Leaving academia after 20 years

Just before I left academia in 2020 - after 20 years of service to the sector - I launched my website ‘Promoting women in academia’. It was a reaction to being denied promotion to Associate Professor. It took me a year to prepare that application, between caring for children and hundreds of students, while knowing that two years worth of labour had gone unpaid because the workload and expectations for performance were that unreasonable.

I arrived at that university having completed my PhD 7 years prior, plus a postdoctoral fellowship, and had 10 years of full-time experience in research and teaching. Yet, they offered me a Level A contract - the lowest possible - saying that even though they knew I was overqualified they couldn’t do better because that’s what the position was advertised at. Being naive, fearful of authority, having no mentors to advise me that that’s just how big businesses work and you need to speak up for yourself, and quickly moving cities to get married to a lovely person with three children - I took that contract without question.

A year later, I tried to change my contract. HR would take months to reply to each of my emails. I then went on maternity leave. In the end, it was nearly 2 years before they finally met me in person. My Head of School was there as a witness. A week later when the paperwork came through, the new contract was at a lower level than what we had discussed and agreed to. Shocked that they would go back on their word, and exhausted with a newborn and as a mother of four, I did not have it in me to continue picking that battle.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m keen as beans to put in a prestigious ARC Future Fellowship application and catch up a lot of lost time. I’ve published like crazy to keep my track record up as best I can, and it was clearly amazing for a part-timer, but no matter which research centre leader I went to my track record was deemed too low. I finally went to a different university, and while my application was not successful it was the support I received there that was the lasting legacy of that experience: somebody thought I was worthy.

Having invested so much intellectual and emotional labour in preparing an application for a project about a group of people who rarely receive compassion and care, and which took me a year to write, I decided to at least complete ‘Stage 1’ of that proposal. I applied for sabbatical to give me time to do this work, but my one and only application in 20 years was denied (even though others I knew had had multiple sabbaticals). They said the proposal was underdeveloped, but that if I reapplied the following year in a non-teaching trimester I would be successful. (Bullshit barometer now rapidly rising). I did the work anyway because it was the right thing to do by the people that project was designed for. In my mind, the effort would be squared with a promotion to a more commensurate title. My application for promotion was a no-brainer, filled with description of the work I had done and testimonials of its quality, so it was a kick in the guts when it was denied. One gatekeeper said, “I can’t see what you’ve done since last promotion”, and the other (who also denied my sabbatical) said “It’s good to be bold, but don’t you think you’re being too bold?” (Both of them women).

Racism and sexism are insidious, and their effects so drastic that middle-aged women are now the fastest growing group at risk of homelessness. Living in poverty for a decade as I tried to feed many mouths on a part-time wage and maintain an exceptional standard of work that was never going to be recognised, while gaslit with the lie that is meritocracy, led me to create a service in which I would provide an independent review of women’s applications for promotion. No university took it up. Two years later, I shut up shop. So that the (cou)rage to speak up did not go to waste, I archived some of that content. You can access it here.

Academia is an industry (yes, industry) where if you play your cards right - and they have less to do with good hard work than it is willing to admit - you can be on a $250K+ salary within 7 years of getting your PhD. Others like me can go backwards from a starting salary of $80K gross (1.0 FTE) to $60K gross (0.5 FTE) 20 years later - predictable additive penalties for being a woman, brown, and with children. Laundry, shopping, cooking, and cleaning for 6 was my daily reality, and why networking and visibility were things I clutched at. This unfairness was so great that after it worked in stealth for two decades, it finally accumulated to a correct ‘diagnosis’: moral injury.

My moral injury birthed something even more magical than my original PWIA website - Scholar Freedom: the world’s first independent self-publishing platform where researchers can set their own prices and get paid by their readers if they choose this. You see, part of why all the gatekeepers could not see what I had done was because of the 65 rejections of 13 research manuscripts by journal editors and reviewers within the last 2 years of my 20-year academic career - ironically, when I am most experienced and knowledgeable. This meant I was unable to attract prestigious external funding, which is all universities want. If I had had that, I would have been promoted.

I made a submission to Australia’s national Senate Inquiry on wage theft in 2021, and took my case to the federal Fair Work Ombudsman in 2022. None of it worked - a brutal reminder of how powerless most people are in these systems that are supposedly set up to protect them and restore justice. If I had stolen more than $100K from my university, I might be in jail. Calling out wage theft in universities is like calling the sky blue - truth in plain sight that everyone knows. Yet, the burden of proof fell on the victim who still lost in the face of time-stamped evidence of daily hours worked collected over 7 years that proved 2 years worth of labour had gone unpaid (most of it from teaching). Power does not cede itself, and trying to change systems and policies that governments implement at will (such as neoliberalism) is like throwing rocks at a rocket.

I’m battered and bruised from a long-sustained workplace trauma where I learned that working hard is a really stupid thing to do because it has little power against the power of gender and skin colour. In Australia, 67% of Professors are white men, 23% are white women, and 2% are women of colour - these are not the statistics at graduation. It has been a psychological and financial violence for me working in neoliberal academia, but I still smile with joy everyday about the life I have lived, am grateful for the gorgeous caring husband who has listened to me every day while sharing the domestic load, and bearing witness to thriving children who prove that nothing was in vain - all with a kick-arse mission to change academic publishing forever by allowing researchers to claim back their voice and money because too many big institutions are benefitting from taking these from workers.

While I’ve left the building, I do have a head full of information that you can still benefit from! A summary of the services and resources I offer are listed on the Home page. Your email is welcome at any time.