‘Demeaning, Frustrating, and Exhausting’: Academic Women’s Labour and the Contradiction of Dependence and Devaluation in the Capitalist University

Piper Ariel Bell Bell; Sharlene Leroy-Dyer; Francesca Bartlett

doi:10.53103/cjess.v6i6.588

Authors

Piper Ariel Bell Bell University of Queensland, Australia
Sharlene Leroy-Dyer University of Queensland, Australia
Francesca Bartlett University of Queensland, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53103/cjess.v6i6.588

Keywords:

Academic Labour Process, Social Reproduction Theory, Gender, Class Stratification, Higher Education

Abstract

This paper examines the experiences of academic women through a social reproduction theory (SRT) framework, analysing how academic institutions perpetuate gender and class hierarchies while simultaneously depending upon and systematically devaluing women’s labour. Drawing on illustrative survey data from 453 academic women across multiple countries, we demonstrate how productive and reproductive labour intersect in the academic labour process, with women disproportionately absorbing service and relational work that remains invisible in formal productivity metrics. Findings show that working-class women academics face compounded exploitation through precarious employment, class-based cultural exclusion, and acute awareness of the structural contradictions sustaining their exploitation; an awareness that, we argue, contains within it the conditions for transformative possibility. In advancing SRT as an empirical research method, this paper contributes to an emerging body of SRT-grounded work in higher education, calling for structural transformation over reformist frameworks proven unable to address the material conditions documented here.

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