CAPE TOWN - Climbing the higher education ladder isn’t always easy for Africa’s female early-career academics. They’re often hamstrung by a lack of mentoring, research funding and by the demands of balancing work and family life.
This is according to Dr Phyllis Kalele, who recently obtained her doctorate in Science and Technology Studies at Stellenbosch University.
For her doctorate, Kalele established the profile of an African female early-career academic and investigated the mentoring experiences, career outcomes and challenges of female early-career academics in 25 African countries. She did a secondary analysis of existing data, which researchers had previously collected through questionnaires and interviews as part of the ‘Young Scientists in Africa’ project.
According to Kalele, little is known about female early-career academics across Africa, and even less is known of their mentoring landscape and how mentoring actually works.
She said her study showed that these academics face several career challenges.
“Most of the female early-career academics (social scientists, natural and agricultural scientists, health scientists, and engineering and applied technologists) perceived that lack of mentoring, balancing work and family demands, lack of research funding, lack of funding for research equipment, lack of training opportunities to develop professional skills, and lack of mobility opportunities had negatively impacted their career to at least some extent.
“However, the first three challenges were the most significant in terms of the proportion of female academics that had reported that they had a negative impact on their career.
“Those in the engineering and applied technologies were most likely to report that lack of mentoring had a negative impact on their career, while those in the health sciences were least likely to do so.”
Kalele pointed out, however, that the majority of these female academics had received mentoring in the form of introduction to research networks, getting a position/job, research methodology, scientific writing and presentation of research results.
“In contrast, only a minority had received mentoring in making career decisions and fundraising. Only half of them had received research funding. In a typical year, they reported spending quite a lot of time on consultancy and very little time on raising research grants. As far as research output is concerned, they produced on average 5,8 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals; 0,3 books; 1,1 book chapters; 3,3 conference-proceedings papers and 5,0 conference presentations over a three-year period.”
Kalele noted that this research output could be better if the key challenges that female early-career academics face are addressed.
Kalele said there was a link between receiving mentoring in fundraising and receiving research funding; being introduced by a mentor to his/her research networks, on the one hand, and the mentee’s research output on the other; and being mentored in the form of introduction to research networks and the frequency with which mentees engaged in intra-institutional and national collaboration.
She said that the female early-career academics were on average 40 years old, had two children or dependents on average, and undertook the majority of care work and general housework in their family, relationship or household.
She added that most female early-career academics were employed permanently as senior lecturers and a large majority of these academics had never studied or worked outside their home country. Lastly, these academics tended to collaborate with researchers at their own institutions.
Kalele said there were a few things that higher education institutions could do to support female early-career academics.
“Female early-career academics in Africa are a heterogeneous group of individuals, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be used in mentoring efforts that seek to enhance their career outcomes. When higher education institutions design mentoring interventions, they should first consider the characteristics of female academics in Africa that the interventions are supposed to serve.
“Moreover, tertiary institutions in Africa should design and offer mentoring programmes that are specifically targeted at providing mentoring on fundraising, and in the form of introduction to research networks.”
Kalele emphasised that opportunities to receive mentoring in different aspects should be made available to African female early-career academics espwecially in engineering and the applied sciences. Mentoring should also be part of orientation and continuous development programmes for these academics.
She advised higher education institutions and other organisations that offer research grants to consider providing training to female early-career academics on aspects of fundraising, such as proposal writing and general resource mobilisation strategies, in order to improve their rate of applying for and securing grants.
Cape Times