Christopher Moore
Women historians win fewer awards than their male counterparts — but why?
Why do women trail men when it comes to winning awards for academic history writing in Canada?
The group of women historians attending the 2014 prize-giving of the Canadian Historical Association all noticed the same thing. “We all kind of looked at each other,” said Elise Chénier, who teaches oral history, sexuality, and modern Canadian history at Simon Fraser University. “Are we just noticing this — or is this year a fluke?” she said to Lori Chambers of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who has written substantial histories of adoption law, women’s property law, and regarding other matters.
What had they noticed? That it seemed men were winning all the big prizes.
Chénier and Chambers came away determined to study how gender influences not only prizes but all the work historians do. “We assemble and analyze data on our historical research subjects, but not so often on ourselves,” said Chénier. With Anne Toews, a Toronto graduate student, they launched a study of “Sex Distribution in Publications and Prizes” in Canadian history. The data they compiled proved to be powerful stuff.
After all these years of equity hiring efforts, only about thirty-seven percent of full-time academic staff in Canadian university history departments are women.
In recent years, women wrote or edited just twenty-eight percent of scholarly history books in Canada. Men produced sixty-three per cent. Only about eight percent were collaborations between women and men.
“Faculty committees seek or require gender equity, adding to the work burden of the smaller number of women,” reports Chénier. And women typically carry a larger responsibility for household and childrearing work than their male colleagues. Chénier, Chambers, and Toews speculate that these burdens explain why women are more strongly represented in the writing of articles than books. The latter demand more time and concentration and require freedom to travel for extensive research.
Men also wrote about two-thirds of the scholarly book reviews in Canada, mostly about books written by other men. The only field where women dominated as authors and as reviewers was work with a gender or feminist analysis — since relatively few men write or review books on gender topics. The data create a troubling image of historians, still mostly male, still mostly reading and writing about the work of other male historians.
And that impression from the award ceremony? Confirmed. Women exist in something of a prize ghetto, they found. The women who write gender history have a fair chance at winning prizes for that field.
But for the many women historians who research and write about other historical topics, prizes are harder to come by. Male historians’ books do win most of those prizes, along with the influence and reputation that goes with them. But maybe that simply proves that men write the best histories? Chénier, Chambers, and Toews suspect it has more to do with “the social construction of academic excellence.”
“Every jury is unique. People bring their own perspectives,” said Chénier. But if the male majority mostly reads, and reviews, and teaches each other’s work, “the danger is in the tendency to treat the topic of broad interest as the one that treats the ‘neutral’ subject, which is the white male subject.
“We do have great respect for Canadian historians,” Chénier continued. “These are our colleagues, these are people we know, and they really are enlightened, sensitive, aware, and widely interested.” But, she says, works about women, immigrants, and people of colour are seen as specialty fields. “The history of the white male is not seen as specialized in the same way.” That subject is treated as wider, broader, more important — and more prize-worthy.
Most of us are not university teachers. But prizes and reputations shape what we all read. If we only hear about some of the best historians, we all lose.