University feminism initiatives, like Oxford’s women in the humanities, at first glance seem valuable in their intentions and goals. However, the vast majority of faculty-led initiatives share the naïve assumption that “women” and “feminism” can be talked about without conversations about race, class, disability, sexuality, and other axes of oppression.



Without these perspectives, you can combat only the sexism experienced by a dominant group – which tends to be white, cisgender, able-bodied and financially comfortable.

Such initiatives fail to fully take into account the specific challenges faced by women both within and outside of the academy who are marginalised in multiple ways, including black women, queer women, disabled women, or poor women.

Indeed, for most women, the academic ivory tower remains an elusive place. Campaigns like this run the risk of further propping up women who already have access to certain kinds of privilege, leaving the most oppressed firmly out of the picture and replacing one problematic hierarchy with another. The women steering these initiatives tend to be united not simply by their womanhood but by shared privilege.

There is much that these initiatives get right. They seek to tackle the frequent silencing of women’s scholarship and the dearth of women in permanent posts. Some, in addition, support women through funding for grants, seminars, and fellowships as well as by hosting conferences to highlight women’s scholarship. They may successfully bridge the gap between doctoral candidates, early career researchers, and more established academics. They can promote collaboration and community.



There certainly is, then, a need for this sort of activity. Women face a great deal of misogyny in academic settings and are typically outnumbered by their male colleagues. This means they are often denied opportunities to network with other academics, to receive mentorship and guidance, and to present their research to a wider audience.



As a young woman pursuing a doctorate and aiming for an academic career, I strongly feel the need for these spaces, and know the same to be true of many of my peers.

However, these initiatives do little to inspire any sense of ownership or belonging in those of us who do not identify with the aforementioned dominant group.



Some women academics of colour, speaking along similar lines, commented on Twitter about being “blinded by the glaring whiteness” of it all, which is telling.







What is needed instead is an intersectional approach.



In 1989 the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to name the way that different forms of oppression interact with and inflect each other.



An intersectional feminism understands that, as far as sexism is concerned, women from different segments of society are oppressed to different extents and in different ways.



We should be wary and weary of any feminist agenda that ignores the complex ways in which gender intersects with other aspects of identity, and which fails to mention recent studies such as this one, which found that there are only 17 black female professors in the UK.



Patricia Arquette’s backstage comments at the Oscars, that it was time for “all the gay people and all the people of colour” to fight for “us”, perfectly demonstrate a lack of awareness of intersectionality, forgetting that some women are also LGBTQI and/or of colour.

For a university feminist initiative to be genuinely progressive and emancipatory, it must show solidarity with and seek to improve the lives of all women, not just a few.



What is needed in these initiatives is greater inclusivity and imagination.

These intersectional questions must be asked from their very initial conceptual stages. The leaders of these projects should be a diverse group, and they must be actively committed to the empowerment of women least represented in the academy. They should think carefully about how all dimensions of identity impact the power relations at play in academic institutions.



How does race shape our understanding of, say, literary value, canonicity and university syllabi? Or how do universities need to change to become more accessible to women with chronic illnesses, either mental or physical?



These initiatives should learn from, and collaborate with, the important intersectional work already being done excellently by many student feminists. The Oxford University student union women’s campaign, to name just one example, has a number of active working groups, including groups for women of colour, disabled women, and queer women.

Feminism does not have just one face, one body or one history. For real change to happen, for all women to ascend the staircase of scholarship, then university-based feminist initiatives must confront this truth.

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