The father's house of traditional doctoral supervision (also called ‘advising’) was ‘designed’ by men for men. That is its history. But is it now under siege? The social architecture of this house has been, and still is, ‘composed of interactions, emotional relationships, routines, everyday comings and goings, where gender also marks its rhythms’ (Arfuch 2020: 9): as the gender of the house's occupants has changed so too has its architecture. For the past few decades, and alongside the many changes to supervision driven by ascendant managerialism (Green and Usher 2003), academic women as supervisors (advisors) and student practitioners and critical scholars of doctoral education have sought to transform the father's house into something more habitable for them and their students (as, more recently, have Indigenous and other scholars of colour – see, for example, Kidman 2007; Qi et al. 2021; Trudgett 2014).
In the first part of this article, I offer a brief history of the modern PhD to show the gendered origins of supervision as a cultural practice originating in the West in which the supervisor, and indeed the academic self more generally, is a ‘normatively masculine position’ (Frow 1988: 319). Here too, I describe the arrival of women into the academy and into the sphere of doctoral education. In the article's second and longer part, I review the relatively small published (anglophone) literature about women as doctoral supervisors1 with two questions in mind. The first asks what women are doing to doctoral supervision; the second asks if the woman supervisor is really ‘just a man’. In closing, I explore some complexities entailed in the feminist project to renovate the father's house of supervision, the resilience of that traditional architecture, as well as some transformations that have undoubtedly taken place.
A caveat before I begin: in the ensuing short history of the modern PhD in relation to women as supervisors, I provide various brief data from different systems to illustrate general trends in Western higher education. Some more detailed data come from Aotearoa New Zealand, as this is my own location, but trends there are similar to trends elsewhere in the West.
The modern PhD
The father's house of doctoral supervision was built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the fitful arrival across the West of the modern PhD. William Clark (2006: 202) suggests that ‘the modern doctoral candidate’ was constructed by the 1810 statutes of the Prussian University of Berlin. These statutes required, for the first time, the candidate to produce their own masterpiece, the dissertation, and stipulated that, ‘on the basis of this writing, his own composition, . . . [the candidate] will be publicly examined to the satisfaction of his teacher’ (2006: 210). At this time, the doctoral candidate and his professor would be presumed male. Their predecessors in the medieval period, during which ‘higher doctorates’ in theology, jurisprudence and medicine were awarded, had to be ‘of legitimate birth, without infamy, Christian, male, the proper age, and have all the antecedent degrees’ (2006: 197). In the medieval mind, women (and others such as ‘Jews’, ‘deaf-mutes’, ‘illegitimates’ and ‘children’) were mostly seen as ineligible for the award of advanced degrees (2006: 199–200), although exceptions were sometimes made. There is evidence, for example, of singular women being awarded higher degrees from the seventeenth century onwards. For example, Elena Piscopia was awarded a doctorate by the University of Padua in 1678, Laura Bassi by the University of Bologna in 1732 and Dorothea Schlözer by Göttingen in 1787 (2006: 200).
The spread of the modern PhD (also called the Dphil or DrPhil) – the ‘generic name for [lower] doctorates in arts and sciences’ (Clark 2006: 183) – beyond the German lands was uneven. In large part, it was inspired by a spirit of competition: increasing numbers of American and British students were acquiring German PhDs. The United States wanted to stop its students going off to Germany, and, in turn, Britain wanted to stop its students going to the United States and Germany. So, in the second half of the nineteenth century American universities began awarding the degree: Yale, the first, in 1861, followed soon after by Harvard and the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania (Simpson 1983: 18). By the end of the nineteenth century, gaining a ‘permanent appointment at nearly every prominent [US] institution’ depended on having a PhD (Veysey 1965: 176). Britain was more reluctant to take up the new ‘lower doctorate’ because, according to Clark (2006), unlike in Europe, the master's degree had maintained its prestige, so the need seemed less pressing. Once established at Oxford in 1917, however, the PhD spread quickly: within three years, it was offered by ‘almost all departments of all British universities and with practically identical regulations’ (Simpson 1983: 1). By 1925, 774 PhDs had been awarded in Britain, a number that doubled in the following five years (Simpson 1983: 160). In contrast, the PhD did not arrive until the 1940s in the British colonies of Australia and New Zealand, despite the fact that they had founded universities well before the end of the 1800s.
A new practice: Supervising doctoral candidates
The general recognition of the doctor of philosophy . . . roughly paralleled the transfer in authorship of the graduation dissertation from the presiding professor, soon a doctoral advisor, to the graduate student, then a doctoral candidate, by around 1800. (Clark 2006: 238; italics added)
A major shift in the modern PhD was that the student now wrote the dissertation rather than disputing one written by their professor. The writing required guidance. Yet, other than Clark's passing reference above to the professor being made over into a ‘doctoral advisor’, what is not written about in the historical accounts of the PhD is the practice of supervision. As the professor was made over, so was the graduate student: away from the medieval restrictions largely based on physical attributes and towards an emphasis on disembodied ‘pure intellectual capacity’ (Clark 2006: 237). What was the appropriate relation between doctoral ‘advisor’ and ‘candidate’ in this new order? In the absence of specific discussion of this matter, Clark's reference to the shift in the professor's identity gives us some clues as to how supervision got ‘sorted out’ in the German system: when the authorship of the dissertation moved to the candidate himself, the professor, now reduced to overseeing another's writing, morphed into a doctoral supervisor, the Doktorvater or doctorfather, a normatively masculine and paternal figure. The purpose of doctoral education was the cultivation of intellectual authority – the reproduction of the ‘professorial’ individual (Clark 2016: 16–17), the idealised ‘Subject of Knowledge’ (Green 2005: 162). Hence there was a new, and enduring, emphasis on the candidate writing (professing) the single-authored monograph as an original contribution to the discipline. This is one of the historical lineaments that shaped the practice of supervision, along with the disciplinary mechanism that, in the early stages, required the ‘father's’ satisfaction with the ‘son's’ performance for the successful award of the PhD. Needless to say, father–son relationships are not one thing: they can be remote and austere, close and affectionate, rivalrous and ruinous.
Amidst rapid growth in the British PhD, and alongside the ‘continuing problem’ of comparative standards between universities and existing higher degrees, Renate Simpson points out that ‘the whole question of supervisors and examiners had to be sorted out’ (1983: 160). She does not address this question. However, given the tradition of the Oxbridge tutorial that, by the early nineteenth century, was core to collegiate undergraduate education in Britain, early doctoral supervisors would not have had to look far for a mode of conduct: ‘The teaching of the undergraduate, man to man, by his Tutor or Supervisor . . . gives to the education at Oxford and Cambridge something scarcely to be got elsewhere in such full measure’ (Palfreyman 2008: 15–16, citing the 1922 Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge Universities). David Palfreyman describes the Oxbridge tutorial in loving detail, describing much that is recognisable from modern doctoral supervision, perhaps especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences. He cites at length a 1968 source, The Tutorial System and Its Future, written by Oxford Fellow and Tutor W. G. Moore:
A usual feature of the method is informality. . . . It opens with a few questions as to how the student has ‘got on’ with his subject and a brief confession on his part, perhaps . . . the final minutes are devoted to suggestions and hints about next week's subject. . . . The teacher acts as constructive critic, helping him sort it out, to try it out sometimes, in the sense of exploring a possible avenue, rejecting one approach in favour of another. . . . The good teacher will thus help the student to refute or correct him, which is to say he will teach method rather than hard and fast conclusions. . . . Here I think we touch the nerve of power of the tutorial as a tool of learning. Each side is free to refuse what is offered by the other. This may (and does) mean waste of time and effort, boredom and sense of frustration on both sides. (Palfreyman 2008: 17–19)
Like the Doktorvater, the Oxbridge tutor-supervisor was a man, as were most of the early doctoral students, although this is never remarked upon per se. Supervisors’ and students’ bodies are overlooked: their intellect is the thing. A core feature of the Oxbridge tutorial was the centrality of ‘academic [intellectual] intimacy’ (Palfreyman 2008: 23): ‘The pupil has the advantage of intimate contact with a good mind and a greater wisdom than his own’ (Palfreyman 2008: 15, citing C. Mallinson's 1941 essay, ‘The Oxford Tutorial’), and indeed the tutorial usually took place in the tutor's living rooms within the college. Such unchaperoned intimacy between male supervisors and (the then rare) female students would have been at least uncomfortable in the earliest years of the PhD. And yet the ethos of the Oxbridge tutorial resonates with contemporary feminist concerns with relationality and care, as we will see.
The privacy and intimacy of the Oxbridge tutorial is a persistent feature of doctoral supervision in the present:
Traditionally conducted behind closed doors in spaces remote from undergraduate teaching, the intensity of the interpersonal relations of much postgraduate pedagogy is presumed but uninterrogated. It has not been in the interests of academics generally or their postgraduate charges to show and tell what systems of encouragements or discouragements may have been at work in the daily mentoring of ‘pure’ research and thesis writing. (McWilliam and Palmer 1995: 32)
From the contemporary institution's point of view, at least, this privacy and its quirkily interpersonal character is problematic, if not outright risky, for both supervisors and students, which has led to increasing efforts to regulate and surveil supervision as well as requiring supervision training (Manathunga 2005).
Women and the PhD, with a focus on colonial New Zealand
The timing of the PhD's emergence in Britain roughly coincided with the full inclusion of women in university education (Oxford in 1920, although Cambridge not until the late 1940s). In the Antipodean colonies of New Zealand and Australia, however, this timing coincided with a period of university expansion in the 1940s and 1950s. (The egalitarian ethos of these colonies, plus a shortage of potential students, meant that their universities had included women from soon after their opening in the late 1800s.) In Britain and the Commonwealth system, women feature amongst some of the earliest awardees of the PhD. For example, in 1903 at the University of Toronto in Canada, Emma Sophia Baker and Clara Benson were the first women to be awarded PhDs, just three years after the first PhD was granted in 1900 (Friedland 2002), while almost two decades later, in 1921, Sister Bernardine of Notre Dame College was the second person to be awarded a PhD at the University of Glasgow (Glasgow University 2021). In 1948, women were two of the first three persons awarded PhDs in Australia (Dobson 2012: 95).
The collegiate University of New Zealand (UNZ) – established in 1874 and dissolved into several independent institutions in 1961 – instituted the PhD in 1948 (Middleton 2001: 5).2 In the centennial histories of the four university colleges (Otago, Canterbury, Auckland, Wellington) that comprised UNZ, very little is said about the arrival of the PhD, suggesting that it was of relatively small importance in the colony's first century of higher education. While doctoral supervision is not mentioned either, I did find a glancing reference to early PhD students at Canterbury being ‘lavished with the affection and attention reserved normally for domestic pets or favoured sons’ (Gardner et al. 1973: 398). Favoured sons, notice, not daughters. However, the first woman gained a PhD in 1954 (Margaret di Menna, a microbiologist), which places her amongst New Zealand's earliest crop (Zonta 2021).3
More is said in the centennial histories about the arrival of women academics that is relevant to my focus on women doctoral supervisors. Despite including women students from the outset, and hiring plenty of women as temporary teaching assistants and demonstrators, it took thirty-five years for the first permanent woman lecturer to be appointed to the UNZ (Fitzgerald 2009: 11) – at Victoria College in 1909. Between 1909 and 1961, a total of 245 women held academic positions, mostly at the rank of lecturer or below (just thirty held higher ranks). Most (fifty) were found in Home Sciences, and none at all in Engineering, Law and Medicine (Fitzgerald 2009: 19). Overall, in the ninety-year life of the UNZ, only four women professors were appointed, all within Home Sciences, a subject taught at only one of the colleges (Otago). The history of New Zealand's higher education system offers a picture of female scarcity familiar in the West: women academics and students ventured into universities where men numerically and positionally dominated the ‘structure, organisation, staff numbers, curriculum and scholarship’ (Fitzgerald 2009: 25). In such establishments, the presence of women sufficiently senior to supervise doctoral students was rare. The scene for women did not really begin to change until the 1970s with second-wave feminism. For example, there was a 30 per cent increase in women students at the University of Auckland between 1970 and 1981 where ‘[t]he women's movement also made its impact on the staff. . . . In recent years [1975 and 1981] the first two women professors have been appointed’ (Sinclair 1983: 293).
Generally throughout the West, until the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, women's participation in doctoral education, as either students or supervisors, was relatively low at 10 to 15 per cent.4 In the 1970s, women doctoral graduates still figured at around 15 per cent in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (Centra 1974; Leonard 1997: 154). And even into the 1990s, writers such as Linda Conrad in Australia (1994: 53) and Kathleen Heinrich in the United States (1995: 448) were commenting on the paucity of senior academic women who could be doctoral supervisors. Over subsequent decades, the number of women doctoral students steadily increased until, around 2010, it rivalled, or even overtook, that of men in many countries. In New Zealand, for example, 400 women (domestic students) completed doctorates in 2020 compared to 290 men, although gender representation remains uneven across fields, reflecting the entrenched gendering of certain occupations, such as engineering, teaching and nursing (Education Counts 2021). Likewise, for women doctoral supervisors, the number of women academics in many Western countries is inching towards parity with men, although men are still heavily over-represented at higher levels. For example, a recent study from New Zealand universities finds ‘the proportion of women decreases at higher academic levels across all institutions, with women making up between a quarter and a third of the senior academic staff’ (Walker et al. 2020: 12).
‘Favoured sons’ in the father's house of supervision
The struggle for knowledge hath a pleasure in it like that of wrestling with a fine woman. (Lord Halifax, 17th century, epigraph in Dale 1997)
[The function of the Oxbridge tutorial]. . . is not to instruct . . . it should be the most adult relationship between teacher and student . . . [without it] the final and essential stage in education may never be reached. This is the process of handling material for oneself and of bringing together one's own analysis, reflection, judgement in a form which is really a creation of individual thought. (Palfreyman 2008: 19, citing W. G. Moore)
Lord Halifax's words in the 1600s and Palfreyman's words four hundred years later underscore two normatively masculine elements of doctoral supervision. On the one hand, in the Western tradition, knowledge is feminine (the personification of wisdom is the Greek goddess Sophia) and there are pleasures to be had in its mastery. On the other, when we look sidewise at that ‘most adult relationship between teacher and student’ through the lens of history, it resolves into a relationship that is man-to-man. Together, in the scene of older individual men initiating younger individual men into the sensual pleasures of the struggle to ‘possess’ knowledge, to gain autonomous dominance over it, we find the habitus of Western disciplinary-knowledge-making and PhD education. The modern PhD, as described above, installed the singular, independent author as its keystone, whose success depends on being recognised as such and entails, therefore, repressing all but the most minor and ritualised traces of the interdependence required to produce original academic work (such as citation practices and thesis acknowledgements – on this latter ‘peripheral element’, see Kelly et al. 2021: 201).
The male-dominated history of doctoral education has left enduring cultural traces in the present. For example, in writing about doctoral supervision in English literature John Frow traces the persistence of the ‘normatively masculine’ (1988: 319) master–disciple relation as ‘a mechanism, archaic and clumsy, for investing the process of transmission of knowledge with a productive intensity’ (1988: 321). In a similar vein, my own earlier work (Grant 2005, 2008) explored the pedagogical dynamics of the master–slave architecture of supervision in an effort to understand the complex and tension-ridden, but also usually productive, bonds between supervisor and student. And in Frances Kelly's analysis of fictional accounts of students’ experiences of supervision, she finds the figure of the ‘supervisor whose power is inflected through their gendered relation to the students’ (2009: 371). She traces out three distinctive, if overlapping, cultural representations: supervisor as in loco parentis, supervisor as master and supervisor as disappointing pedagogue. Overall, she says, ‘the figure of the supervisor in these texts is drawn from a recognisable type: stern, sometimes paternal, always in authority, and bearing a close resemblance to the “teacher-as-untouchable-authority-and-heartless stereotype” . . . in film and television narratives of education’ (2009: 371). These stereotypes, inextricably and enduringly gendered masculine in Western culture, produced an educational environment that some found exhilarating in its freedom and independence (Riemer 1998). Such values, understood as central ‘mechanisms for the production of [scholarly] autonomy’ (Lee and Williams 1999: 17), have a shadow side, though, in painful student experiences of abandonment or neglect. Such experiences may well be exacerbated by the traditional privacy of supervision described above and the solitariness of the research endeavour characteristic of, in particular, the arts, humanities and social sciences.
This brief description of the emergence of the modern PhD and doctoral supervision in relation to gender shows their embeddedness in the deep history of patriarchy in Western higher-knowledge-making. The imagined subject of the PhD and his supervisor were undoubtedly male, although how that man-to-man relationship played out in supervision would have been variable within the possibilities of place and time. Women's access to higher education is relatively recent: their presence as doctoral supervisors and candidates grew slowly over the twentieth century before accelerating in the final decades. I turn now to explore what the extant research literature on women as doctoral supervisors tells us about the changes, if any, that have followed this acceleration.
Women as doctoral supervisors: A bird's-eye view
To locate the anglophone literature on women as doctoral supervisors, I searched for works that address, either exclusively or substantially within a wider discussion, the perspective and/or work of women doctoral supervisors. I excluded a small amount of literature that mentioned either women supervisors in passing while discussing women doctoral students (e.g., Kurtz-Costes et al. 2006) or gender in passing while discussing supervision more generally (e.g., Chapman and Sork 2001; Green 2005) or graduate mentoring (e.g., Hulbert 1994). My focus was on how women, as authors and/or research participants, talk about their work as doctoral supervisors and how they position themselves vis-à-vis personal, student and institutional expectations and cultural (including disciplinary) norms.
My search turned up twenty-six publications published between 1992 and the present day (see Appendix for an overview). Nine come out of the North American doctoral education system (Canada, 3; United States, 6), while seventeen come out of the British system (Australia, 9; New Zealand, 2; South Africa, 1; United Kingdom, 5). All are written by women scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences (including geography, nursing and psychology), and most writers explicitly position themselves as feminist and/or draw on feminist theory. As the overview shows, sixteen of the works rely on experience, observation and reading (EOR) and the other ten draw on qualitative data (QD) from a small set of research participants, mostly women supervisors, occasionally including the authors but sometimes including women or men students talking about their women supervisors. Just over half (fourteen) of the works discuss relationships with women students; only four explicitly mention the supervision of male students (on the overview, MS); and the remaining eight do not mention students’ gender. All but one (Chuh 2013) appear to be written by white women, and none address the ethnic identity of women supervisors. Four are written by former supervisor–student pairs reflecting back on their shared experience (on the overview, SS).
In reading this literature, I asked two questions influenced by feminist theorists of women in the academy: The first – inspired by Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret's (2014) work with women philosophers – is ‘What are women doing to doctoral supervision?’ The second – inspired by Luce Irigaray's (1985) meditation on the sexed (masculine) subject of science – is ‘Are women supervisors really just men?’ Before answering my questions and given the way the literature inevitably centres on women's experiences, I want to explain how I handle my reading of those experiences.
Leonor Arfuch reminds us that:
rather than some notion of ‘female experience’, which would return us to essentialism, it is a matter of thinking of the experiences of women, with their similarities and differences, as the product of what . . . can be called the ‘technologies of gender’; that is to say, the social, semiotic, epistemological and critical weave in which gendered subjects are constructed. (Arfuch 2020: 67–68)
Like Arfuch, I have a non-essentialised theory of women's experiences, understanding them as constructed by and within disciplining and enabling cultural practices (‘technologies’). At times, the gendering work of these technologies seems quite visible and palpable; at other times, it is decidedly elusive and ambiguous such that we might ask ‘What is going on here?’ (For example, in Chapman and Sork [2001: 95], the feminist student asks of her male supervisor's behaviour: ‘Is this male, or is it him?’.) Indeed, the first part of this article has tried to show something of the wider gendered weave of the academy into which women doctoral supervisors have quite recently arrived and proliferated. In this culture, to be a woman is still to be somewhat (at least) at odds with the rhythms and weave of ‘normal’ academic subjectivity. I find Arfuch's concept of gendered rhythms (2020: 9) useful for thinking about the complexity and elusiveness of gender in culture – it is something we might feel as much as it is something we might think or see. Moreover, what women are doing to the father's house of supervision is not of a piece and is also, sometimes, being done by men.
Notably, the writers reviewed here do not all share my perspective on gender. In paying attention to the rhythms of gender in supervision, they come from diverse, and more or less explicit, feminist standpoints. I engage with each on their own terms, essentialising or otherwise, by making extensive verbatim use of their words.
What are women doing to doctoral supervision?
We are women engaged in a man's profession, a profession which numerous men, as our predecessors, satisfactorily demonstrated to be unsuitable for women. If the question is ‘how to inherit?’ this profession, then it cannot be resolved in a general way. (Stengers and Despret 2014: 67)
We [academic women] are caught, I would suggest, in a complex ambivalence between, on the one hand, taking ourselves up in familiar and already recognizable terms, and on the other, engaging in work through which the terms of recognition themselves might be reworked. (Davies 2006: 508)
The literature suggests that women doctoral supervisors have set about transforming the father's house of supervision, both in terms of how it is thought about and how it is practised. This transformation, however, as Stengers and Despret suggest, does not have one ‘general way’: there are different, sometimes irreconcilable, views about what is appropriate. In what follows, I introduce four recurring, interrelated themes found in this literature: attending to power; emphasising relationality; asserting the importance of care; and foregrounding desire, embodiment and emotion. (These themes also feature in the wider longer-standing literature on feminist pedagogy in universities.) In writing about such matters, women academics are deliberately reworking Bronwyn Davies’ ‘terms of recognition’ for what counts as good doctoral supervision, often explicitly refusing the prevailing terms – whether these terms belong to the longer history of the university sketched above or are more recent terms imposed by neoliberalism, which is sometimes seen as ‘a new form of academic masculinity’ exhibiting an antagonism towards ‘elements associated with femininity (emotions, bodies, acceptance of the diversity of humanity, personal interactions)’ (Leonard 2001: 43). In this sense, women academics are actively going about rebuilding the father's house of supervision to become a place more convivial and sheltering for women and, ambitiously perhaps, for others on the margins of the traditional university.
Attending to power
From the earliest writers, power asymmetry that places women in a subordinate position has been a key concern even though it is theorised differently. For example, Phillida Salmon talks about the challenges of supervising women students: ‘Women [candidates], in my experience, are particularly liable to suffer this persistent inner self-deprecation; given the gendered power structure of the social world, including that of academic institutions, this is hardly surprising’ (1992: 117). Some women supervisors also describe their difficulties in similar terms, as we shall see below. In a different theoretical frame, Terry Threadgold argues that ‘feminist (or indeed any) pedagogy cannot ignore the sexuality, the unconscious desires, the will to power and the making of the relations of ruling . . . and thus of the relations of sexual, class and racial difference, that are made on a daily basis’ (1995: 46). And, in yet a different vein again, Kathleen Heinrich (1995) delicately unpicks three different dynamics of power at work in women doctoral supervisors’ practice: ‘power with’ (collegial relationships with shared power), ‘power over’ (supervisor-controlled relationships) and ‘power disowned’ (where the supervisor denies her ‘legitimate power’). In a conference paper based on talking to supervisors and students in the Department of Women's Studies at an Australian university, Shannon Dowling and Michelle Jones write that ‘in describing feminist supervision both students and supervisors mentioned a recognition of power dynamics being an essential part . . . both mentioned the student's implication in the structuring of this dynamic – the student was in no way considered “powerless”’ (2000: 646).
Within discussions of power, views diverge on the extent to which supervisory power can be mitigated. For example, Christine Jarvis and Miriam Zukas argue that ‘supervisory relationships are negotiated within a cultural context in which institutional status and power cannot be disregarded – even from a feminist perspective’ (1998: 6; italics added); Áine Humble and colleagues also suggest that a ‘truly consensual relationship may not be possible’ (2006: 10). In contrast, Rob Baum's feminist model for ‘teaching as supervision’ (2017: 88) is committed to principles, such as reciprocity and equality, aimed at undercutting the supervisor's power (2017: 90). And Jo Ann Gammel and Amy Rutstein-Riley propose a ‘holistic, power-with, relational model’ (2016: 33), in which the ‘role and experience of power’ (2016: 32) ought to be equitable and co-constructed, caring, fluid and wise, as well as hierarchical and differentiating.
Generally, paying attention to power – indeed ‘critically analyzing power’ (Humble et al 2006: 10) – is a preoccupation in this body of work on women supervisors, in striking contrast to the wider literature on supervision and the early (at least) institutional documents, where power is something of a ‘dirty word’ (Grant 2001). Moreover, as Gammel and Rutstein-Riley (2016) indicate above, power is enmeshed with relationality.
Emphasising relationality
Another core concern for women doctoral supervisors – typically framed in opposition to traditional modes of supervision based, for example, on a pedagogy of ‘neglect and indifference’ (Lee and Williams 1999: 22) – is empathic relationality. As Salmon describes it: ‘A successful supervision relationship . . . depends crucially on mutual sympathy and trust and on a personal resonance on the part of the supervisor to the student's sense of meaning and excitement’ (1992: 21). She contrasts this approach to the directive/managerial model of ‘constantly reminding, prompting, chasing’ (1992: 19), which, in her view, is derived ‘from a view of research as the application of standard scientific procedures to a given question’ (1992: 20). She is interested in how an interpersonal relationship supports the student as they make their way through the difficult demands of ‘private thinking . . . the real stuff of original research’ (1992: 20).
On a slightly different tack, Pamela Moss writes of reconceptualising feminist supervision in non-hierarchical terms: ‘For me, graduate supervision is about deliberately choosing to enter into a relationship with a student to go through a process together: participating in that process fully and flexibly . . . dealing with dilemmas, problems, and paradoxes as they arise respectfully and empathetically’ (2009: 73; italics in original). Moss's togetherness and full participation is suggestive of the self-disclosure that Humble and colleagues suggest is required from the supervisor in order to ‘reveal the inseparability of the personal and the political’ (2006: 10). Lia Bryant and Katrina Jaworski too see the relationality (intersubjectivity) of supervision as ongoing work that also contributes to the supervisor's ‘continuing development’:
Following Butler, we suggest that the relationship between supervisors and doctoral scholars is an ongoing accomplishment, a reiterative practice in recognizing, repeating, and recontextualizing subjectivity and therefore intersubjectivity . . . Thus . . . through ongoing encounters each subject recognizes the other, allowing the possibility of identifying with the other and the possibility of being shaped by the other. (Bryant and Jaworski 2015: 12)
Discussions of supervision relationships often invoke metaphor. For example, the lineaments of the family drama evident in the description of traditional supervision above (doktorvater and student-son) resurface here but differently, typically in discussions of their relationships with women students (although, not just women: in a rare discussion of supervising a male student, the woman supervisor says: ‘I behaved just as he expected: like a mom’ [Ritchie et al. 2002: 62]). Margaret Somerville and Sarah Crinall (former supervisor and student), whose book chapter takes the form of an exchange of letters, offer an evocative account. At one point, the former supervisor says about reading the student's thesis blog on her ‘soft velvet sofa’ (2018: 60) that she is ‘back in the time of mothering’. She describes further the sensuality of this experience: ‘The water of your thesis chapter I am reading washes over me and I enter a different time zone’ (2018: 60). Later she says: ‘I have long thought of you as the true daughter of my intellectual work’ (2018: 62). There are many intimate and sensual layers to the mother–daughter relationality she is describing.
Other writers describe more troubling (for them) versions of the family drama. Heinrich, drawing on a psychoanalytically informed analysis in which ‘the mother-daughter relationship is the template for adult relationships between women’ (1995: 461), observes the problematic combination of ‘negative mother advisors and good daughter advisees’ (1995: 451) occurring in her study. In counterpoint, Joy Ritchie and colleagues propose ‘spinster’ and ‘othermother’ as more helpful metaphors for women supervisors, connoting edgier relationships ‘less fraught [than mothering] with expectations for unconditional love and support’ (2002: 60). In a similar vein, Alison Bartlett and Gina Mercer (another former supervision pair) discuss problems arising from slipping into mother–daughter or older–younger sister relationships in an ‘effort to accommodate our female bodies into institutional positions [of supervisor and student]’ (2001: 59). They propose other, non-familial but still companionable, metaphors – cooking, planting, bushwalking – in an effort to eschew traditional power relations. In contrast, Chris Beasley's metaphor is coach (in relationship with an implied beginner): ‘Students have to understand that it is their thesis, which is very frightening in some respects. We are not there to write the thesis for them. . . . It is about having the skill to watch someone and take note of what will work for them’ (Beasley and Jaworski 2015: 45).
Some writers anticipate risks in emphasising relationality, whatever the metaphor. For example, Jarvis and Zukas, writing as former supervisor and student, suggest that ‘perhaps the greatest risk for feminist supervisors is a denial of the significance of knowledge/power in research relationships, and an over-emphasis on reciprocity and mutuality’ (1998: 6). And Threadgold, in pointing out the dominance of the Oedipal narrative (the family drama) in the institutional life of supervision, asks: ‘Is there no other position for women in higher education to occupy than that of the desexualised mother or the dangerous seductress?’ (1995: 46). She points out the especial risks attendant on the mother–daughter metaphor:
What if your mother refuses her gaze, turns her attention elsewhere? . . . If she wields power not as care, nurturance, preservative love, but as assertion, need, desire of her own? Or if she is off playing, with other women or men? Or in her own head? Can daughters stand to be cut off, outside the dyadic circuit? (1995: 46, citing Jane Flax)
Relationality, it turns out, is not without its dangers, such as a denial of the foundational difference between supervisor and student, perhaps because of ‘too much’ supervisor self-disclosure or a student's feelings of rejection about the inevitable deflections in a supervisor's attention.
Asserting the importance of care
Akin to concerns for relationality, care in supervision is emphasised in this literature, but often ambivalently because of its problematic connotations for women. Two targets for the supervisor's care surface. One is the student: for example, Salmon asserts that ‘the quality that supervision needs above all to offer is that of personal support’ (1992: 20). The other is the work, the project, the discipline: ‘You [the supervisor] need to be there as the person who cares about [the student's] project in some sense. This process of caring is highly emotional and passionate and gets more emotional for them and less emotional for you’ (Beasley and Jaworski 2015: 39). Ritchie and colleagues describe their tension-filled experience in this conflicted space of caring: ‘We are too often only agitated. And we're torn between nurturing individuals and getting the work done. We experience constant conflict between taking care of people and carefully taking the profession to new and better places’ (2002: 56). Lesley Johnson and colleagues describe a caring fantasy that can haunt the feminist supervisor – to be ‘infinitely patient, available, confident in her knowledge, an intellectual and sexual role model, who uses her long office hours therapeutically to help students develop subjectivity and self-esteem and to solve personal problems’ (2000: 144, citing Berlant 1997). In their view, this fantasy ‘potentially leaves women burnt out and exhausted’. These varied views are ambivalent about foregrounding care because of how its gendered meanings intensify particular expectations of women supervisors. As Elizabeth St Pierre remarks, even a ‘century after first-wave feminism, refusing to enact traditional womanly care remains problematic in any relation. . . . I do find myself cringing at that word “care” [in relation to supervision], laden as it is with womanly virtue. So I ask how we might think differently about ethical relations [such as supervision] outside “care”?’ (2013: 149). There is a difficult dilemma here in how to be caring towards both the student and the work without being consumed by the former or, in relation to the latter, losing sight of the fact that the doctoral project is the student's work. Perhaps, as St Pierre suggests, the (difficult) challenge is to rework the very meaning of ‘care’.
Foregrounding desire, embodiment and emotion
[A]ny making of knowledge that goes on involves people, people who have bodies, sexed bodies, and that process is never free of desire or power, nor of class, race and gender struggles and inequalities. (Threadgold 1995: 46)
Another dimension of what women are doing to doctoral supervision is foregrounding desire, embodiment and emotion in what it means to be a supervisor. Coming from the place of the marked Other (as compared to the non-marked masculine subjects of traditional man-to-man supervision), they draw our attention to the inescapability of these elements in the supervision relationship but also to their pleasures. For example, Johnson and colleagues challenge women to find alternatives to that of the traditional ‘“master” Tutor’ (2000: 144) that still leave space for women supervisors to enjoy the embodied ‘flirtatiousness of intellectual debates . . . the sexiness of winning’ (144, citing Kirby 1994). Indeed, Jane Gallop's exemplary desiring pedagogical couple is two women, doctoral supervisor and student, who are ‘madly in love’ (2001: 148), part of the chemistry being their shared research interests. Desire is entangled with the student and her successful work:
[T]he supervisor is, by the very nature of her role, inevitably too close, too invested, and definitely cares too much. I want my dissertator to succeed – because she is ‘my student’, because her success reflects on me, and her achievements afford me prestige. My considerable investment of time and energy in her progress as well as my narcissistic investment in my own excellence as a teacher make me an interested party in the dissertator's success. (Gallop 2001: 155)
In another example, Catherine Manathunga and colleagues mount a ‘collaborative biographical memory work’ project that seeks to capture the impacts of space, time and bodies on doctoral supervision, and also ‘the cultural narratives present in the stories of bodies in supervision spaces’ (2013: 67). Their project produces three cameos of supervision rich in experiential detail that offer a window into the embodied complexities between supervisors and students, and also between supervisors.
Across this literature, writers resist the traditional norm of the disembodied supervisor (and candidate). For example, Beasley and Jaworski reject ‘a neo-liberal model of individual atomistic individuals all rushing around separately, bumping into each other’ (2015: 40) by proposing an ‘ethic of social flesh’ as a way of ‘grasping together the corporeal (including its emotionality) and the socio-political’ (2015: 36). Here, embodiment is much more than brute materiality, it is a state of constant, inevitable, mutual and necessary interconnectedness with the Other of supervision: ‘[Your students] are not just these singular functioning units going about their business. They are woven into you because of how you are with them, and they with you, and yet there is also a level of independence’ (2015: 41). Similarly, Somerville and Crinall remark: ‘We realised that our bodies [supervisor's and student's] had become intertwined through the processes of writing our daily lives to each other’ (2018: 62). Through the to and fro of writing to each other, the abstract institutional relation of supervisor and student became entangled with their fleshly selves. Somerville's sensual account of being a supervisor is unusual in the literature: this is delicate terrain, and few tread there.
Returning now to my opening question of what women are doing to doctoral supervision, we can see that they are actively committed to reshaping the relationship away from the hierarchy, impersonality, isolation and trauma that have been identified by authors critical of the normative masculinity of traditional supervision. What non-traditional supervision might look like is a source of considerable thought and even some disagreement – there is no one ‘feminine’ or ‘feminist’ way. Having explored this complexity in some detail, I turn my attention now to my second, more difficult, question.
Is a women doctoral supervisor really just a man?
Is a woman scientist wholly a man? A genetic aberration? A monstrosity? A bisexual human being? A woman cowed into submission, or not yet subdued? Or?? (Irigaray 1985: 77)
Feminists tread on men's turf and do enter the public sphere, including the university, but we do it with a lot of self-recrimination and self-blame. We get exhausted by the process. ‘We carry weights on our feet’. Although looking at things from a feminist perspective is painful, because it makes us see what is done to us, it is much better than what went before. But seeing this does not mean we escape our situation or ourselves. There is a repetitive confusion: something not closed or resolved in the psyche of academic women, interconnecting sexuality, competition, higher education, career and feminism. Feminism is a transgression. (Leonard 2001: 233)
I want now to turn to a more unsettling question: are the things women are doing to supervision fundamentally altering its masculine architecture or tinkering at the edges (and possibly even making supervision more difficult)? On the one hand, we have the argument that ‘relational mentoring [advising] has the potential to promote transformation in the doctoral student, the doctoral advisor, the advising relationship context, and even in the culture of doctoral programs’ (Gammel and Rutstein-Riley 2016: 33) and that ‘we want to change the patriarchal terms of academic accomplishment and success’ (Ritchie et al. 2002: 56). On the other, in becoming doctoral supervisors are academic women unavoidably caught up in being the master of traditional supervision? Some writers wonder if, indeed, ‘the female body must be disavowed’ (Lee and Williams 1999: 14) in order to become properly rational and autonomous, that is, ‘academic’. As they and others explore, there is something deeply gendered about the Western knowledge project, how the disciplines work and the human subjects they require. For example, Johnson and colleagues discuss the gendered-masculine character of the autonomous self – the Subject of Reason – that is the goal of doctoral education and how this norm has guided various ‘often fraught and unsatisfactory’ supervision pedagogies (2000: 136). Bartlett and Mercer too observe that ‘all the circulating meanings and representations women bear inevitably disrupt the narrative of authority/ genius/ charismatic master’ (2001: 58); they explore the question of how ‘we as two women (and feminists at that) [can] jostle to make satisfactory positions for ourselves’ (2001: 58). They are suggesting that even just the presence of women in the academy, including as supervisors, unsettles the hegemonic story of who an academic is and how they ought to conduct themselves.
There is no simple answer to the question of how women are to make satisfactory positions for themselves as doctoral supervisors. The literature offers many examples of women feeling at odds with what is required of them (by institutions, students, other supervisors) including the possibility that they will not be recognised as a supervisor. In my own study of a supervisor–student pair, the woman supervisor agonises over her conduct in the supervision meeting: ‘Too fast, I spoke too fast. I was too imposing. Why am I that way always. Want to do too much for them’ (notes, lines 1–2). And later, she stated that she felt ‘first ashamed of myself as the bully. Then I started to rationalise and justify it and came out quite all right after a while. I pacify myself, otherwise it is too hard to live with myself, I suppose. But it is also trying to see the other side, the advantages of a supervisor who talks and who does offer feedback’ (Grant 2003: 184). At the time, I commented: ‘What these reflections might point to are tensions some women experience in taking up positions of authority in which they easily feel overbearing and uncomfortable’ (2003: 184). Manathunga, exploring mixed-gender team supervision, also observes (possible) gender dynamics of defensiveness, self-deprecation, feelings of having been ‘too critical’ on the part of even senior women (2012: 36). Similarly, the supervisor in the Brady–Durell dialogue says: ‘In those early days, I tried to be what I thought was “professional” with you too. In the role of PhD supervisor, I wanted to be taken seriously (whatever that means) so I thought carefully about maintaining a distance’ (2015: 13). In these texts, women are wrestling with the tension between what Heinrich calls ‘legitimate power’ (1995: 451) and their desire for mutuality.
But self-doubt is not the only story. Diana Leonard issues a warning to women students that women supervisors are not always supportive and that some are ‘downright hostile’ (2001: 95). Beth Kurtz-Costes and colleagues found that women doctoral students perceived women supervisors ‘as less supportive than male faculty of family concerns when these women had themselves sacrificed family formation for the sake of their careers’ (2006: 137). Heinrich sees in her data the presence of ‘iron maiden advisors and handmaiden advisees’ (1995: 451), a relationship that smacks of the traditional master–apprentice model in its most authoritarian form. Giving flesh to these warnings, Helen Lucey and Chrissie Rogers (2007) offer richly detailed views of three women students’ experiences of working with women supervisors: in one story, the student describes how she ‘looked to Dr Aston [a woman], as she had to her emotionally withholding father, for “love, acceptance, a modified authority”’ (2007: 25) and how later this supervisor blocks an exciting direction in her work despite encouragement from her other (also woman, but junior) supervisor. Lucey and Rogers go on to say: ‘The power of a more senior and well known academic to decide what does and does not count as appropriate academic endeavour or knowledge to a relatively junior colleague and student is made abundantly clear in this example’ (2007: 26). Another student describes how an exciting relationship with a woman supervisor ends up with her feeling as if ‘all the ideas, all the good bits of the articles, all the cleverness belonged to Dr Fraser and not me’ (2007: 28). In both cases, the dynamics of the students’ experiences of supervision, mixed up with those between supervisors, comprise complex gendered elements including women supervisors who behave in stereotypically masculine ways.
Threaded amongst the literature, there is also a persistent provocation to embrace academic distance, authority and power, which might also be read as an embrace of the masculine position but perhaps with a difference: ‘The supervisor (not the supervisee) has the most power to determine which experiences count as knowledge’, say Jarvis and Zukas (1998: 7). ‘Any kind of selfless feminist pedagogy is impossible . . . knowledge is always involved with the “passion for power in learning”’, says Threadgold (1995: 47, citing Kirby 1994; italics in original). And Kandice Chuh critiques the metaphor of mentor (often proposed as an antidote to the hierarchy of supervising/advising) 5 and its associated intimacy: ‘At least consciously, neither do I offer or give help to students “for” them but simply because it is part of my work, my privilege, my politics. For me, impersonality is a condition of honesty insofar as mentoring is concerned’ (2013: 5). For Chuh, a return to some version of the traditional impersonal advising role is preferable to a more personal relationship such as that proposed by many other writers in this field. This view is a further reminder (over and above warnings about the cost of caring) that dismissing out-of-hand the traditional ‘impersonal’ (not necessarily unemotional) academic relation on the grounds of its normative masculinity may be unhelpful, and that supervisory caring that encompasses both the candidate and their work depends on some necessary, if unquantifiable, measure of distance.
Returning to the question of whether or not the women doctoral supervisor is really just a man, the answer has to be ‘in some ways, yes’. The Western architecture of knowledge and knowledge-making, masculine in its genesis, is tenacious. As Irigaray suggests, women doctoral supervisors are simultaneously ‘cowed into submission’ and ‘not yet subdued’ (1985: 77) by supervision's traditional architecture: they write and practice in opposition to aspects of it, imagining and finding other ways to be a supervisor. But they are also ensnared by it, feeling judged by themselves and others in relation to its norms.
Closing thoughts
We still have unfinished business, regarding supervision. We still have an obligation to think about supervision, to work with it, as a concept, and as a problem. We cannot escape history so easily. (Green 2005: 152)
We must make no mistake: men and women are caught up on a web of age-old cultural determinations that are almost unanalyzable in their complexity. (Davies 2006: 497, citing Hélène Cixous)
In this article, I have first shown something of the gendered history of both the modern PhD and the practice of doctoral supervision, despite the absence of written accounts of supervision's beginnings. Then I have explored the literature about women doctoral supervisors and found that the arrival of women and, even more importantly, of feminist politics and theories into the university has slowly but surely meant different kinds of supervision commitments and possibly practices as well. Just as they have moved into other previously male-only social domains, women have entered the once-sequestered father's house of doctoral supervision. They are renovating it withal to be more structurally alert to power asymmetries, more relational and caring, more responsive to different bodies and desires. Along the way, they are helping us ‘to think, and think differently about, and be differently in this intolerably complex relation’ (St Pierre 2013: 151; italics in original), despite the durability of its traditional form.
The tension between the legacy of history and the desire for a brave new world of less ‘masterful’ supervision plays out in the complex experiences described by women supervisors (and, sometimes, their students). As Davies suggests of women's efforts to change the academy, any process of ‘decomposition is tough, slow, never-ending work, in which one is caught over and over again undoing the thing one thought one had accomplished’ (2006: 500). This undoing over and over again is a function of the depth of doctoral education's history and its sedimented ‘interactions, emotional relationships, routines, everyday comings and goings’, its gendered ‘rhythms’ (Arfuch 2020: 9). These ‘almost unanalyzable’ sedimentations and rhythms are resistant to both easy inspection and enduring disruption. Moreover, when disruption does take place, it may have unforeseen consequences, including being taken up by managerialist forces inimitable to feminism's project.
Reviewing this small but potent body of work, we can see the voices of women doctoral supervisors are contributing ‘uniquely and significantly to the empirical, epistemological, and normative conversations constituting academic discourse’ (Peterson 1993: 244). Despite many obstacles and complexities, they are promoting changes in supervision practice as well as in how we imagine research and knowledge production. In reviewing the doctoral supervision literature, Wendy Bastalich describes a series of trenchant challenges being ‘mounted to the conception of supervisors as distant masters with sole responsibility for research outcomes’ (2017: 1145). She observes how ‘in pedagogy approaches [to supervision] the isolated doctoral education space is to be filled with relationality’ (2017: 1151). Although she does not notice women's or feminism's contributions to this change, we can notice them: the change towards relationality is of a piece with the arguments for transformation that women doctoral supervisors – and those in the older feminist pedagogy literature as well – have now been making for several decades. Cumulatively over time, women doctoral supervisors have made profound, even if sometimes difficult to articulate, differences to the father's house of doctoral education.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Critical Studies in Education doctoral writing group (2021) for their formative feedback and to acknowledge the invitation to present my work at the University of Melbourne's Social Transformation and Education Research Hub in August 2021. The talk generated some provocative questions about my approach to the literature.
Notes
There is a parallel, sometimes overlapping, literature on women doctoral students dating back to the 1970s – see, for example, Leonard (1997) and Bryant and Jaworski (2015).
The precise date for the first PhD award in New Zealand is unclear. The published lists of UNZ theses (Jamieson 1963; Jenkins 1956) record awards during a time when the degree was not actually offered by the UNZ (an initial decision to offer it in the early 1920s was soon after revoked). By 1950, around eleven had been awarded and thereafter the annual awards grew steadily, initially mostly in the sciences.
Before 1948, some New Zealand women went overseas for doctoral study. For example, Elizabeth Gregory studied domestic science at the Otago college in the early 1920s and then earned a PhD in biochemistry from University College, London, in 1932 (New Zealand History 2021).
The UNZ thesis list of 1955–1962 shows a total of 101 PhDs awarded in the approximate period, ten going to women (i.e. 10 per cent) (Jamieson 1963).
The ‘solution’ of mentoring to the ‘problems’ of traditional supervision is critiqued by Manathunga (2007).
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Appendix: Literature on women doctoral supervisors in time and place
| Australia | Canada | New Zealand | South Africa | United Kingdom | United States | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990s | Lee and Williams 1999 – QD Threadgold 1995 – EOR |
Acker 1999 – QD, MS | Jarvis and Zukas 1998 – EOR, SS Salmon 1992 – EOR |
Heinrich 1995 – QD | ||
| 2000s | Bartlett and Mercer 2001 – EOR, SS Dowling and Jones 2000 – QD Johnson et al. 2000 – QD |
Humble et al. 2006 – EOR Moss 2009 – EOR |
Grant 2003 – QD | Leonard 2001 – EOR Lucey and Rogers 2007 – QD |
Gallop 2001 – EOR Ritchie et al. 2002 – EOR, MS |
|
| 2010s | Beasley and Jaworski 2015 – EOR, MS Bryant and Jaworski 2015 – EOR Manathunga 2012 – QD Somerville and Crinall 2018 – EOR, SS |
Manathunga et al. 2013 – QD, MS | Baum 2017 – EOR | Brady and Durell 2015 – EOR, SS | Chuh 2013 – EOR Gammel and Rutstein–Riley 2016 – QD St Pierre 2013 – EOR |
|
| Legend: | EOR – based on experience, observation and reading; QD – based on qualitative data; MS – considers male students; SS – written by supervisor–student pair. |