Quality assurance and women in higher education

This paper examines a range of positive and negative consequences for women of Quality Assurance (QA) initiatives in one Australian university. Drawing on Foucault‘s concepts of ’governmentality‘ and ’power/knowledge‘, it is argued that the popular ’repressive hypothesis‘ of power via governmentality hides a positive and potentially productive dimension of power. Following recent work by feminist political theorists, my claim here is that a corporatist managerial discourse such as QA can be used strategically for a politics of transformation in the interests of women. The paper begins with an outline of the parameters of debate about and critiques of the QA agenda in the Australian higher education sector, and highlights some potentially negative consequences for women in terms of their structural location in the university. An overview of QA audit processes then leads into a closer examination of one university‘s response to QA initiatives. The culture and management style of this regional university was significantly transformed from an informal and pastoral model to one with open systems of accountability and performance targets built around equity issues. In that regard, it is argued, equity target groups including women, became the visible focus of the development and implementation of new systems designed to bring equity into the mainstream. In closing, I argue that in this particular university, the new managerialism of QA was indeed a panoptic mechanism of ’making visible‘: productivity, equity groups, procedures and outcomes. But in an institutional context where open systems were lacking and women‘s contributions invisible and undervalued, the QA agenda brought new opportunities not only for women but for other groups previously marginalised and silenced.