Picturing workloads and well-being in the academic workplace: A photovoice project


Anne-Marie Bresee, Western University

Men and women professors experience the academic workplace differently. Women professors encounter cultural and structural barriers that men do not. The resulting gender inequity negatively impacts women professors, adversely affecting their well-being and sense of professional belonging. Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) refer to the feelings of professional belonging as mattering. Mattering results in positive outcomes such as self-esteem, competency and belonging while the opposite results in feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and self-doubt. Lack of mattering may also manifest in negative mental health issues. Studies indicate gender plays a role in the well-being of professors with women reporting higher levels of stress in comparison to men (Salimzadeh and Saroyan, 2020; Redondo-Flórez et al., 2020). Giving voice to women faculty members, who continue to be underrepresented within the academic workplace, is valuable. Photovoice encourages this “unsilencing” as it enables participants to document and interpret their everyday lived experiences. The psychological processes of professional identity, however, are often overlooked in literature in favor of the interplay of physical workplace structure and professional identity (Macdonald, 1989; Baldry and Barnes, 2012; Siebert et al., 2018). Little attention has been directed towards the academic workplace as a cultural space that shapes both social and professional identities. Further, studies tend to focus on segments of the academic profession, most notably contract faculty, providing a narrow understanding of women’s experiences in the academic workplace. This paper provides a more inclusive albeit small sample of women who hold faculty positions as contract, tenure track and tenured professors. Grounded in feminist theory, with its commitment to social change, the original aim of the study was to examine the role hiring rank and gender have in terms of workload and well-being of both men and women contract, tenure-track and tenured professors in the academic workplace. When no men agreed to participate, the study changed focus, becoming a photo story that exposes how the interplay of institutional, professional and personal values influences the experiences of women professors in the academic workplace. It builds upon existing photovoice studies that explore how professional identity develops in such professions as occupational therapists, pharmacists, nursing and teaching. By not using a traditional method of deconstruction of social binaries reflecting an us-them paradigm, photovoice is used to enable a discursive discussion of well-being in the academic workplace. The intention of photovoice is to open a space in which participants produce authentic knowledge about themselves, their lives and their communities (Fals Borda and Rahman, 1991). A group discussion relied heavily upon photo-elicitation which encouraged participants to tell the story of their own social, professional and personal meanings reflected in their images. The group discussion involved participants actively engaged in the process of meaning making. Thus, the women professors’ beliefs and experiences became the main source of understanding the gendering of institutional culture. The resulting discourse of this photovoice project provides insight into the workplace experiences that shape the well-being of five women professors teaching at the undergraduate level in the faculties of humanities, social sciences and arts at a medical / doctoral university in Ontario.

This paper will be presented at the following session: