

1.4.3.5 Women’s Studies students reported a willingness to ‘invent’ their own jobs, that is to think creatively about making employment for themselves.

1.4.3.6 Women’s Studies facilitates upward professional mobility in its students.

1.4.3.7 Women’s Studies students benefit greatly from the female friendship and mentoring networks at local, national, and international levels that they acquire during their Women’s Studies training. These networks act as facilitators in finding post-training employment.

1.4.4.1 There was an increasing tendency among students from all partner countries except Spain and Italy to study abroad as both exchange programs have grown and knowledge of Women’s Studies has become more widespread.

1.4.4.2 Countries which have well established Women’s Studies programs such as the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and Germany are more likely to receive foreign students than countries where the subject is less well established.

1.4.4.3 Students also tend to be attracted to countries in which English is spoken.

1.4.4.4 In all the project partner countries except the UK and the Netherlands there was more inward than outward mobility of students.

1.4.4.5 Overall, women still tend to be under-represented in terms of educational mobility.

1.4.4.6 Those who study abroad tend to do so predominantly for a semester or a year.

1.4.4.7 Few students take entire degrees abroad.

1.4.4.8 Problems persist with having courses taken abroad accredited in the home university, especially where these are in subjects that have no equivalent in the home country. Students often do not know if the courses they take will be accredited on their return.

1.4.4.9 Although increasing numbers of students study abroad as part of an EU mobility scheme, a significant proportion are self-funded.

1.4.4.10 The most important barriers to studying abroad are lack of or insufficient funding, lack of language skills (which is particularly acute in the UK), and family and/or care commitments.

1.4.4.11 Women are less likely to study abroad once they have family.

1.4.4.12 Women who undertook training abroad were particularly impressed by the pedagogic and methodological schism between Anglo-American and Continental European systems of teaching (smaller class sizes and more focus on interactive teaching in the Anglo-American system), the differences in resourcing (better resources regarding IT etc in north-west European countries), and the experience of less restrictive and less traditionally gendered environments in the north-west European countries.

1.4.4.13 Students reported the development of greater tolerance towards others, a greater readiness to be mobile educationally and employment-wise, an enhanced understanding of other cultures, better language skills, and a positive impact on their employment as benefits derived from studying abroad.

1.4.4.14 Students from eastern and southern countries reported bringing back different ideas about gender roles to their home countries (see section 3.7.11 of this report).

1.4.4.15 Students reported that study abroad was valued by employers.

1.4.4.16 Students who want to stay in academe found the experience of studying abroad especially useful in subsequent employment terms.

1.4.5.1 Equal opportunities legislation is at different levels of institutionalization across the diverse European countries.

1.4.5.2 Equal opportunities infrastructure in many European countries is dependent on the party-political context, with offices etc being closed if governments move from left-wing to right-wing dominance.

1.4.5.3 Equal opportunities legislation is rarely supported by the political will to implement it effectively and offers little sanction in case of violation.

1.4.5.4 Equal opportunities legislation in most European countries is not well understood, nor widely known by many people including those who have an awareness of gender issues (Suárez and Suárez 2003).

1.4.5.5 Although all project interviewees reported experiences of discrimination in the work place, none of them had resorted to legal measures to try and redress those issues.

1.4.5.6 In many European countries including France and Finland, for example, gender expertise is not a job requirement for people working in equal opportunities jobs.

1.4.5.7 Women’s Studies training changes women’s understanding of equal opportunities issues and increases women’s perception of their involvement in equal opportunities issues.

1.4.5.8 Some Women’s Studies students would like to see more equal opportunities training on their courses.

1.4.5.9 Women’s Studies students are interested in working in equal opportunities employment contexts.

1.4.5.10 Women’s Studies students’ sense of being able to work in the equal opportunities sector is related to the degree of institutionalization of equal opportunities in their countries.

1.4.5.11 Women’s Studies training enables women to enact equal opportunities policies in their work place including:

1.4.5.12 Women’s Studies training facilitate students’ understanding of the gendered power asymmetries they routinely encounter in their working lives, enabling them to make sense of those experiences.

1.5.1.1 The EU should use the Bologna process to encourage the establishment of Women’s Studies as a fully recognized independent discipline at under- and at postgraduate level in all European Union countries.

1.5.1.2 All national governments should facilitate the establishment of Women’s Studies as a fully recognized discipline at under- and at postgraduate level by including it as a discipline for all assessment and funding purposes, and supporting it with endowed chairs and studentships.

1.5.1.3 National governments and ministries of education should ensure that Women’s Studies forms part of all teacher education curricula.

1.5.1.4 National governments and ministries of education should ensure that Women’s Studies is part of the primary and secondary education curricula so that changes in gender roles can be addressed at the educational levels to which all European Union citizens have access.

1.5.1.5 Ministries of education and equal opportunities bodies in the European Union countries should explore the ways in which Women’s Studies bases in tertiary education might be built upon and supported to disseminate equal opportunities knowledge more widely in society.

1.5.1.6 National governments and ministries of education should ensure that Women’s Studies Centres are supported to act as dissemination centres for gender research and equal opportunities along the lines of the Swedish National Gender Secretariat.

1.5.1.7 The full institutionalisation of Women’s Studies as a discipline, available both within traditional subjects and as a stand-alone degree, should be part of the implementation of the Bologna Agreement.

1.5.1.8 The project shows that students on modular degrees or on modules in traditional degrees that are interdisciplinary in character are difficult to track. We therefore recommend that the EU and national governments agree common processes for keeping such data so that student aggregation around interdisciplinary areas can be tracked and analysed more effectively.

1.5.1.9 During the project we found that with the exception of the UK, universities in no other country kept exit data for students which made it difficult to track students by discipline. The EU and national governments need to agree common processes for keeping data so that the transition from training to employment can be tracked and analysed more effectively.

1.5.1.10 Women’s Studies students outperform their mothers in terms of reaching higher professional and/or managerial positions than their mothers had done.

1.5.1.11 Women’s Studies students, especially in Italy, Finland and Germany, reject the conventional male career model which emphasizes climbing a career ladder and making increasingly large sums of money, instead defining their ideal job in terms of job satisfaction, making a difference, feeling valued, and working in a non-sexist environment.

1.5.1.12 Women’s employment is inadequately captured by current conventional employment categories as used by EUROSTAT, the OECD, and other such bodies. Their categorizations replicate a male employment structure, and lump women’s employment by default together in the ‘Service’ sector. Such undifferentiated structures fail to provide a true account of women’s employment and also do not capture the cultural significance of any employment category. This includes ISCO-88 which offers more refined employment indicators.

1.5.1.13 Women’s Studies (postgraduate) students are influenced by their training in the type of employment they seek and want to work in particular in three employment sectors: feminist research/academe, equal opportunities, and women’s NGOs.

1.5.1.14 Women’s Studies students produce four different discourses regarding how they enter the labour market, highlighting varying degrees of sense of agency in the process which are sometimes significantly at odds with the actual amount of pro-activity the students demonstrate. This highlights women’s continuing acculturation into feminine gender roles that construct them as passive and objects rather than the subjects they are and act as.

1.5.1.15 The gender expertise generated through Women’s Studies training is of critical importance in a great variety of jobs including human resources, health and social services, the police, middle management, etc., and Women’s Studies graduates enter a wide variety of professions in which they are able to make a difference due to their gender expertise.

1.5.1.16 The women’s movement and Women’s Studies have led to new employment sectors in the form of feminist research/academe, equal opportunities jobs, and women’s NGOs. This demonstrates the professionalisation of gender expertise.

1.5.1.17 Women continue to carry the double burden of paid employment and domestic labour which impacts on their ability to participate fully in the labour market.

1.5.1.18 Women’s Studies in a number of countries attracts older women who then either return to the labour market or enter it for the first time.

1.5.2.1 Women’s Studies courses need to support students in marketing their knowledges and skills more effectively.

1.5.2.2 Education ministries and equal opportunities bodies should facilitate Women’s Studies staff to help them market the knowledges and skills Women’s Studies students acquire to prospective employers.

1.5.2.3 National governments should develop initiatives to enhance employers’ knowledge of the kinds of knowledges and skills students acquire during their training, including Women’s Studies training.

1.5.2.4 Women’s Studies staff should seek to develop awareness raising programs for employers regarding the kinds of knowledges and skills Women’s Studies students acquire during their training.

1.5.2.5 Careers advice services for students should be available in all European Union countries, and the Bologna process might be used as a tool by the European Union to support the establishment of such services where they do not exist.

1.5.2.6 Careers advisors should be trained both in equal opportunities and in knowledge of the kinds of careers that require gender expertise. Such training might be delivered via Women’s Studies programs, and national ministries of education as well as departments of trade and industry which should set up initiatives to enable this.

1.5.2.7 Careers advice services should produce annual gender audits.

1.5.2.8 Women’s Studies courses should consider the inclusion of work placements as part of their curriculum.

1.5.2.9 National governments and ministries of education should ensure the establishment of postgraduate courses and research centres in Women’s Studies in all higher education institutions.

1.5.2.10 The EU and national statistics offices should develop gender sensitive employment statistical indicators for women’s employment. This includes the development of gender sensitive statistical indicators for unpaid care work.

1.5.2.11 Several European certification norms already exist, notably in relation to health and safety (eg AFNOR, ISO-2000). A similar scheme should be adopted in relation to women’s employment. National and local governments, public and private-sector companies, leisure and cultural institutions, third sector service providers, political parties, etc. should be required to meet a series of norms in relation to the promotion of women’s rights in employment. So-called "family-friendly" personnel management practices could be one of the first areas to be recognised with a "best practice" gender equality certification scheme. In addition, this scheme could also provide a framework for training equal opportunity staff. Training programmes (in collaboration with Women’s Studies experts in higher education institutions) could be harmonised across the EU, with the explicit aim of transferring "best practices" in relation to training women (or men) in equal opportunity-related jobs from countries where there has already been a degree of "equal opportunities institutionalisation", to those where there are few employment opportunities in this area, or where people can be recruited to equality officer jobs without any previous training in gender analysis.

1.5.2.12 Women’s Studies staff and careers advisors need to support their students more, and more systematically, in recognizing their own agency in entering the employment market.

1.5.2.13 Measures need to be developed both nationally and at EU level to facilitate cultural change in men so that they become producers and not merely consumers of domestic labour. These should include compulsory teaching on gender issues at

primary and secondary school level, the development of positive role models for men doing domestic labour in the media, and incentives via employers and tax breaks to encourage men to take on proper care responsibilities for dependents.

1.5.2.14 National governments and education ministries should support the setting up of Women’s Studies courses for women aged 40+ to help the latter enter or re-enter education and the labour market.

1.5.2.15 At EU level and nationally, policies to reduce working hours for all employees should be given more weight than policies encouraging part-time employment for women.

1.5.3.1 National/regional ministries of education and departments of trade and industry should develop strategies for promoting greater knowledge of the skills acquired through Women’s Studies training.

1.5.3.2 The EU and national/regional governments should develop and support female mentoring systems for Women’s Studies graduates to sustain the latter in unconventional employment arenas, and to spread knowledge about the opportunities around divergent career paths.

1.5.4.1 The EU should revise student and staff mobility programmes to include opportunities for short-term exchanges (one week to one month) to enable women and men with care/domestic responsibilities to participate in such schemes.

1.5.4.2 The EU should review the financial incentives aimed at achievingharmonization and a more competent workforce through greater mobility for educational purposes, as finances are often too limited to enable students to take educational mobility schemes up.

1.5.4.3 The EU should use the Bologna process to enforce language teaching in countries such as the UK where lack of knowledge of languages impedes educational mobility.

1.5.4.4 The EU should revise mobility schemes to enable participation even where there is no exchange of equal numbers of students.

1.5.4.5 The EU should use educational mobility schemes to further international networking and mentoring for women by encouraging support schemes which transcend the duration of the actual mobility scheme.

1.5.4.6 The EU needs to establish measures and sanctions that ensure the accreditation of courses taken abroad in the student’s home country, including courses in subjects not taught in the home country.

1.5.4.7 The EU, national governments and education institutions should use educational mobility users to act as advocates of such schemes and to promote them.

1.5.4.8 The EU ought to encourage the establishment of a greater diversity of mobility schemes including summer schools.

1.5.5.1 The EU should promote measures to speed up the implementation of equal opportunities legislation in all its member countries.

1.5.5.2 The EU and national governments should ensure that equal opportunities infrastructures are set up and maintained independently of changes in local/national government, and independent of the political will of political parties.

1.5.5.3 The EU and national governments ought to develop effective and implementable sanctions in case of equal opportunities legislation.

1.5.5.4 Both the EU and national governments should develop campaigns to facilitate a greater degree of dissemination and understanding of equal opportunities legislation.

1.5.5.5 As part of schools’ training for citizenship, curricula ought to be developed to encorporate knowledge of rights under equal opportunities legislation and an understanding of how one might use that legislation to seek redress in case of violation.

1.5.5.6 The EU and national governments should ensure that gender expertise is a standard requirement of all equal opportunities posts.

1.5.5.7 Women’s Studies courses should be encouraged to give more curriculum space to equal opportunities.

1.5.5.8 Equal opportunities bodies should be encouraged by national governments to collaborate with Women’s Studies programs to facilitate training in equal opportunities.

1.5.5.9 National governments and departments of trade and industry should ensure that careers advisors are trained to promote jobs in equal opportunities to Women’s Studies students.

1.5.5.10 Domestic and care labour training should become part of the primary and secondary schools training for all boys and girls in all European countries.

1.5.5.11 Employers in all European countries should be required to carry out gender audits and to include action plans for improving gender imbalances in their work place.

1.5.5.12 Careers advisors should receive gender awareness training. Their activities should be regularly monitored and audited, including a gender audit, and incentives created to facilitate the promotion of men into traditionally female jobs and women’s opportunities to work outside the service sector.

1.5.5.13 International mentoring schemes for women with Gender Studies expertise need to be developed and promoted throughout the European Union through bodies such as the ‘Women and Science’ Unit.

1.5.5.14 The EU and national governments ought to agree on incentives to be offered to employers (tax breaks; benefits) designed to transform gender segregation in the labour market through making gender awareness part of their job specifications, and to promote greater gender balance in employment.

1.5.5.15 All European countries should introduce targeted programmes to increase women’s participation and advancement in academe.

1.5.5.16 European policy should support targeted positive action at national level to enhance women’s participation and advancement in academe.

1.5.5.17 National mentoring schemes for Gender Studies experts need to be put in place through ministries of education and departments of trade and industry.

1.5.5.18 National governments should consider using tax incentives and other fiscal measures to encourage employers to improve gender imbalances in areas such as promotion, the pay gap, and parental leave taken by men rather than women.

1.5.5.19 Gender audits and relevant action plans should be established as a central aspect of all public funding policies.

1.5.5.20 Countries such as Germany and France should introduce standardised job descriptions for commissioners of women’s affairs/equal opportunities officers.

1.5.5.21 Ministries of education should ensure that all teacher-training courses include a compulsory equal opportunities element.

1.5.5.22 National campaigns are required to promote equal opportunities legislation and women’s rights within the work place.

1.5.5.23 National campaigns are required to promote awareness of issues such as violence against women, and the need for men’s participation in domestic and care labour.

The Amsterdam Treaty (1997) identified a gap in the employment rates between women and men in Europe, resulting in the greater economic and social exclusion of women. The Commission’s Communication entitled Social Action Programme 1998-2000 (Com (98) 259, 29/4/98) points out that the Employment Guidelines adopted by the Member States are based ‘on the four pillars of employability, entrepreneurship, adaptability and equal opportunities.’ (4) Within this context Member States have agreed to ‘actively support employability’ (Council resolution on the 1999 Employment Guidelines, 4) and to increase ‘possibilities for training, work experience, traineeships or other measures to promote employability’ (5). The Council Resolution on the 1999 Employment Guidelines recognized that ‘women still have particular problems in gaining access to the employment market, in career advancement, in earnings and in reconciling professional and family life.’ (7)

This project addressed the problematic of women’s employment by focusing on a specific group of women about whose experiences in and of the labour market little is known at present. The women in question are those who have undertaken Women’s Studies training, predominantly as part of or in the form of university degrees but also through NGOs. During the last twenty years at least around 100,000 women in Europe (SIGMA Report 1996) have undergone such training and it is known anecdotally that their training has had significant impacts on their employability, adaptability, entrepreneurship, and the promotion of equal opportunities at regional and at European level. This project for the first time collected systematic data on, and investigated, the impact of Women’s Studies training on women’s employment in Europe.

The fundamental research question of this project was: how does Women’s Studies training affect women’s opportunities and interventions in the labour market? In pursuing this question the project’s three working hypotheses were that

These hypotheses were supported by both the analyses of both the primary and the secondary data produced and utilized during the research process.

Within this context the key objective of the project was, for the first time, to collect systematically quantitative and qualitative scientific data on women who have undergone Women’s Studies training in order to understand the impact of that training on their employment and in order to provide policy recommendations regarding the training and employment of women.

No re-orientation of the rationale or objectives occurred during the lifetime of the project.

This project, conducted between October 2001 and October 2003, and funded by DGXII (Research) of the European Commission as part of Framework 5, is the first cross-European project conducting systematic comparative research into the issue of what happens to women with Women’s Studies training in the employment market. Its project partners were universities which offer Women’s Studies training and the senior academics responsible for the research were all women with extended histories of conducting Women’s Studies training, in many instances reaching back to the 1970s and early 1980s. Since that time, at least 100,000 women have received such training but little is known about what happens to them in the employment market. The project addressed this knowledge gap.

This report is based on empirical research carried out in nine European countries during 2002. It combined non-random quantitative data elicited through questionnaires from an average of 50 past and 50 current Women’s Studies students in each participating country with qualitative data derived from 30 semi-structured interviews (20 past and 10 current Women’s Studies students per participating country). The latter were carried out in order to establish the meanings of some of the answers provided in the questionnaires, and to lend depth to the data gleaned from the questionnaires. The project’s findings are thus based on over 900 questionnaire returns and 270 interviews.

Prior to constructing the questionnaires, and based on the hypotheses that informed the project, each participating country had produced a Background Data Report on women’s employment, the institutionalization of equal opportunities and of Women’s Studies in the respective country. These reports informed the construction of the standardized questionnaires which were initially written in English and then translated into the partner countries’ respective languages. The questionnaires elicited data on:

The questionnaire returns were analysed using SPSS and summary reports produced for each participating country.

The questionnaire data collected were non-random. This was for two reasons: 1) apart from the UK, higher education institutions across European countries do not keep exit or first destination data of their students, apparently for data protection reasons. This means that (in particular past) students had to be accessed using snowballing techniques. 2) Especially at undergraduate level, students tend to access Women’s Studies courses predominantly (see Table 1) as modules within other, traditional degrees. These students who cannot take Women’s Studies degrees as such are thus doubly invisible within the education and training system.

Subsequent to the questionnaires, semi-structured interviews were conducted in each participating country, utilizing a jointly agreed interview schedule. Interviewees were on the whole selected from among questionnaire respondents who had indicated their willingness to be interviewed, and partners attempted to cover a wide variety of experiences among the interviewees. Where questionnaire respondents proved difficult to track for interview purposes, in particular in Hungary, Slovenia and in Spain, some interviews were conducted with additional women who had had Women’s Studies training. Some of these then also filled in the questionnaires. Interviews lasted between one and three hours, and each partner conducted 30 interviews, 20 with past students and 10 with current Women’s Studies students. All partners produced qualitative data reports based on the interview data they collected.

Finally, eight comparative data reports were written, based on the data and reports already collected and done, and mentioned above. These comparative reports focused in cross-European perspective on eight key issues that underpinned the project, namely:

Each comparative report also contained policy recommendations relevant to the issue it centred on.

This final project report thus draws on the Background Data Reports of the project, the summary reports of the quantitative questionnaire-based data, the SPSS files constructed from those questionnaire data, the qualitative data reports derived from the interviews conducted, the comparative reports, and other relevant sources.

The scientific description of the project results is divided into the following six sub-sections governing the rest of this section:

3.3 The Institutionalization of Women’s Studies in Europe

3.4 Women’s Studies Training and Employment I: Pre- and in-training expectations and experiences

3.5 Women’s Studies Training and Employment II: Post-training expectations and experiences

3.6 Impact of Women’s Studies training on how work is carried out

3.7 Women’s Studies, equal opportunities and women’s employment

3.8 Women’s Studies, women’s educational migration and employment.

Women’s Studies as a discipline takes as its premise that gender is a defining category, affecting and effecting both experience and knowledge (Bowles and Klein 1983; Humm 1989). In analysing the meanings and impact of gender on both experience and knowledge Women’s Studies, predominantly located in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Silius 2002a), is interdisciplinary, challenging not only conventional, traditional academic structures and disciplines but also deeply ingrained socio-cultural assumptions about femininity and masculinity. Its transformative agenda is vital to the EU if it is to promote not only new kinds of knowledges but also the increasing participation of women in the labour market. So is its interdisciplinary nature. Both have created challenges for its insertion into higher education, augmented by the fact that Women’s Studies is not conventionally included in primary and secondary school curricula, therefore unfamiliar to students entering higher education straight from school. Since Women’s Studies is concerned with tackling deeply rooted acculturated notions of femininity and masculinity which are key contributors to gender inequality and differential access to the labour market, the project partners suggest that gender issues be introduced at all levels of education from primary school onwards and that they should also constitute a compulsory component of all teacher training.

Our data show that Women’s Studies as a discipline is unevenly developed across the nine participating European countries (Griffin 2002c). In many European countries its development dates back to the 1970s (SIGMA Report 1995; Silius 2002a) when the first courses, often as modules in traditional Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines, were introduced. As Table 1 shows, the discipline has seen its most rapid development in Europe from the mid-1980s onwards. In 2003 all European countries have centres where feminist research is conducted and in the vast majority it is possible to do postgraduate degrees in the subject. In all European countries it is possible to take Women’s Studies modules as part of other degree courses, ranging from the possibility of majoring in the discipline to doing joint degrees or taking Women’s Studies as a minor. Among the partner countries in this project, it is possible only in the UK to gain a named undergraduate degree (BA; BSc) as well as named postgraduate degrees (MA; MSc; PhD) in Women’s Studies.

The vast majority of the project’s questionnaire respondents (see Table 1 below) had taken Women’s Studies as one or more modules within another, traditional undergraduate degree; the second highest category of respondents were postgraduate students undertaking Masters degrees. We think this broadly reflects the distribution of Women’s Studies students across under- and postgraduate degree levels in the participating countries, but the issues regarding student tracking mentioned above impact on the project data.

Table 1. Percentage of questionnaire respondents undertaking particular kinds of Women’s Studies training

Specific national circumstances apart, across Europe the following four factors are key in either furthering or hindering the institutionalization of Women’s Studies:

Table 2. Factors impacting on the institutionalisation of Women’s Studies

According to Silius (2002a), the process of the institutionalisation of Women’s Studies in Europe, which began in the 1970s, followed six phases (though these are not always strictly successive):

This project indicates that the degree of institutionalisation of Women’s Studies may be measured in terms of

In terms of these indicators, Women’s Studies has not achieved full disciplinary status in any European country, and the degree of its institutionalisation is variable:

Table 3. Degree of institutionalisation of Women’s Studies in the EWSI-partner countries in Europe

As Silius’ (2002a), and Barazzetti and Leone’s (2003) reports show, the meaning of these degrees of institutionalisation vary from country to country even where they seemingly fall within the same category. Only UK universities among the partner countries, for instance, can award named undergraduate as well as postgraduate degrees in Women’s Studies. But unlike Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, the UK has not benefited from state feminism in the form of endowed chairs or endowed PhD studentships in Women’s Studies. The institutionalisation of Women’s Studies in both France and Italy is low not least because the women’s movement was strongly anti-institutional. In France this same anti-institutionalism is augmented by little university autonomy in the creation of new curricula which have to be agreed by the Ministry of Education every four years (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2002), and by the specific history of the concept of egalité which proclaims a universal, gender-neutral subject, thus precluding the possibility of the recognition of gender difference and, for instance, positive action. A similar scenario regarding the concept of equality exists in Finland (Tuori and Silius 2002) but this has not prevented the relatively high degree of institutionalisation of Women’s Studies there, fostered by a greater degree of flexibility in study patterns and by modularity. The project thus shows that contextual factors play a key role in the institutionalisation of Women’s Studies.

In this project we distinguished between traditional, strongly discipline-based, non-market oriented, mass higher education systems (Spain, France, Italy, Germany) and selective, modular, market-oriented education systems (the UK, the Netherlands, Finland), with the east European partner countries (Hungary, Slovenia) representing a different case (Barazzetti and Leone 2003) determined by their socialist pasts and current transitional status from a centralized to a market-led economy. The non-market oriented, mass higher education systems tended to view education as a desirable end in its own right, not necessarily linked directly to employment. In consequence in these countries, in particular in France, there was less assumption of a direct relationship between university education and employment, than there was in the market-oriented systems in which there was both a stronger expectation of such a direct connection and, especially in the UK, a direct connection between the ability to attract students to courses and the establishment of such market-led courses, of which Women’s Studies during the 1980s was one (Griffin 2002b). This approach makes disciplines vulnerable to market-led demand, particularly evident in the UK where significant numbers of degree courses in all manner of disciplines including languages and European Studies have been closed down because they do not attract sufficient numbers of students. The erosion of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1979) which this constitutes is an issue hardly tackled either in the UK or elsewhere. The project partners recommend that Women’s Studies be recognized as a discipline in all European countries by the relevant education and funding bodies, and that education ministries and governments support the creation and maintenance of subject-related infrastructures including chairs and lectureships in Women’s Studies and endowed PhD studentships as part of their implementation of equal opportunities policies.

Since Women’s Studies is at present not taught in schools, undergraduates who formed the bulk of our questionnaire respondents (see Table 1) usually came across Women’s Studies by chance once they had entered university. This is evidenced in their sources of information for choosing Women’s Studies which as Table 4 below shows were mostly universities themselves:

Table 4. Source of information about Women’s Studies according to questionnaire respondents in percentages

As one French student described it: ‘The first time I ever heard anything about Women’s Studies was in my first year of Sociology. There was this core course on social inequality. . . as soon as I heard [lecturers] talking about masculine domination, that triggered something inside me, it was really strong, and that just sort of got me interested, so when it came to choosing the final year degree options, I took the Women’s Studies option, because of that class’ (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003, p. 33). Another French interviewee described the process as follows: ‘in the first year, there was this one lecture on gender relations, I went twice, the second time I even took a friend. . . In the second year, we had this group project to do. . . so we chose to work on the social construction of femininity. . . As soon as I was given the opportunity to develop those kinds of questions, I did. In the third year, I didn’t hesitate at all.’ (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003, p. 33)

This progression from coming across the subject by chance to making a deliberate commitment to it was not unusual amongst interviewees, and led to a high level of desire to pursue the discipline at postgraduate level. This is an important issue for, as Le Feuvre and Andriocci (2003) argue, ‘women’s employment rates . . . vary quite considerably according to the level of education’ (p. 22). They cite Eurostat information (see Table 5 below) which shows that ‘societal specificities in women’s labour market participation rates are reduced once one compares women with a degree’ (p. 23):

Table 5. Male and female employment rates (25 to 59 years), by education, 2000

Le Feuvre and Andriocci (2003) conclude that it is ‘very important that women should have access to the highest levels of the education system, since their levels of qualification impact directly on their employment patterns.’ (p. 23) Since Women’s Studies as a discipline, as indicated above, encourages women to enter and remain in higher education in a context where women across Europe are on average still less likely than men to obtain higher education qualifications (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003, pp. 23-5), it is vital that the institutionalization of Women’s Studies as a discipline is fully supported at European as well as at national levels.

Interest in the subject and personal interest were cited extensively as reasons for taking Women’s Studies. These, as Table 6 indicates, were far more important, certainly at undergraduate level, than a direct connection between taking Women’s Studies and subsequent employment:

Table 6. Factors influencing the choice of Women’s Studies in percentages

These findings are not specific to this study. A project conducted by Maryanne Dever and Elizabeth Day (2001) from the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at Monash University, Melbourne, involving four Women’s Studies centres each in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America also found that ‘career and vocational issues do not appear to feature prominently in students’ initial reasons for selecting the major. . . Women’s Studies students indicated overwhelmingly (between 70% and 90%) that their primary reason for enrolling in the field was "interest in the subject", a trend largely replicated in the control groups from other humanities and social science majors.’ (Dever and Day, p. 56) Indeed, ‘fewer than 5% of students in the various Women’s Studies programs surveyed listed "career prospects" as the principal motivating factor in their enrolment decision.’ (Dever and Day, p. 56) This project’s data confirmed these findings (see Table 7), with the low percentages of respondents taking the subject who sought to gain a qualification in it being explained by the lack of opportunity in most European countries of doing so. However, it should be noted that there were significant variations between countries regarding these expectations. These can be explained by a number of factors which vary from country to country and include general levels of women’s employment in the countries concerned, age and employment experiences of the respondents, and the visibility of Women’s Studies and degree of institutionalization of equal opportunities in a given country.

Table 7. Percentage of questionnaire respondents seeking to gain a qualification or improve job opportunities through undertaking Women’s Studies training

However, as shall be indicated below, the situation was very different where postgraduate students were concerned.

One important consequence of Women’s Studies students’ focus on personal interest and interest in the subject was that students, especially past students who commented on this from the perspective of more extended experiences of the labour market, systematically under-estimated the impact which Women’s Studies would have on their employment (Table 8). Where expectations were lower than actual impact, this was in part a function of limited employment experience, especially regarding current students.

Table 8. Percentage of reported expected and actual impact of Women’s Studies training on women’s employment by questionnaire respondents

This underestimation may be a function of the misrecognition, especially amongst undergraduates, of the meaning that doing Women’s Studies has for employers. Since undergraduates’ primary interests in the discipline are personal and discipline-centered, they tend to over-invest in the content. One Italian interviewee, for instance, said: ‘I remember that in 1987, when I attended a course to become an equality counsellor, those who dealt with gender issues were regarded as troublemakers within their company or their organisations.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 32) A Dutch interviewee said: ‘[Women’s Studies] can be hampering, but that is more related to the image of Women’s Studies, that people think of you as a radical feminist or so. . . If people read in your curriculum vitae that you graduated in Women’s Studies, they will not all approve.’ (van der Sanden 2003, p. 18) Even if students did not view their studies as an entry ticket into the labour market, they were, in Dever and Day’s study (2001) as much as in the present project, able to articulate both directly and indirectly some of the employment-related benefits they derived from their Women’s Studies training: ‘First of all, [Women’s Studies] has given me a different knowledge of myself, both at an individual and at a gender level. Indeed, you can get practical knowledge and specific skills, but I don’t know to what extent they are recognized in the labour market. You therefore keep this knowledge to yourself.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 25)

The notion of Women’s Studies as an identity project on the one hand, and as a source of transferable skills on the other, was countered by a sense that what was learnt was not necessarily valued in the labour market. Students feared encountering, and do encounter, employer hostility to having studied Women’s Studies. This can lead to various forms of self-censorship, especially as students are aware of the subject not being valued as highly as other disciplines either inside or outside the academy: ‘When I did my doctorate, although I was very keen on [Women’s Studies], I made a universal and neutral choice. . . I got a neutral qualification as a philosopher. . . In doing this, I was playing safe, in order to be recognized by the scientific community and be viewed less suspiciously as regards my feminist interests.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 26) Some students thus modified both their academic choices and how they presented their academic history to prospective employers in order to improve their employability. The Finnish qualitative data report summarized: ‘Most of the students said that they do not bring [their Women’s Studies knowledge] up in a job interview, for example, as it would not be considered as anything positive. . .’ (Tuori 2003, p. 32) As one Italian interviewee described it: ‘[Women’s Studies] has not been a job opportunity. On the contrary, it denied me the possibility to work. Probably, some people do not offer me any job opportunities because I have such a strong characterisation at the gender level, as it were, that they can say: that person is one of those who work on these issues, a troublemaker, let's just forget about her.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 27) One German interviewee asserted: ‘for me it’s clear that [Women’s Studies] programmes are educating experts who are sorely needed but the question is whether institutions and relevant departments or government really want to pay [for that expertise]’ (Schmidbaur et a 2003, p. 35)

This denying behaviour on the students’ part, founded on their perceptions of how prospective employers might view the content of their courses, is understandable. However, it is also the case that, as Dever and Day (2001) found, ‘the majority of employers recruiting graduates with generalist degrees are far more interested in graduates’ transferable personal and professional skills (i.e. confidence, communication skills, team working, creativity, verbal reasoning) than in the specific knowledge gained from their studies.’ (Dever and Day, p. 60) These skills are among the many that Women’s Studies fosters. One UK student, for example, said: ‘in terms of my own ability to work productively I’ve learnt a lot. . . I suppose I’m learning transferable skills, the kind of skills, you know, like working in a team when you’re team-working. . . working independently, motivating yourself. . . and working to deadlines which is obviously a huge thing for a PhD student.’ (Griffin 2003, p. 44) Among the many skills and dispositions students stated they had acquired, we found a significant degree of reported gains in, for instance, critical thinking, gender awareness and self-confidence as a function of Women’s Studies training among the respondents (Table 9):

Table 9. Percentage of respondents reporting growth in critical thinking, gender awareness, and self-confidence following their Women’s Studies course

The particularly marked growth in critical thinking and gender awareness, but also in self-confidence - on the whole more marked among students in countries where Women’s Studies is well established (the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Finland) than where Women’s Studies lacks visibility and is less well established (France, Hungary, Spain), and more marked among past than among current students, possibly because past students have more experience of the impact of that growth in their post-training context – constitutes important tools in both accessing the labour market and in determining everyday working practices among the former Women’s Studies students. One German interviewee said: ‘what I’ve learnt will really be needed by society. And that includes the confidence in finding a job somewhere.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 36)

The growth in critical thinking was perceived to be uniformly high among all respondents, partly fostered by Women’s Studies’ critical stance in relation to traditional forms of knowledge production and its interrogative position, partly because having to defend the subject and engage persistently with critiques both within and about the discipline fosters the ability to argue effectively.

The growth in gender awareness reported is key not only for dealing with gender issues in the workplace but also for greater tolerance towards diversity in the workplace. As will be shown below, respondents reported significant impacts on how they conduct themselves at work as a consequence of the acquisition of these skills and knowledges (see Table 21).

These impacts should stand students in good stead as they enter the labour market. However, as Dever and Day (2001) indicate, and we found in our study, students’ sense of what employers want is less focused on the skills they acquire than on the content of the subject they have taken. It suggests that students need to be taught to recognize more clearly, and name, the vocational strengths gleaned from Women’s Studies (Schniedewind 1993). As Dever and Day put it: ‘the personal is also vocational’ (p. 61). And as one of our Spanish interviewees put it: ‘[Women’s Studies] impacts on everything. And of course, it is very difficult to separate professional life from personal life, because the margins are not clear. Because [at]. . . my workplace, I’m not an automat, I’m still a person, with feelings. And, of course, my personal life is also here [at work], I have friends and relationships. . . So the line is not clear. . . [Women’s Studies] impacts on everything.’ (Suárez and Suárez 2003, pp. 4-5)

3.4.3 Analysing women’s employment histories

A comment needs to be made about the analysis of the respondents’ employment data in this project. In attempting to analyse the job descriptions they gave of their employment prior, during, and after their Women’s Studies training we found that those descriptions made it very difficult to fit the respondents into the conventionally used employment categories since these are based on a male employment model centring on employment that is traditionally carried out by men and cramming women together under the category ‘Service Industries’ which is where roughly 80% of European women are located. We therefore argue that conventional employment categories are gender-insensitive and thus inadequate to mapping women’s labour market participation adequately. In the project we decided to use ISCO-88 (International Standard Classification of Occupations) as its conceptual framework has two parameters, the kind of work performed and the level of skill involved. This in theory enables a more detailed analysis of the levels at which women work. However, the potential for refinement is marred by the lack - within traditionally female employment areas - of sub-classifications that classify women’s jobs adequately compared to the much more accurate classification of traditionally male jobs. In addition, the potential for refinement is marred by the fact that the socio-cultural meanings of jobs, ie their relative level of prestige, are not adequately captured by these classifications. The meaning of being ‘a civil servant’ for instance, which in many European countries is highly desirable because of the privileges and benefits attached, is not adequately addressed within this scheme. Moreover, many of our respondents gave job descriptions that did not neatly fit into one of the (sub-)categories proposed by ISCO-88 due to the lack of refinement within relevant employment groups. We therefore relied on a combination of the questionnaire data and the interview data to determine the results of this project.

In analysing the impact of Women’s Studies training on women’s employment, we need to understand the sample’s relation to the employment market. Contrary to the notion that a distinction can be made between those in education and those in employment, and that these two are successive, we found that significant numbers of our respondents had had some form of employment prior to entering Women’s Studies courses (see Table 10), during their studies (Drglin et al 2003), and of course, following on from their training.

One of the characteristics of Women’s Studies students is their expectation that they will work, an expectation significantly different from that of their mothers in a number of European countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. Students thus frequently came to Women’s Studies with prior work experiences (Table 10):

Table 10. Percentage of questionnaire respondents in employment prior to undertaking Women’s Studies training

The generally higher number of past students in employment prior to undertaking Women’s Studies is partly associated with the higher rate of women returners into education among past than among present students, with past students having been more likely than current students to have left their first education earlier to go into employment, having had a career break, or a family.

If one correlates the employment histories of the respondents with their age profile (Table 11), it is evident that employment prior to undertaking Women’s Studies training is partly associated with the age of the respondents whilst revealing, simultaneously, other traits, particular national circumstances.

Table 11. Average age of questionnaire respondents in 2002

Given the high average age profile of the UK past students, for instance, being educated in a system that has relatively short education spans (7 years secondary schooling; 3 years for the normal undergraduate degree), it is clear that many of the respondents were so-called mature students who returned into education after significant breaks away from education, mostly in employment but also looking after dependents. This is borne out by the interview data (Griffin and Hanmer 2002). The average age of the Dutch respondents was also relatively high but their labour market participation prior to doing Women’s Studies comparatively low, a function of the specific history of women’s participation in the labour market in the Netherlands (van der Sanden and Waaldijk 2002) where women are less likely to be in full-time employment than in the UK or Finland, for instance (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003).

In countries such as France, Germany, increasingly the UK, and others it is common for students to work while they are studying, both at undergraduate and at postgraduate level (Table 12):

Table 12. Percentage of questionnaire respondents who were current Women’s Studies students in paid employment during their studies (figures for 2002).

The differences in paid employment rates of current students during their studies indicated in Table 12 are partly explained by the age groups in the samples. On the whole, the younger the sample, the less likely they were to work while studying. However, it is also clear that histories of female work cultures and availability of work play a role here. For example, significantly more current Finnish students were in paid employment during their studies than their Hungarian or Italian counterparts. We thus have the relatively new figure of the student worker, a hybrid whose employment trajectory cannot simply be measured in terms of successive life stages.

In some countries such as Finland, the Netherlands, Hungary and Slovenia postgraduate students undertaking PhDs and/or teaching duties are considered employees rather than students. Indeed, as our research showed, PhD scholarships in Hungary and Slovenia, especially if funded through international resources such as the Soros Foundation, can provide a significantly greater income than equivalent university jobs in the local employment market. That in itself contributes to the status of funded PhD students in those countries as employees rather than as students (Drglin et al 2003, 8).

Employment during one’s studies needs to be distinguished from work placements which form part of one’s studies. Since the discipline of Women’s Studies is in most European countries rooted in histories of feminist activism (Silius 2002a), one might expect that work placements in organisations such as NGOs, women’s organisations etc. might be a feature of Women’s Studies training. However, we found (Table 13) that few Women’s Studies courses require any form of work placements and what is more, that the number is declining from past to present students.

Table 13. Percentage of questionnaire respondents required to undertake work placements during their Women’s Studies training

Where numbers of obligatory work placements are high as is the case in France, this is in some cases a function of the kind of course attended (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2002), in other words a bias in the sample. We also think that some respondents confused the category ‘work placement’ – an in-course requirement – with working for a living while studying. Irrespective of these reservations, it is quite clear that few students were required to undertake any form of work placement during their training and, one might argue, such a requirement might be difficult to fulfil given the ‘student worker’ situation described above.

However, some interviewees who undertook a work placement said that one of the effects was to find out what their career interests were. Some of these students were also later able to obtain employment in the places where they had undertaken their work placement. Thus a Slovenian past student of Women’s Studies commented: ‘I was lucky that the counselling centre was beginning work at that time and I found my own place in the sun where I liked working and where I later got the opportunity to have a job.’ (Bahovec et al 2003, p. 40)

Some of the interviewees (the ‘mature’ or those doing postgraduate studies) talked about their participation in the academy as lecturers or teachers – work, to which they were invited by professors or assistant professors at various programmes of Women's Studies. This was not considered practical training as such, but was related to their professional aspirations (e.g. the desire to teach) and, in some instances, led to subsequent employment in the academy. Overall, those students who did work placements found that these had a positive influence both on their ability to make realistic assessments of the labour market and in helping them consider their employment options and career interests. The project partners therefore recommend that such placements, possibly with some form of remuneration or funding attached, be considered more widely across Women’s Studies programmes in Europe.

3.4.8 Educational attainment and labour market participation

As previously indicated, women’s levels of qualification impact directly on their labour market participation rates. As seen in Table 14, on average women are still less likely to obtain a higher education qualification than their male counterparts, especially in Germany, while the qualification levels of Finnish women are significantly higher than those of their male counterparts.

Table 14. Male and female education levels, 2002

One of the major contributions Women’s Studies has made is the encouragement of women into higher education, including postgraduate education where women tend to be under-represented, even in subjects in which they are over-represented at undergraduate level. In Germany, for example, half of the interviewed Women’s Studies graduates remained in education after graduation. The postgraduate work of four doctoral candidates was ‘financed by various scholarships. Five graduates [were] also scientific associates (with contracts for a maximum of five years) or with shorter contracts as post-doctoral assistants. One graduate [was] working free-lance as an academic. All graduates employed in higher education [were] engaged in Women's and Gender Studies. More than for any other group, this one found its studies to be a precondition for employment.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 41) In France Women’s Studies students were more likely to remain in education after graduation than their counterparts in other Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003). The vast majority of students interviewed in the UK had undertaken postgraduate degrees (MA/PhD) in Women’s Studies. If we accept the findings above that women with higher education across Europe are more likely than their less well qualified counterparts to be in employment (see Table 5), then Women’s Studies as a discipline must be viewed as a key contributing discipline to the retention of women in higher education and in particular in postgraduate education.

In almost all European countries, the decision to remain in the education system or to leave school on reaching the age of 16 is largely determined by social background: ‘Data show that social origin is a factor which, to a large extent, determines the chances of young people to continue schooling or to drop out of school at a young age. In all countries except Finland, the percentage of young people prematurely leaving the educational system is far higher among those whose parents have a low level of education than among those whose parents are more educated and the differences are very significant’ (Eurostat, 2003b: 4). However, with the exception of Hungary, women have a much greater chance than their male counterparts of obtaining a qualification that is higher than that of their mother or father. Two immediate implications of these findings are a) that Women’s Studies’ encouragement of women to continue in(to) higher education improves women’s labour market participation rates, and b) that the children of women who have taken Women’s Studies training are themselves more likely to enter higher education, given the importance of parents’ levels of education for their children’s levels of education.

In our project we considered the differences in employment between questionnaire respondents and their parents (Hanmer and Wigglesworth 2002). We found that for both current and past students the occupational categories occupied by mothers and fathers demonstrate gendered horizontal and vertical job segregation. Fathers were not only more likely than mothers to occupy managerial positions, but were also in a wider range of occupations. There were exceptions to this. In Hungary, the occupational categories of the mothers of current students in relation to fathers reflected vertical job segregation, with mothers more likely to occupy a wider range of categories than fathers. In Spain fathers were not concentrated in managerial and professional categories, and both mothers and fathers of current students held almost identical proportions of managerial and professional jobs. Whilst higher education, as indicated above, is a route to professional and managerial occupations for women, only a longitudinal study of current students can show the extent to which this is realized by those students.

Amongst past students (see Table 15) we found that in Finland and the Netherlands the employment patterns of daughters was closer to that of their mothers than their fathers, indicating stability in horizontal and vertical job segregation. Daughters, however, could substantially out-perform their mothers. In Italy and France, whilst past students were closer to the occupational stratification of their mothers than their fathers, daughters out-performed their mothers in relation to the proportion of professional positions they occupied. In the UK in relation to managerial positions daughters were closer to their fathers and substantially out-performed their mothers. Fathers in the UK, however, continued to work in a wider range of occupations than mothers or daughters. In Hungary, whilst fathers were more likely to occupy managerial posts, mothers held a wider range of occupations. In Slovenia the occupational categories inhabited by mothers in relation to fathers reflected horizontal but not vertical job segregation. The same pattern occurred within the German sample, but daughters outperformed both parents in relation to the proportion in professional occupations. For Hungary and Slovenia, however, it was not clear that daughters did better than either mothers or fathers in the labour market. This is, of course, a function of the transition of those societies from a centralist, egalitarian society with full employment and gender-equal access to the labour market to a market-led, capitalist one with varying unemployment rates and highly gendered access to the employment market. Spain provided a different range of occupations with few fathers or mothers in managerial or professional occupations. Daughters there out-performed both their parents. Overall then but not in every participating country, women with Women’s Studies training tended to out-perform their mothers in terms of level of occupation reached, thus demonstrating a generational difference among women regarding access to the labour market.

Table 15. Past Women’s Studies students’ employment performance relative to their parents

However, women did not tend to occupy a wider range of occupations than their mothers had, and only in a very limited number of countries did they out-perform their fathers. This demonstrates the persistence of gender segregation in the labour market, especially - but not only - horizontally.

Women’s Studies training impacts on the kind of work women look for. Table 16 shows that almost 60% of past students from all project partner countries agreed that Women's Studies influenced the type of employment they sought – with considerable differences between the countries (from 19% in Hungary to 89 % in Germany):

Table 16. Percentage of respondents reporting impact of Women’s Studies training on type of employment sought

Quite what this means is less clear, but it was evident from the interviews that Women’s Studies students wanted to work in environments where their feminist views and women in general were respected, and where they felt they could make a difference. They thus tended to focus on people-, care- and education-centred employment, areas that are key to the future European economy with its ageing population and expansion of higher education which demands suitably qualified personnel in these areas. As one French interviewee put it: ‘When I first started at University, I had no idea about what I wanted to do afterwards. Even today, I’m not absolutely sure what kind of job I want. At least I know that I want to work in something social […] The DESS has encouraged a kind of militancy. There’s something that makes you want to work in a field that isn’t too neutral, something where you can be totally engaged with other people, something that has social consequences.’ (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2002, p. 59)

Since significant numbers of Women’s Studies students undertake work both prior to and during their studies, their engagement with the labour market after their studies is often one of continuity rather than of ab initio entry. The questionnaire responses allowed us limited tracking of women’s employment experiences following on from their Women’s Studies training (the emphasis here is on the past students), while the interview responses provided some in-depth understanding of those experiences. Our data (Table 17) show the following pattern of women looking for employment after completing their training: a third of past students looked for a job within weeks, 16% within a few months, and 10% took several years, whilst for around 40% the question was not relevant, either because they already had a job or because they decided to continue their studies, travel, or set up home.

Table 17. Past Women’s Studies students’ responses to how soon they looked for a job after completion of their training

Many respondents, especially during interview and particularly pronounced among German, Finnish and Italian interviewees, commented on the fact that they did not want to pursue what they thought of as a typically masculine kind of career, involving ‘climbing the career ladder’ and making progressively more money. As one Italian interviewee put it: ‘Career is a word that, as such, sounds unpleasant to me. In fact, I would tend to say, "A career? No way, how sickening." However, if we consider it as a growth and a development, it certainly becomes important to me. Rather than a vertical career progression, I would be keener on something that deeply gratifies me. I’m not interested in holding a powerful position^[]. . . I think it is important to deal with people on an equal footing’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 33). Another Italian interviewee said: ‘I don’t care if a woman is allowed to become a carabiniere and I don’t think that it is much of an achievement.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 11) For these women, employment was not about doing the same jobs as men and doing them in the same way. Instead, they were concerned to make a difference.

In their comparative project report on ‘The Professionalisation of Women’s Studies Graduates in Europe’ (2003) Silius and Tuori distinguished four types of discourses that Women’s Studies graduates use to describe their move into post-Women’s Studies training employment:

These discourses through which the interviewees made sense of their employment trajectories and experiences did not necessarily reflect the actual process by which they arrived at their employment but rather highlighted their perceptions of their own agency, expectations and experiences of the labour market, and assessments of their opportunities within it. The four discourses were not necessarily mutually exclusive, nor did they necessarily reflect accurately what happened to students in the workplace (we found, for instance, that ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ had much less to do with what actually happened than interviewees imagined); rather, they indicate a range of (dis)positions, from viewing oneself as an agent shaping one’s working life on the one hand, to being the object of circumstances on the other, from aspiration to experience. These discourses also reflected attitudes towards work which could include the rejection of the concept of a career where that seemed to gesture towards a male model of work involving long hours and making large amounts of money, or the embrace of the notion of a career understood by the Women’s Studies graduates as a full-time, permanent, fulfilling job. The key desire of most of the interviewees in all partner countries was to find jobs where they could make a difference, which were demanding and cohered with their ideological disposition towards equality.

Silius and Tuori (2003) discuss the professionalism of Women’s Studies graduates in terms of the competencies they acquire through Women’s Studies. Women’s Studies students in all nine partner countries talked about certain competencies that they gain through their training which equip them for or enhance their work. One example is how women work in a different manner as a result of their Women’s Studies training. Such professionalism might be distinguished from professionalisation, understood predominantly as the establishment of new professions. This is, however, not a clear-cut division. Professionalism, as a certain expertise, skills and knowledge, often means professionalisation for the individual student. As a collective phenomenon it can also lead to professionalisation, implying differentiation of the labour market into new professions. Professionalism is necessary across all forms of employment. It can refer, for example, to a librarian who works in a different manner as a result of her Women’s Studies training. Professionalisation, on the other hand, references the emergence of specific Women’s Studies jobs, such as in academia (within Women’s Studies), equal opportunities, associations working with women's/feminist issues, etc. The issue of professionalisation will be discussed further below.

Many of the key skills Women’s Studies students reported acquiring during their training such as critical thinking, analytic ability, and self-confidence (see Table 9) which enhance their professionalism are not specific to the discipline but may be acquired in a number of humanities and social sciences subjects. However, the multi- and interdisciplinarity of Women’s Studies as well as its specific gender focus mean that students gain perspectives not available in other disciplines, directly related to the gender expertise they have. This opens them up to possibilities of change and diversity. One German graduate, for example, employed today in municipal politics, described the ability to analyse through feminist glasses as the most important result of her studies applied to her professional life. She said: ‘Yes, simply to observe, also to analyse, how things work and then to reflect on the consequences to be drawn from it. Where can you expect change to start? And what will result from those changes, how will they affect the group, its goal or individual goals? So I would say that this skill in particular, to step back, to observe and to analyse helps a great deal’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 54).

Many interviewees across the partner countries commented on the all-pervasive importance of gender expertise which they regarded as central to every employment situation. An Italian current student, for instance, said: ‘Any job needs it [gender expertise], I think. Not only for women though, but for everybody. It should start from teaching at junior high school levels upwards. Gender knowledge means questioning roles. This means that you can’t work in education, from kindergartens to university, without questioning roles, taking them for granted. The same is true for any other professional context. Be it the tertiary sector or – why not – a factory. Just consider, for example, the importance of a gender perspective when interpreting migration processes in relation to employment’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 31).

The professionalisation of Women’s Studies graduates among the interviewees in this project, here understood as the creation and establishment of new professions, occurred in four contexts:

Of these the first three were also the preferred career options among the Women’s Studies students we interviewed, with significant numbers of interviewees already undertaking such jobs. It should be noted that employment areas such as feminist research/academe, equal opportunities and women’s NGOs have arisen largely since the 1970s and not least in response to feminist demand. They thus constitute new employment opportunities, to some extent developed in parallel with the institutionalisation of Women’s Studies, and have offered one form of upward employment mobility for women.

Entering academe emerged as the most popular career choice amongst the project’s interviewees, of which a high number were or had been PhD students. It should be noted here that the researchers who were employed on this project themselves fell into this category:

Table 18. Project researchers’ education and employment, 2003

The aspirations to enter academe or work as feminist researchers were in many countries only realizable by (re)turning to traditional disciplines since Women’s Studies positions remain scarce in all European countries. According to the project’s background data reports (Griffin 2002) a high degree of integration of Women’s Studies within traditional disciplines (eg in Germany) tends to imply more Women’s Studies positions, albeit as part of other disciplines, than a high degree of autonomy (eg Finland). Whilst this suggests the benefits of mainstreaming it also invisibilizes the discipline, subsuming it under other disciplinary umbrellas. In countries with low degrees of institutionalization of Women’s Studies such as France, Hungary, and Slovenia, specialization in the subject made students vulnerable on the academic employment market.

Importantly, many interviewees mentioned that the inter-disciplinarity which Women’s Studies entails was sometimes seen as a limitation to one’s academic competence rather than as an extension thereof. This highlights the traditionalist attitudes that prevail in many universities.

Differences regarding the level, history and type of institutionalisation of equal opportunities in the project partner countries are considerable and directly related to the countries’ point of entry into the EU. Countries such as the UK, Finland, and Germany with high levels of equal opportunities institutionalisation, also have a long history of equal opportunities-related work. Hungary, Italy, France and Slovenia, on the other hand, belong to countries with a recent development in equal opportunities. Particularly in the Italian and Dutch cases it was clear that the professionalisation of equal opportunities depends on the political climate. In 2003 both countries have governments that are not very supportive of equal opportunities. This is what one Italian past student, who also noted the importance of regional differences (important in Germany, Italy and Spain), said: ‘Yes, there are many of them (job opportunities), but there are differences. For example, I know that Tuscany is much better than Lazio. In part, it also depends on the local traditions /.../ In Florence there is a Women’s Unit, while in Rome there isn’t one /.../. Unfortunately, the government plays a role. Until the last government, the Ministry for Equal Opportunities worked, now it’s a real mess.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 32).

In all nine project partner countries, independent of the level of institutionalisation, the number of positions in the strictly defined sector of equal opportunities was low. The level of institutionalisation is, however, important with regard to the visibility of equal opportunities, including students’ perceptions of job opportunities within that sector. Additionally, the relationship between Women’s Studies and equal opportunities plays a role in job opportunities for Women’s Studies graduates as well as in how Women’s Studies graduates perceive these opportunities. In Italy the relationship between Women’s Studies and equal opportunities is close (Barazzetti et al 2002, p. 207) and there is an increasing interest in gender training for equal opportunities employees. There has also been a rise in equal opportunities measures, and the awareness of equal opportunities as a job possibility among the interviewees was strong in Italy. This was lacking in the other countries. In the Netherlands there are many equal opportunities institutions, but the relationship between Women’s Studies and equal opportunities is rather distant and women are not likely to see equal opportunities as a career option. Two Finnish students had an employment history in equal opportunities, which is by no means representative considering the few positions in the field of equal opportunities. At present the relationship between Women’s Studies and equal opportunities is rather distant in Finland too. In France several women were working within equal opportunities. This was due to the recent increase of equal opportunities positions, as well as a bias in the selection of the interviewees. In Slovenia gaining a position in any state institution (including the Commission for Equal Opportunities) is difficult and there are very few positions. This is also the case in Hungary but it is worth mentioning that following on from this project the Hungarian researcher moved to the position of head of department for gender equality in the newly established Hungarian Ministry of Equal Opportunities.

In contrast to Italy, in countries with medium or high levels of institutionalisation of equal opportunities, equal opportunities employers generally do not require or regard gender expertise as a qualification for jobs in this area. In Finland, France, Spain and the UK gender expertise is not a job requirement. Positions can also be closely linked to political power, which is exemplified by this Spanish past student’s comment: ‘There’s no real equal opportunities. Only on paper. /…/ Equal opportunities is being used as a political strategy /…/ usually the jobs related to gender are political posts where no training is required. I think women’s groups should demand that they require specific training for those jobs.’ (Suárez and Suárez, 2003, p. 8).

In the UK as well as in Germany, however, training in gender issues was organised for equal opportunities employees. In Italy and Spain equal opportunities are perceived as something that must be enhanced in order to reach the level of the more institutionalised countries of the EU. It is likely that this ‘reaching the EU level’ will also affect Hungary and Slovenia when joining the Union. Finland, on the contrary, has a rather opposite stance by claiming to be one of the most ‘equal’ countries in Europe, even if the results of the EWSI background studies do not quite support this view (Griffin 2002). In sum, it is possible that the employment opportunities in the specific sector of equal opportunities will increase in countries with low levels of institutionalisation, while countries with a high level of institutionalisation may feel that the sector is already fully developed.

Whilst equal opportunities has been dealt with in a narrow sense above, restricted to government, regional bodies, municipalities and organisational bodies (e.g. universities) that are explicitly working with equal opportunities, other jobs linked to equal opportunities exist, for instance in trade unions, or as on-the-job training that plays an important role in Germany. This is where many of the German graduates were involved already while studying because of specific political interests. Indirect involvement in equal opportunities, even if the work did not explicitly have to do with it, played a role in France, for example, where the interviewees were able to introduce women's or gender issues at work. Freelancing or self-employment through consultancy work, monitoring or evaluating equal opportunities measures also constitute new fields for Women’s Studies graduates.

Some interviewees, especially in Hungary, Finland and Slovenia had worked for or intended to work for women’s NGOs. Work in such organisations means working on issues directly concerning women from a feminist perspective. It is innovative work where women can use their Women’s Studies skills and knowledge. Working in women’s organisations is concerned with the notion of improving and transforming women’s lives. Interestingly, a major - and one of the few - women’s organisations in Hungary, NANE, which works on violence against women, offers Women’s Studies training in return for work in the organisation (Juhász 2003). Significantly, countries with no history of a second-wave women’s movement such as Hungary tend to have few women’s NGOs. This confirms the co-terminus relationship between the emergence of Women’s Studies and of such organisations.

The downside of this kind of work is low income, insecure working conditions, lack of career perspectives, and often an overload of work. NGOs seem to be most important in the two countries with the lowest degree of institutionalisation of Women’s Studies, in Hungary and Slovenia. In Slovenia, Women’s Studies is not limited to academia. There were examples of women who first worked as volunteers in an NGO, wrote a thesis with a relevant topic and later found work in this field. However, in both countries this was a somewhat marginal work trajectory. Although the UK sample included only a few women working in women’s NGOs, this is a large employment sector in Britain, and Women’s Studies students enter it.

The three preferred career options of Women’s Studies students, especially postgraduates, of academe/feminist research, equal opportunities or working in women’s NGOs, are beset by problems recognised by the students. These problems include short-term insecure employment and few permanent job openings in academe; low incomes, insecure employment, and lack of career prospects in women’s organisations; and, most surprisingly, as will be discussed in greater detail below, lack of employment opportunities in equal opportunities. Women’s willingness to take on such employment bespeaks three things:

The first notion, that of taking risks in employment in choosing insecure, often short-term employment, is already partly indicated through students’ choice of Women’s Studies in the first place – a choice problematized by the low status of the discipline in academe, many people’s hostility towards the discipline, its single-sex status in predominantly secular, co-educational systems, and its overt transformative agenda. All of this means that students who choose Women’s Studies are likely to be independent-minded, willing to experience something new and different, more willing to take risks. These are clearly assets in the more flexible labour market Europe now faces.

One definition of professionalisation is upward employment mobility, for instance through climbing the career ladder or changing jobs. The conditions that influence such mobility are country specific. First of all, the amount of mature students, which in this report means women with an extended work history prior to their Women’s Studies training, varied greatly among the countries. In the UK mature students formed a significant proportion of the interviewees. Their type of training was also significantly different. In the UK and in France there were several women with specialist training (DESS in Gender and Social Policy in France and different MAs in the UK) which leads to a specific profession. Most of the other students (also many women in these two countries), however, had a generalist education, comparable to other university education in humanities and social sciences.

Women who entered Women’s Studies training more or less directly after secondary education, did not speak about ‘changing career’ or ‘climbing the career ladder’ as a result of the Women’s Studies training, as they did not have a previous career. In the UK, however, there was a significant proportion of interviewees (75%) who completely changed jobs, got promotion, or entered the labour market after having been at home for many years. One British past student who was contracted to do research on women and health after her degree said: ‘I wouldn’t have had access to that [research work] had I not done research /.../ in a formal setting with Women’s Studies. I think having a Women’s Studies degree gives me a good skills mix’ (Griffin 2003, p. 47). Another past student was headhunted ‘because I was the only one with a degree, there were only two of us in the country’ (Griffin 2003, p. 44). These examples show a direct impact of Women’s Studies training which was also part of a deliberate plan when these women decided to study. The British case further gives many examples of career advancement (teacher to head of department) as well as movement from insecure to more secure jobs. Among them one can find housewives who returned to or entered the labour market. There are social workers, health workers and teachers who through postgraduate education moved into more qualified jobs such as teachers of health workers, lecturers etc. Professional mobility sometimes included complete changes of job (distribution manager to head of a college department), promotion within the same field (social work manager to senior social work manager) and acquisition of qualifications that were considered necessary to enter or sustain a career (especially in education, the health service, the voluntary sector).

These shifts are borne out by the project’s quantitative data which indicate that greater numbers of students enter professional jobs after their graduation than have such jobs whilst they are studying (Drglin et al 2003, pp. 7-12); whereas a third of students was in professional jobs whilst studying, two thirds of students (see Table 19) found professional employment as their first job after completing their training:

Table 19. First employment after Women's Studies training (secondary analysis).

The table indicates that two thirds of valid responses about first destinations among Women’s Studies students following the completion of their training were in professional occupations, a very high rate of movement into those occupations. This trend towards moving into professional occupations increased from the first to the second and third job women held once they completed their training.

This does not mean that the students all worked in Women’s Studies related fields but it shows that their training led them into professional jobs. The questionnaires and interviews from all countries indicate that past Women’s Studies students entered a variety of professions (for more on the Women’s Studies qualifications see Le Feuvre, 2000), including trade union officialdom, project management, research, social work and social work management, librarianship, teaching at school, further, and higher education levels, counselling, archivism, the police force. Past Women’s Studies students had very diverse professions/jobs, as well as diverse careers. Not only does this show that they are highly employable, but it also indicates the positive effect a Women’s Studies programme can have. For instance, in the Netherlands, ‘looking at the current jobs of past students interviewed, 10 women ended up in the public sector, 5 in the private sector, the other women [were] working for an association, a church-institution, as a free-lancer, looking for work, and labour disabled. There [were] two women who next to their job [had] their own business. /.../ Many women [were] (sometimes in addition to their paid labour) actively engaged in voluntary work that is related to Women’s Studies/emancipation/feminism, for instance editorial work for a feminist magazine or working in a meeting project with foreign women.’ (van der Sanden 2003, p. 20)

More than half (57,1 %) of those surveyed in all countries who answered the question about what they had done immediately after finishing Women’s Studies said they were employed. The differences between the countries were great – in Finland for example one third were employed and in the UK almost 80%. There were also significant differences among countries regarding the type of job women had – in the Netherlands, for example, 53% of past students were first employed in jobs under the code ‘Legislators, senior officials and managers’, in the UK 27%; in Germany, Finland and Slovenia around 6%, and in Netherlands, Italy, France, Hungary and Spain none. Finally, the questionnaires indicate great differences between individual countries among past students as regards part-time or full-time employment (for example in Finland the ratio of part-time to full-time work was 3 : 7, in the Netherlands 7 : 3). This difference seems to be related to the general patterns of women’s employment in the individual countries.

These data exclude significant numbers of Women’s Studies students who continued their studies after their initial Women’s Studies training. About 50% of those past students who were not employed immediately after their Women’s Studies course continued to study (for an MA, for example), 15 % were registered as unemployed, 10% did voluntary work, fewer (all answers below 10 %) took care of children or other dependent persons, stayed at home (up to not more than two years) or something similar (see Table 20):

Table 20. Women’s Studies students’ activities other than employment following their training*

The figures in the table above are partly explained by the age of the respondents and the levels of education they had attained as well as by the national gendered specificities of the employment market. Overall, where women were not engaged in paid labour following on from their studies, they did unpaid labour. Respondents from the Netherlands in particular stood out because of the proportionately relatively high number of women engaged in voluntary work.

Most of those who registered as unemployed remained so for one year or less. However, the overall employment profile of the respondents also identifies not only the process of early career stages with frequent changes in employment, but also the new flexibility, instability and impermanence of the labour market. Thus the duration of first employment after taking part in a Women's Studies course was one year or less for almost 60 % of those surveyed, two years for 15% per cent, and longer only for increasingly smaller percentages. The second employment lasted a year or less for more than half of those surveyed. Two thirds of past students who had a third employment were employed for a year or less. The fact that even the third employment was short-term can hardly be attributed to subjective factors.

Self-employment of past Women’s Studies students grew steadily with the number of jobs held. Among first-time employees 16 % were self-employed, with the second job this rose to 19 %, and with the third to almost a quarter. The decision to become self-employed may have been related to the general insecurity of the job market but was also related to feelings of being secure, being backed-up by the whole family, etc. In the interviews, the need for new specific jobs, sometimes created with the help of Women’s Studies students themselves, was emphasised repeatedly. Some students (undergraduates and postgraduates) who were active in NGOs while studying later found employment with these organisations. In Slovenia, for example, in the last ten years, some new job opportunities have appeared. One current postgraduate student was employed for a time as a counsellor at the Association Against Violent Communication where she had worked as a volunteer while still a student (Bahovec et al 2003, p. 40).

In Hungary, where there is a problem with finding a job, ‘the novelty of gender studies, its connection to feminist activism requires people who are creative and inspired, with a pioneer spirit. Exactly because of these qualities they will be able to overcome such "trifling" difficulties as no jobs available. One student said: "I don’t have an insight into this [whether or not it is possible to find jobs with feminism]. Most probably there are some from the feminists, who can find work for themselves, or I should rather say, you can create work for yourself." (Juhász 2003, p. 7.)

If we compare the first, second and third employment on the basis of the analysis of the questionnaires filled in by the past students from all countries only slight changes in percentage are seen in individual groups of occupations. There is no distinctive trend. An exception is the percentage of those, who are employed under the code ‘elementary occupations’ - this reduces with the second employment and disappears with the third.

A comparison of employment patterns between past and current students shows differences in the employment patterns between the two groups – past students are employed in more demanding, more responsible and independent jobs than current students. This is an expected and presumably general pattern of employment dynamics, where students are employed in less demanding and responsible jobs whilst studying and immediately after finishing education.

The impact of Women’s Studies was greatest on how students carried out their work rather than on the work they sought. As one woman put it:

Table 21 indicates the percentage of questionnaire respondents who reported an impact of their Women’s Studies training on how they carry out their work:

Table 21. Percentage of respondents* reporting impact of Women’s Studies training on how they carry out their work

Both for past and for current students (many of whom in countries such as Germany, France, and the UK as indicated previously work whilst studying), the percentage of women reporting an influence of their training on how they carry out their work was high. With an average percentage of 76%, just over three quarters of past students reported that impact; whilst an average of 62% (nearly two thirds) of current students did. Figures are higher for past students since overall they have more and longer work experiences than present students. They are lowest for past students in countries (Slovenia, Hungary) where Women’s Studies is not well established, and for current students where Women’s Studies is not highly visible (ie France) and where students enter degree courses straight from school rather than as mature students.

Women’s Studies training had such an impact because students felt it impacted on all aspects of their lives (eg Suárez and Suárez 2003, pp. 1-2).

What then was the nature of the impact Women’ Studies had on how women carried out their work? In the interviews, women with Women’s Studies training reported that they tended to

This was evident from the interviews as the following quotations show.

Our data show that Women’s Studies training enhanced women’s ability to fight discrimination in the workplace and outside. A UK interviewee, for example, said: ‘I suppose I was aware of gender discrimination. . . in terms of helping me identify, articulate it and challenge it, yes, that’s, that’s been an evident benefit.’ (Griffin 2003, p. 35) Another UK interviewee said: ‘I am much more conscious of discrimination em, there are times when I just, whereas I know before I would have just thought oh well that’s not fair. Now I, I think well that’s not fair and actually I could do something about it. Em, and whilst I might only do things that are kind of small scale, it might just be going to the head teacher and explaining that there is a problem and saying that I’m concerned. . .’ (Griffin 2003, p. 36)

Women’s Studies graduates are less likely to put up with sexism in the private or the public sphere than they were prior to their training. A German interviewee, for instance, stated: ‘if I notice anything sexist in my private sphere I go jump on the barricades. Or I say to friends when I hear it’s going on at work, I say, you don’t have to stand for that. So I’m doing this kind of enlightenment work.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 66)

A French interviewee reported: ‘I was working as a newspaper journalist and the Chief Editor was this really awful guy. . . I’ll always remember the way he harassed me, right up until the day I hit back. After that, he gave up on me but he didn’t give me any more assignments either.’ (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003, p. 23) Another French interviewee reported: ‘I did have this boss who just used to turn up in my office and spend like two hours staring at my cleavage. . . I think that doing Women’s Studies helped me to understand that all that was part of a wider question of power relations.’ (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003, p. 23)

The self-confidence students gained as a function of undertaking Women’s Studies training enabled them to feel empowered to make applications for promotion or to move into other jobs. This correlates with the high percentage of Women’s Studies students who moved into professional jobs following their training. As one Finnish interviewee put it: ‘Women’s Studies is a new discipline and there is not enough experience to look back on, so one has to be quite aggressive oneself and engaged in one’s search for a job. . . one also has to be very flexible. And maybe invent one’s own employment. . . it is a question of economic strategies and preferences.’ (Tuori 2003, pp. 29-30)

Another Finnish interviewee recounted the following experience: ‘with Women’s Studies I can show that I have something else [than formal competence] as well, that I have this consciousness, that this is useful when applying for a job. And of course I claim, and I am of the opinion myself, that I have a broad basis of knowledge which I have acquired precisely through Women’s Studies training. . . I saw the advertisement [for an equal opportunities job] and. . . noticed that my chances of getting the job were good and I applied and got it.’ (Tuori 2003, pp. 33-4)

Among many interviewees, but in particular teachers, it was noticeable that one effect of their Women’s Studies training was to make them very conscious of sexist work practices. In consequence, they attempted to work in a less sexist manner. An Italian interviewee, a past student, reported: ‘I used the structure I had observed at NOISE [an EU-funded International Summer School in Women’s Studies] seminars, together with what I learnt on the Masters course [in equal opportunities] in Milan. I reshaped my working methodology in the light of these experiences. . . I created some working groups with a methodology other than the one that characterises the company style, which is the leading training trend here.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 28)

A past student from Finland, working as an economics teacher, said: ‘Economics is an optional subject [at the gymnasium] and a lot of girls have opted for it, even more than in the beginning. I can imagine one reason to be my somewhat dissenting attitude to the question of what is important in economics. . . I have tried to bring forward . . . issues like poverty. . . and how important it is to bring a female perspective to bear on them. . . I think this has drawn more girls than before. And perhaps my own experiences of what kinds of lectures I didn’t want to participate in. . . have helped in trying to create a kind of milieu where everybody can speak and feel comfortable.’ (Tuori 2003, p. 36)

Women’s Studies’ students enhanced understanding of gender discrimination led, inter alia, towards a greater appreciation of diversity beyond gender. A Slovenian interviewee found: ‘I have become quite a lot more tolerant to different forms of womanhood not just those that were near to me back when I was studying, that I am more ready to accept something which I didn’t accept before.’ (Bahovec et al 2003, p. 55)

A Dutch researcher said that Women’s Studies had influenced her career opportunities and how she worked as a researcher positively because ‘this broader outlook, being able to put things in perspective, I just think that by doing Women’s Studies you become a better researcher. . . I really think that is the case. . . you acquire better competencies, better qualities as a researcher, because of that broad perspective, the crossing of boundaries and not thinking in stereotypes, which is a good feature for researchers.’ (van der Sanden 2003, p. 21)

And an Italian interviewee stated: ‘[Women’s Studies] taught us to become more tolerant and more receptive to other people’s situations. More sensitive. All this – and being with other women in particular – has influenced me enormously. This experience taught me to have a different perspective and look for dialogue on some aspects I did not see before.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 42)

Importantly, the ability to deconstruct gendered stereotypes was also seen as something that generates competence to deconstruct other stereotypes such as race/ethnicity or sexuality, thus leading to greater degrees of tolerance and ability to engage with diversity. This was particularly evident in the Dutch and Italian contexts. As one Dutch past student put it:

Importantly, following on from their Women’s Studies training many interviewees attempted to introduce gender issues into their work place, thus raising awareness about the issues among colleagues and empowering them. A Spanish interviewee said: ‘I’ve seen in my work, women with a feminist conscience who aren’t militant in any group but have changed the language of clinical histories. . .’ (Suárez and Suárez 2003, p. 20) Another Spanish interviewee said: ‘Jobs are what they are and you have to adapt to them, but doing a job having a gender perspective is not the same as not having it. You don’t see things in the same way.’ (Suárez and Suárez 2003, p. 27)

A UK interviewee said: ‘I think [the course] affected my work life more than my social life. . . I found that I was changing things when I was doing talks or giving lectures or doing workshops, em, I totally changed the twist, the accent. . . and made the students look at it from a feminist, if I dare use that word,. . . perspective.’ (Griffin 2003, p. 37)

Another effect of Women’s Studies training was to make women more supportive of other women. One UK interviewee, for instance, talked about how she and colleagues had set up a women’s group in her adult education institution in order to help female staff: ‘there were a lot of things we were asking for, like the part-timers, most of the [women] were part-timers. They were being denied access to pensions and all sorts of other things and really taken advantage of, and the union didn’t care because some of them weren’t in the union, and we were saying we can support each other through this, you know.’ (Griffin 2003, p. 38)

A German interviewee, one of several for whom union-sponsored on-the-job-training in Women’s Studies was key said: ‘as a representative of youth and personnel I already knew where discriminatory mechanisms in our organisation lay. And I concerned myself with these topics, with the promotion of women. So it was pretty clear that that would be paramount in my course of study. . . And in addition to my courses I was active in union-sponsored training which permitted me to apply what I had learnt. I brought it into the seminars I taught.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 40)

And a Finnish interviewee stated: ‘I try to behave in a way that is in solidarity with women and also in solidarity with low-salary employees. . . The situation at my own work is that within the administration we are all women except the attendant. Within the school hierarchy we are at the bottom. . . Personal relations are rather inflamed, as well, and one’s own frustration is also taken out on one’s colleagues, and all that I try consciously to influence and I don’t take part in it myself. . . here Women’s Studies has had a great impact.’ (Tuori 2003, p. 21)

As the quotations under 3.5.1-3.5.7 indicate, many of the interviewees were teachers who began to import ideas and pedagogical styles they had met in their Women’s Studies training into their education jobs. This highlighted the need for teachers at all levels to receive systematic gender training as part of their teacher training.

The changes in how Women’s Studies students carried out their work were effected predominantly through the course content of their Women’s Studies courses and through getting degrees. These included greater self-confidence, enhanced critical thinking and gender awareness as well as, importantly, a greater understanding of and ability to take action regarding equal opportunities.

The significance of these reported impacts on how women carry out their work following Women’s Studies training cannot be over-estimated. It suggests that women with such training act as change agents in their work environment, irrespective of whether or not that work environment is Women’s Studies centred. It underlines the importance of Women’s Studies as a source of empowerment for women, and as a useful tool in bringing about much needed changes in the work environment which contribute towards greater equality in that context. Further research is needed not only to assess the long-term impact of such training but also to understand employers’ perceptions of employees with such training, and of colleagues’ perceptions and experiences of working with women who have Women’s Studies training.

As Griffin and Hanmer (2003) demonstrate, Women’s Studies training impacted not only on women’s employment but also on their domestic and social lives. Respondents reported changes in relationships with parents, children, and friends. Of these the most fraught were relationships with male partners. Nearly two thirds of respondents reported the need to review and re-write the domestic contract following on from their training as they strove towards greater equality in the home, involving more sharing of domestic and care labour between heterosexual partners. Griffin and Hanmer’s report (2003) clearly shows the need for more training directed at men from an early age to transform them from consumers to producers of domestic and care labour.

The most important transformation in women’s social lives which impacted on their employment was the establishment of female friendship and mentoring networks during the Women’s Studies training at local, national and international levels (Table 22):

Table 22. Reported experience of transformation of female friendship networks through Women’s Studies training in percentages

How useful such contacts are to professional women was described by a 46-year old educator from Germany, employed in adult education: ‘Well, in my first job I could completely apply everything I learned. Because I developed a course for women. So I planned it and carried it out. And if there was an aspect I hadn't mastered myself, I could call on a good network stemming from my university years. I knew a lot of women so I could quickly invite guest speakers.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 43) And an Italian interviewee stated: ‘I work in training. All these courses [in Women’s Studies] gave me some useful ideas and more self-confidence. Through them I met Ms Laura Balbo [former Minister for Equal Opportunities] so it also worked on a relationship-building level. I ascribe my eagerness to be involved in a field like training to women’s experience and especially to the experience of the collective. This resulted in a collaboration with other fellow trainees that, in some cases, has lasted to this day. . . The last course we organized stemmed precisely from this experience. I was able to "use" the network that was created during the NOISE [Women’s Studies summer school] course.’ (Barazzetti et al 2003, p. 29)

As the two quotations indicate friendship networks could operate horizontally (among peers) and vertically (with more established figures). In the context of the latter a number of interviewees reported the importance certain professors had assumed in their lives in providing them with networking, employment and professional development opportunities. The importance of the female friendship networks that many of our interviewees developed related to the following three functions that such networks could fulfil in the work context:

Within the project the issue of the inter-relationship between Women’s Studies, women’s employment and equal opportunities occupied a special place since the project partners hypothesized that the degree of institutionalization of equal opportunities in a given country would correlate with the degree of institutionalization of Women’s Studies and with women’s employment opportunities. As will be indicated below, whilst this turned out roughly to be the case, the socio-political and economic histories of the partner countries played a major role in determining the precise relationship between the three.

The process of the institutionalisation of equal opportunities across Europe is marked by the historical context of the different European countries after World War II, their political evolution since 1945, and their trajectory since 1975, the first International Year of Women and the year of the adoption of CEDAW (the Convention to End all forms of Discrimination Against Women). Two crucial factors in each country were the establishment of a democratic government and its date of entrance into the European Union.

Formal equality has been achieved in all nine project partner countries through three ways of legislating on equal opportunities: "through the constitution, through an equality act, or as part of another set of laws and regulations" (Silius, 2002a: 505). Some countries included the principle of equality in their national constitutions, especially from the second half of the 1940s, but this did not automatically lead to the implementation of equal opportunities. In fact, the process of achieving this principle in the rest of the legislative bodies took some time. Although in many countries a few steps towards equality in legislation were taken during the 1950s and 1960s, the second wave of the feminist movement in the decade of the 1970s marked the beginning of a new period of action towards equality, in which policies affecting women began to be understood in terms of equality instead of protection (Suárez and Suárez 2003, p. 6).

In the background data reports to the project (Griffin 2002a) we distinguished between two types of relevant public policy in the field of equal opportunities:

Overall, we found that protective measures specifically for women tend to reproduce gender inequalities at all levels since the burden to even out work and domestic commitments falls to women. One French interviewee, for instance, reported: ‘My mother always believed that she couldn’t work and assume her role as mother and role model, because she really wanted to become a real "home-maker". Of course, she expected me to work, but she wanted me to become a primary school teacher, because she said that I would be able to look after my own children at the same time, to have the school holidays and all that kind of thing. I think that my mother envisaged a fairly classic kind of future for me, with a job that would enable the combination of employment and family-life, to be a good home-maker, to know how to run a home.’ (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2002, p. 21) The same expectations underpin the practice in France to enable women to take Wednesday afternoons off from work because that is the day when schools are closed in the afternoon. If equality between the sexes is truly to be achieved men need to be incentivised to take up domestic and caring roles in order to change the expectation, generally observed in and by our sample, that women alone remain responsible for creating a work-life balance.

In all European countries European legislation and directives regarding equal opportunities have been of central importance for the implementation and systematization of equal opportunities policies at national level (see for example Barazzetti, Leccardi et al 2003, pp. 7-8; Suárez and Suárez 2003, p. 5; Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2002, p. 16). Despite this, our study showed that in 2002 equal opportunities institutionalization across the nine European partner countries varied as follows (Table 23):

Table 23. Degree of institutionalisation of equal opportunities in nine European countries

Countries with high and medium degrees of institutionalization of equal opportunities tend to have posts such as Commissioners of Women’s Affairs (Spain), equality officers, ‘Frauenbeauftragte’ (Germany), ‘Rector’s Delegates for Women’ (Italy) etc. However, such equal opportunities posts do not in any country require gender expertise which one might consider to be a key requirement in any such job. It is thus not surprising that only in Germany did we find several examples of Women’s Studies students who were working in equality offices. There ‘eight of twenty interviewees [current Women’s Studies students] were employed in fields that have something to do with equality or the promotion of women.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 8) But this was the exception. Indeed, those who did work in this field saw themselves as ‘lucky exceptions’ since the numbers of women we interviewed with gender expertise who wanted to work in equal opportunities jobs were not matched by the number of those who actually did. One Finnish interviewee, for instance, said: ‘one reason for me getting this job was that I had Women’s Studies training. But it is an extreme case because it could be said that this is an organization which deals exclusively with women’s questions.’ (Suárez and Suárez 2003, p. 21)

In the UK and in the Netherlands the mainstreaming effect of equal opportunities was visible. Subsumed under ‘human resources’ within organizations where equal opportunities is just one of many briefs, equal opportunities was effectively invisibilized through the process of mainstreaming, not least because gender expertise is not part of a job requirement.

We also found that the infrastructure and maintenance of equal opportunities at the formal level is dependent on the political will of the parties which constitute the government in a given country. Typically, this means that left-wing governments are more likely to support equal opportunities policies and institutions than right-wing governments. Thus equal opportunities in Spain began to be institutionalized only after Franco’s death in 1975. In countries where there are shifts from more left-wing to more right-wing regional or national governments (as has happened in Germany for example) equality offices can be closed or disbanded as part of the change in policy which attends changes in government.

Our interviewees reported that, except in extreme cases, they found the equal opportunities legislation in their countries ineffective. One Italian interviewee, for instance, pointed to the fact that young women in Italy are still asked by employers to sign completely illegal agreements that they will not become pregnant for a certain amount of time if employed (Barrazetti, Leccardi et al 2003, pp. 19-20). Nothing is done to stop this highly discriminatory practice, and the young women in question themselves do not feel able to refuse to sign for fear of not being employed.

Indeed, nowhere in Europe is equality of opportunity fully achieved or practised to any significant degree. All our interviewees, for example, could produce narratives of unequal treatment in education, the work place and at home. At school women were typically encouraged into ‘feminine’ professions such as nursing or secretarial jobs, while boys were channelled into university education if they got good marks (Griffin 2003, p. 13); and as the French partner reported, ‘the career advice given to young women throughout the course of their secondary school education imposed even more limited horizons on their future than did their parents.’ (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2003, p.8). Overall the interviewees identified the following five inter-related stages of gender discrimination:

It is not surprising, then, that interviewees felt that equal opportunities policies are ineffective.

None of our interviewees reported ever having resorted to legal measures to fight the discrimination they experienced. Indeed, with the exception of the German and to some extent the Dutch interviewees, none of our interviewees had a very clear understanding of what their rights in terms of equal opportunities legislation were. Only one German interviewee could clearly state: ‘I know, for example, what my rights are, how I can achieve my goals, what I don’t have to put up with and what I have to accept.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 12) The rest of the interviewees neither knew what their precise rights were and what measures had been taken in their country to ensure equality of opportunity, nor had they ever used formal measures to fight against the discriminatory practices they had all encountered. In their view, ‘equal opportunities legislation … is easily ignored or circumvented’ (Griffin 2003, p. 7). This can be seen also in the delays in the implementation of equality legislation (Silius, 2002a). Thus, in all the interviews from all countries, equal opportunities measures were described as ‘cosmetic’, ‘just a piece of paper’, ‘too weak’, ‘symbolic’, ‘insufficient’, ‘only political correctness’ or, as a Spanish interviewee put it, ‘the naming of things changes but things don’t. There’s a lack of content and an excess in form’ (Suárez and Suárez 2003, p.7). The interviewees were also clear that the absence of virtually any enforcement measures served to perpetuate existent inequalities.

Our questionnaire respondents reported (Table 24) that, as one might expect, Women’s Studies training significantly impacted both on women’s reported knowledge of equal opportunities and on their reported involvement in equal opportunities:

Table 24. Reported impact of Women’s Studies training on equal opportunities understanding/involvement (in percentages)

As regards the impact of Women’s Studies training on the understanding of equal opportunities, some interviewees commented on a tension between theory and practice, viewing their training as providing a relatively abstract understanding of equal opportunities rather than a practice-based one. This raises the question of the potential role of Women’s Studies courses in universities in transmitting equal opportunities knowledge. Women’s Studies’ students’ relatively limited knowledge of equal opportunities measures that emerged in the interviews was matched by the fact that few equal opportunities workers are required to have gender expertise. Suárez and Suárez (2003) suggest therefore that both the development of careers advice which enables Women’s Studies students to enter equal opportunities professions is necessary and that Women’s Studies at the same time should become both more involved in equal opportunities training and in informing students about where equal opportunities knowledge and updates can be obtained outside the universities.

Regarding women’s reported greater involvement in equal opportunities following their Women’s Studies training, the interviews suggest several interpretations of the data since it is clear that the response does not relate to the numbers of equal opportunities-specific jobs that our interviewees held. However, as discussed above (see section 3.5 of this report), one of our findings was that women reported significant changes in how they carried out their work, refusing to put up with sexism, helping other women fight discrimination in the workplace etc., and it is mainly to this that we think the questionnaire responses refer. This would also explain the differences between the countries regarding the reported change in understanding of equal opportunities and the greater involvement in equal opportunities. For instance whilst German respondents reported a significantly raised understanding of equal opportunities (86% and 81% respectively for past and current students), they showed a significant but proportionately much smaller change in involvement in equal opportunities (66% and 58% respectively for past and current students). Since a significant proportion of German interviewees were in fact working in equal opportunities or equal opportunities-related jobs both prior and during as well as after their studies, one would expect a proportion of them not to ‘need’ to get more involved in equal opportunities. In the Italian case the scenario is different. Here the understanding of equal opportunities changed significantly (54% and 62% respectively), but the reported involvement in equal opportunities became much higher (81% and 85% respectively). Given the narratives of extensive discrimination provided by the Italian interviewees (Barazzetti et al 2003), it is not surprising that their changed understanding led to much greater resistance to discrimination in the workplace and beyond.

The Bologna Declaration of 1999 recognized that student mobility for a ‘Europe of Knowledge’ is

However, historically, women have not participated to the fullest in migration for educational purposes (Juhász et al 2003, pp. 3-4). This section of the report deals with information about the educational mobility of Women’s Studies students who participated in our project, their reasons for migrating or failing to do so, and the impact of their experiences abroad on their employment.

In every participating country Women’s Studies students studied abroad or intended to do so (see Table 25). The number of women studying abroad differed across countries. For present students, Germany and the Netherlands had the highest proportion of travelling students, and for past students the numbers for Germany and Italy were the highest. Looking at both current and past students, Germany had the highest percentage of students studying abroad (43%) and Slovenia the lowest (7%).

In all but two countries (Spain and Italy), current students studied abroad (or planned to do so) more often than past students. Because the figure for current students includes plans to study abroad, it may be higher than the actual level of educational mobility ultimately achieved. However, the fact that many present students plan to study abroad is interesting in itself, not least because there is an overall increase in the actual and planned mobility from past to present students. A possible explanation for this is that more exchange programmes/opportunities have been established. For instance in Finland, the possibilities for educational migration grew significantly in 1995 when Finland joined the EU and became part of the ERASMUS/Socrates agreements. The lower, and actually decreasing numbers for Spain may be explained by the fact that although the vast majority of students have not been abroad to do Women’s Studies courses, a much higher percentage of these Women’s Studies students have taken part in ERASMUS programmes in other disciplines (Suárez and Suárez 2003, p. 34).

Table 25. Proportion of questionnaire respondents who studied abroad

Similar to the general typology of migration, we can distinguish between ‘receiving’ countries and ‘sending’ countries. France and the UK belong to the first category, receiving a higher percentage of educational migrants than sending out. Language skills play an important part in the considerations that precede a decision to go abroad. Consequently countries where language skills are fostered send out more students (the Netherlands, Finland). If Women’s Studies is thoroughly institutionalised in a country, it successfully attracts Women’s Studies students who purposefully seek out the courses they need. These ‘core countries’ are the USA, UK, Netherlands, and Finland where language and flexibility are key factors for educational migration. English language courses offered by Dutch and Finnish universities, often in combination with summer schools, intensive PhD-s or individual tutoring for any period of time offer foreign students ample options to choose from.

The countries where Women’s Studies students went to take courses in their field were mainly located in Western Europe (as in the political West). All countries participating in this project received students and in the questionnaires, other European countries (Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Greece, Norway, Austria, and Belgium) were mentioned though destinations outside Europe (the USA and Canada) were most popular. Apart from these, educational trips were made to Peru, Brazil, Indonesia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, India, and the Dominican Republic (each country mentioned once). Some students had also studied abroad in more than one country. Additional information from the interviews and quantitative summary reports show that some women took Women’s Studies courses, did a work placement or research in countries such as the Czech Republic (Bahovec et al 2003, p. 45), Egypt, Cyprus, Wales (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 58), and Thailand and Suriname (van der Sanden 2003, p. 28). For all but a few students going abroad meant studying in other European countries. The exception was the UK where students were at least as likely to go to non-European countries, predominantly the USA.

When we look at the countries where past and present students travel most to take courses (see Table 26), one can distinguish between the countries in this project and other countries. Within the project the Netherlands and the UK, followed by Spain, Germany and France were the leading countries hosting foreign students. The East European countries (as in political East) Slovenia and Hungary received the least students. Countries outside the project that attracted many students were the USA and Canada, followed by Ireland. It may be possible to explain the popularity of a country as a goal for educational migration by the institutionalisation of Women’s Studies programs. The countries with a high degree of institutionalisation of Women’s Studies training include Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK (Silius 2002a), and are all countries that receive many Women’s Studies students. However, other factors play a role as well.

Table 26. Patterns of educational migration of Women’s Studies students

In Table 26, detailing patterns of educational migration by country, students seem to be studying abroad in what seems to be their own country in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the UK. These are students from another country so they are actually in a foreign country. This is the case for a Polish student in Germany and for students visiting the Netherlands from Poland, Switzerland, and Belgium. In the UK case, the higher number of current interviewees that had come to Britain to study (in comparison to past interviewees) was in part a function of the specific sample since many of the past interviewees were not only mature students (and therefore less likely to migrate) but also came from a college of higher education with no history - at that stage - of student exchanges abroad. If one had interviewed more past students from other institutions, it might have been the case that among past students there would have been a higher proportion of students who had gone to study abroad (Griffin 2003, p. 51).

Language played an important role in the choice of a country. The UK students mainly studied abroad in Anglophone countries (i.e. the USA) rather than in a country that was not Anglophone. Countries with a widely spoken language like the UK and USA were obviously attractive. However, countries where courses are taught in English also attracted students. Women’s Studies courses in the Netherlands and Finland are to a large extent available in English (van der Sanden and Waaldijk 2002, p. 144; Tuori and Silius 2002, p. 95). For the Dutch case this was reflected in the project data, but the Women’s Studies students in our sample seemed not yet to have discovered Finland as a host country. Over the past few years, however, Finland has attracted an increasing number of students thanks to courses offered in English (Commission of the European Communities 2000). Looking at OECD-countries, countries whose language of instruction is French and German also dominate in hosting foreign students (OECD 2002a).

Although many women travel to English-speaking countries, another language may also function as an enticement. Language skills are in some cases essential to acquiring knowledge about Gender Studies. For instance, before 1990, very few feminist writings were translated into Hungarian, so in Hungary knowledge of other languages was essential for gaining access to feminist thought (Gaszi et al. 2002, p. 366). Many students go to countries where languages other than English are spoken, such as Denmark, Greece, Italy and Portugal and hope to learn the language. Language skills can be a requirement and an impediment for studying abroad, but learning a language or improving one’s language skills can also be a motivation for going abroad. This tendency has been supported by grants for language students. In the Hungarian case, students went abroad because they received a grant to study English, Dutch or Swedish (Juhász 2002, p. 24).

Data from the EU-sponsored ERASMUS Program in the partner countries overall show that in most of the nine project partner countries there is more outward mobility than inward mobility. The UK and the Netherlands and to a lesser extent France are the only countries that have more educational immigration than emigration through ERASMUS (in absolute numbers). For the UK this means that there are only a few mobile students. For the UK and the Netherlands these data resemble the project data that indicate that those countries do attract many Women’s Studies students.

Table 27. General student mobility through the ERASMUS program in Europe

The OECD data (2002a) on student mobility show that of the project partner countries, the UK, the Netherlands, and France are net importers of foreign students (see Table 27). Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Spain are net exporters (OECD 2002a). (There are no data for Slovenia.)

The UK has a long history of far fewer students migrating abroad than coming into the country. The high number of educational immigrants, especially from former Commonwealth countries rather than from Europe, must be viewed in the light of the financial situation of British universities as well as the country’s history. The UK universities’ under-funding, combined with the country’s history as a colonial empire, mean that on the one hand so-called ‘overseas’ as opposed to European students are considered particularly desirable since they generate significantly more income than either home or EU students. On the other hand, as a legacy of its empire, Britain attracts overseas students because many of them are brought up in education systems not dissimilar to that of the UK and because they are likely to speak English. The three current students who had travelled to the UK to study Women’s Studies were non-EU students; in the interview sample women from Taiwan, Indonesia and Madagascar were represented.

The attraction of the UK as a host country is also partly a function of the fact that English has increasingly become the lingua franca of the globalised world. The discrepancy in the numbers of students entering the UK compared to those going abroad is so large that some British universities will no longer allow ERASMUS student exchanges if tutors cannot guarantee an equal exchange of numbers coming in and going out. In late 2002, the Higher Education Council of England (HEFCE) put out a tender to investigate the implications of this lack of mobility among students from Britain. The low number of UK citizens migrating to study elsewhere is due both to the lack of knowledge of other languages and to financial considerations among students (Griffin 2003).

In France there is in general as much outgoing as incoming migration, and French Women’s Studies students seem to be more mobile than other French students. Regarding inward mobility, the French project questionnaire responses (compared with the OECD data) seem to suggest that Women’s Studies in France attracts fewer foreign students than other disciplines (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2002, p. 68). This may support the tentative conclusion that institutionalisation of Women’s Studies programs plays a role in attracting incoming exchange students. In France, students from the North and West African countries, the countries that constituted most of the foreign students in France until the mid-1990s, are less likely to apply to Women’s Studies courses than to other disciplines. Educational migration policy is one of the factors in this. Each year, at least two African students are admitted to the DESS postgraduate course in ‘Gender and Social Policy’ at Toulouse-Le Mirail University (Le Feuvre and Andriocci 2002, pp. 70-1).

Women received information about possibilities of educational migration in different ways. Women’s/Gender Studies networks (eg NOISE; WINGS) and exchange programmes between universities through ERASMUS stimulate student mobility.

Some institutions are much more active regarding student exchanges than others. Where institutions are well networked and project the expectation that students will study abroad, it is much more likely that students will do so than if the institution is not supportive, does not advertise schemes well, and has little expectation of student mobility. In several cases, personal recommendations from teachers played a role. In Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the UK, individual professors clearly promoted study abroad.

Information of the overall participation of students in ERASMUS programmes shows equality between the sexes. Of all ERASMUS participants, 59% are female. This corresponds to the fact that women are the majority of students in Higher Education (EC 2000).

Table 28. Outgoing ERASMUS students by gender

However, when all foreign students are taken into account in any particular country (not only ERASMUS students), men represent a larger part of foreign students in the OECD-countries: 52,2 % of foreign students are male. As Table 28 shows, in the project partner countries, male overrepresentation is the case in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. There are no data on France and Slovenia (OECD 2002a).

Table 29. Foreign enrolment by gender

Opportunities for student mobility are very important for women. After their studies, especially when women have families and care responsibilities, it is more difficult for them to travel abroad. Indications that more men than women participate in staff mobility also suggest a decrease in mobility of women after their studies. In a recent study, data indicated that in the UK over 73% of those who took part in teacher mobility in 2000-2001 were men, and in Hungary more men than women appear to participate in outgoing staff mobility (Pirrie et al. 2002).

The experiences of past mobile students reported in our project cover the period from 1980 through 2002. Present students reported studying abroad from 1990 onwards. The length of their stays varied widely, ranging from one-day seminars to 6 years. Of the different kinds of Women’s Studies courses abroad that Women’s Studies students participated in (see Table 29), the option most frequently taken was staying a semester or an entire year abroad (N = 137). 47 students reported attending a Summer School, and only few women (N = 17) reported having decided to take a whole course or program abroad. The average length of all (not only Women’s Studies) ERASMUS student mobility is just under seven months (Commission of the European Communities 2000). Finally, 31 women told us they went abroad for purposes that were related to education, but not specifically to any course participation in the narrow sense. Other purposes included conducting research and performing fieldwork and/or internships.

Table 30. Type of course taken abroad

The existence or lack of a similar degree in the home country is always a problem for accreditation. Since Women’s Studies is a relatively new discipline, where its institutionalisation has not yet reached the level of a separate degree, students, unless they are willing to lose a year, have to take up a semester in a department which has its home equivalent, like sociology, literature etc. The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) has contributed to solving this problem, but as the results of our research show there still remains a lot to be done.

Women studying abroad do gain certain qualifications. Data from the questionnaires show that some women, though not all, received credits, certificates, diplomas, or degrees for their study time abroad. Sometimes these women knew that the credits earned would also count at their home university (ECTS credits), though more often there was no information on this in the questionnaire responses, suggesting that the respondents themselves might be unsure, a possibility that is borne out by informal information from the project partners. Certificates in some cases were certificates of attendance. The degrees that women gained varied from BA to MA and Ph.D. The qualitative data reports of the partner countries suggest that only a few current and past students earned degrees. In most cases, it was not clear whether students’ achievements were recognised by their own universities or not.

The narratives of the overseas students studying in the UK showed that degrees from the UK were held in high regard in their home countries and were indeed often essential to achieve high status positions (Griffin 2003, p. 46). Some overseas students needed the qualification to get promotion in their work either as academics or as a social worker in their home country, and they came to the UK with the intention to get a degree there. A PhD from Britain was viewed as a symbol of ability and authority, bestowing professional status on the degree holder: ‘If you got a PhD people will trust you, what you have done and what you say.’ (Griffin 2003, p. 46)

Although one would want recognition of credits earned abroad in the home country, a stay abroad could also be positive even if that was not the case. A German interviewee who was not sure whether any credits would actually be recognised at her home university said: ‘I’ve come to see that year abroad as a true watershed, in every way. Regarding my studies, ... it gave me a kind of freedom because it wasn’t at all clear if anything I did during that time would count.’ (Schmidbaur et al 2003, p. 58)

The European schemes such as earlier TEMPUS, then ERASMUS and SOCRATES are important sources of funding for studying abroad. Some regional funding possibilities play important roles in the respective regions, such as NORDPLUS in Scandinavia and Soros networks (OSI, CEU, CEP) in East-Central Europe. The thematic Women’s Studies networks NOISE and ATHENA also promote educational migration as do national organisations such as the German DAAD, and other national scholarship schemes. Sporadically, especially mature students with a definite goal, find that private foundations offer grants to carry out research abroad. But overall, public funding of student mobility remains low and difficult for students to access.

As Table 31 shows, self-funding played a major role in study abroad among the project’s questionnaire respondents; in Spain, France, Germany, the UK and Italy fifty percent or more of past or present students were self-financing:

Table 31. Women’s Studies’ students’ funding sources for educational mobility in percentages