How Gender Budgeting Promotes Equity

• Standard financial and managerial systems are not objective and can create inequities between genders.
• Birmingham Business School embraced gender budgeting to discover why it had been so challenging to achieve equity at the school.
• In less equitable situations, men are allowed more time for highly valued teaching activities, while women spend more time on less-valued administrative tasks.

 
Does the term “gender budgeting” put you off reading this article? If it does, it’s probably because of the second word—most faculty find budgeting a painful experience when they’re preparing research funding proposals and program reports. We want to persuade you that, by contrast, gender budgeting is easy to do, offers extraordinary insights, and is likely to make working life better for everyone.

Financial and managerial systems often create gendered inequalities in public policy structures and places of work, including higher education. Gender budgeting is a strategic way to make these inequalities more visible, and then fix them. It recognizes that financial and quantified calculations are not objective or gender-neutral; rather, they are micropolitical managerial processes that have gendered implications and consequences. Gender budgeting aims to change those processes to ensure that they protect gender equality.

A group leading the way on gender budgeting is the EU-funded ACT GenBUDGET community of practice, which develops strategies that challenge gender biases in decision making in higher education. It is headed by one of the authors of this article, Finnborg Salome Steinþórsdóttir, who works in gender studies at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. The other two authors, Fiona Carmichael and Scott Taylor, teach at Birmingham Business School, a large “full-service” business school in the U.K. that is an enthusiastic member of Finnborg’s community.

Birmingham Business School faces challenges with gender equality—as most business schools do. This became clear during an unsuccessful application for the British Athena SWAN quality charter mark, which recognizes good practice in advancement of gender equality. One reason the school was unsuccessful was that it didn’t demonstrate enough action in making equality happen. While most faculty supported gender equality, many felt they lacked both the tools to make it happen and the power to change practice.

A collaboration between ACT GenBudget and Birmingham Business School was designed to resolve this unhappy situation—or at least figure out why gender inequality was so “sticky” as a challenge for the school. We described some of our efforts in our submission to AACSB’s 2022 Innovations That Inspire challenge. Here we offer more detail so other schools can consider gender budgeting, too.

What Did We Do?

We approached this problem as two-sided, involving practice as well as research. We designed a small-scale qualitative and quantitative data collection process focused on equity in workload allocations. We had a useful point of reference because the allocation system had recently changed. For more than a decade, the business school had been operating its own workload allocation system. Then, as part of a wider initiative, senior university leaders designed and implemented a new system in 2019. While built on previous frameworks, the new system was more detailed and involved changes to how different work was valued.

The format also changed from a simple model based on hours to a more detailed framework based on points. Workloads remained broken down into broad categories: research, teaching and assessment, supervision, and management or administration roles. As previous researchers have noted, points-based workload modeling is complex and often reduces transparency, even though its proponents claim it gives a greater sense of accuracy.

While most faculty supported gender equality, many felt they lacked both the tools to make it happen and the power to change practice.

We gathered records of workload allocations for the academic years 2018–19 (under the old system) and 2019–20 (under the new system). Data were aggregated and anonymized, analyzed by gender, contract type, target workload, and actual workload under both models. This provided analysis of workload assignments for 214 academic colleagues, including 138 men and 76 women.

Within this group, 85 men and 57 women worked full-time and therefore had 100 percent workload targets. (Actual workloads can vary from target depending on the tasks assigned.) The rest worked part-time, on fractional contracts, or as probationers, and they all had target workloads that were less than 100 percent. From this data, we could produce detailed descriptive statistics that showed the gender distribution of workload assignments, workload as a proportion of the full-target workload (that is, 100 percent of the target), and workload activities.

We gathered even more information in semi-structured qualitative interviews with key staff members involved in the design and implementation of the new workload allocation model. These included senior leaders and heads of academic units. Finally, we ran a short series of focus groups designed to involve specific colleague groups, such as women and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) faculty.

What Did We Learn?

We analyzed the data in the context of staff surveys related to gender equity specifically and diversity generally, and we came to three conclusions. This is where it gets detailed, but stick with us!

First, we quickly realized that the numbers were interesting. During 2018 and 2019, men were overrepresented proportionally and demographically in most academic positions and at most levels of the hierarchy. In particular, men dominated at the full professor level, accounting for 66 percent of the total.

Second, we found something surprising. Under the new workload system, women were assigned higher workloads than men. This was the reverse of the old system, where women were assigned lower workloads than men, except for the women who were on research and teaching contracts. Under the new system, women’s workloads increased more than 4 percent, while the equivalent figures for men remained almost constant.

Third, we found that the new workload system reflects the time requirements and hidden work associated with the roles often held by women. Neither system showed significant gender difference in the time allocated to research, which is often the key differentiator for individuals seeking to progress and be promoted. However, there was noticeably more gender variation in the time allocated for activities related to teaching and administrative duties. Among academics on teaching and research contracts, men were allocated more time for teaching and assessment activities, while women spent more time on management and administration.

The new workload system reflects the time requirements and hidden work associated with the roles often held by women.

Under the new system at Birmingham Business School, administrative tasks receive higher weighting than under the old system (and teaching receives “relatively” lower weighting). We think the higher weighting attached to administrative tasks better reflects the time requirements and hidden work associated with this kind of work, which is often undertaken by women. In fact, in responding to staff surveys about workloads, women were significantly more likely than men to say that they need to work longer hours and that they are expected to do more work.

What Was Disappointing?

The majority of staff, regardless of gender, agreed that the workload allocation was relatively fair and transparent. However, we believe the workload allocation framework fell short in one critical regard. Despite the designers’ public statements about using it to create transparency and equity, the framework has been used primarily as a management tool, rather than more specifically as a means of promoting equality of opportunity or outcome. We believe the school leaders have missed a major opportunity to show how they have changed workload allocations to produce progressive outcomes—but we’re now working on this!

If the framework isn’t gender budgeted, long-term inequities could be created by the fact that men are given more time to conduct teaching-related activities, while women spend more time on management and administration. Many of these activities are less valued, more time-consuming, and involve more hidden work—in short, they are what feminists term “academic housework.” Taking on these activities is well-known to have implications for women’s career progression and status.

We also still face challenges in inequitable distribution of responsibilities. Individuals with heavy or unbalanced workloads often have less time for activities that are important for career progression, such as publishing research or developing pedagogical profiles beyond the institution. When their choice is to do these activities outside of “normal” working hours or accept limited career progress, many faculty choose life rather than work.

That’s particularly true for women. Because women continue to do most of the unpaid family care, they often don’t even have the option of choosing to take on additional activities outside of the normal working hours. A group of women colleagues really brought this point home to us, in a somewhat weary way, during one of our focus group discussions. In particular, they talked at length about the gendered dynamics of childcare responsibilities.

Why Is Change Still So Difficult?

While gender budgeting has been formally implemented by governments and organizations around the world, it has not generated as much change as anticipated. The same can be said about previous equity and inclusion initiatives adopted by higher education. Why?

Such initiatives are effective only if they change established processes and outcomes in a way that promotes equity. However, the decisions to make such changes often are political and can be met with resistance by those who benefit from the status quo.

More than half a century of research demonstrates how women and BIPOC colleagues have been discriminated against, and how this discrimination has led to differentiated career outcomes.

Those who resist primarily are (white) men, who fall into two main categories. First are those in the “I didn’t know about this” group. While this response may seem reasonable at first, it provokes the obvious question in return: Why didn’t you know? More than half a century of excellent research demonstrates how and why women and BIPOC colleagues have been discriminated against, either purposefully or unconsciously, and how this discrimination has led to substantially differentiated career outcomes and material rewards. That leads us to believe that there’s a second cohort, the “I prefer not to know” group. Both should be better informed, and gender budgeting is one way to achieve that.

Our hope is that our work can help overcome the lack of knowledge exhibited by both groups. In support of this goal, the ACT GenBUDGET community of practice actively promotes gender budgeting as part of a wider strategy to increase the visibility and lower the legitimacy of inequalities created by current practices. When institutions make gender inequities known, they create the necessary conditions to enable organizational transformation.

What Lies in the Future?

The three of us have spent a lot of time—recognized in workload calculations!—raising awareness of gender inequity. We’ve done this partly by researching it at Birmingham Business School, partly by talking about it in formal committees, and partly through publicizing our work.

We now know that it’s possible for members of one small group to make gender budgeting happen, but they can’t implement it solely through their own efforts. They can generate knowledge and raise concerns about inequities, particularly in relation to unwelcome outcomes such as lowered morale and raised staff turnover. But in the end, the decisions required to change gender inequities must go through a complex political process.

Decades of social science research show that leaders can be defensive at best when asked to support gender equity initiatives that challenge established custom and practice. But, in fact, all colleagues can be reluctant to implement changes, especially if these changes present the probability of new work. So, perhaps ironically, when teams try to address issues of workload equity, one of the major barriers they’ll face is … workload.

However, we hope we’ve shown that gender budgeting doesn’t require a degree in economics, complex calculations, or immediate radical change. It is quantitatively straightforward, easy to implement, and can progress in careful and incremental stages.

Gender budgeting also can produce considerable good for all, making workload allocations more transparent and proving that the institution takes equity seriously. Because gender budgeting offers all those advantages, we have an important question for academic leaders: Why not try it to see how it can improve the workplace for everyone? Then, once leaders have used this model to address gender inequity, they can address other well-known factors of inequity, including race, age, and disability. Because as we well know, inequity is intersectional—gender is just the beginning.