Gender_Identity_and_Institutional_Cultur

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First published 2009
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Acknowledgements iv
1 The Carnegie--South Africa Undergraduate
Women’s Scholarship Programme:
An overview 1
Thandi Lewin
2 Overview of the research project 17
Linda Chisholm
3 Female undergraduate students’
constructions of success at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal 29
Pontso Moorosi and Relebohile Moletsane
4 Negotiating social and gender identity:
The worldview of women students at the
University of Pretoria 47
Iriann Haupt and Linda Chisholm
5 Social and academic integration of young
women at the University of Cape Town 61
Monica Mawoyo and Ursula Hoadley
6 Conclusion 75
Linda Chisholm and Relebohile Moletsane
Contributors 81
References 83
CONTENTS

iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This publication was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of
New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of
the authors.
We gratefully acknowledge the role of Nasima Badsha, the former Deputy Director-
General for Higher Education in the Department of Education, who originated the
Carnegie–South Africa Undergraduate Women’s Scholarship Programme and was
responsible for initiating the research undertaken here. Both she and Thandi Lewin, who
participated in the research process, were pivotal in ensuring that the research conducted
went beyond a conventional evaluation and gave researchers the opportunity to probe
deeper questions and conduct the research over a period of time that enabled reflection,
a rare luxury in work of this kind.
Andrea Johnson of the Carnegie Corporation was extremely supportive, and Renschè
Bell, who succeeded Thandi Lewin as Programme Officer of the Carnegie–SA Scholarship
Programme, was exceptionally helpful and understanding.
Thanks also to Sibongile Vilakazi, a student at the University of Pretoria and an intern
at the Human Sciences Research Council in 2006, for the role she played as part of the
research team at the start of the project, as well as to Lameez Alexander in Cape Town for
her participation in the project, also in 2006.
Our final thanks go to Amina Mama and Claudia Mitchell for their extremely insightful
and helpful comments that helped to reshape the chapters in this monograph.
Responsibility for the problems that remain belongs to us.

1
Chapter 1
The Carnegie–South Africa
Undergraduate Women’s Scholarship
Programme: An overview
Thandi Lewin
Introduction
As part of its international development programme, the Carnegie Corporation of New
York (hereafter referred to as Carnegie) has supported two types of initiatives with the
aim of enhancing women’s opportunities in higher education and strengthening African
universities. First, Carnegie has given a grant to the South African national Department
of Education (DoE), and has funded women’s scholarship programmes at other African
universities (Makerere University in Uganda and the University of Dar es Salaam in
Tanzania). In South Africa, the funding of the national scholarship programme led to
a follow-up investment by Carnegie in undergraduate scholarships for women at the
universities of the Witwatersrand, KwaZulu-Natal and Cape Town. Second, Carnegie has
supported the development of women academics in South African and African universities
through its support for HERS-SA, an organisation involved in professional development
programmes for women academics and managers in higher education.
The Carnegie–South Africa Undergraduate Women’s Scholarship Programme was set up
in 2002 as a national scholarship programme targeted at young women wishing to study
primarily in the fields of science and engineering at undergraduate level. With funding
from Carnegie, three cohorts of 50 scholarship recipients each were selected from
across the country’s high schools in 2003, 2004 and 2005 to study at eight institutions.
As the programme manager from the start of this project in 2002 until the year after
the programme produced its first set of graduates in 2006, I present an overview in
this chapter of the scholarship programme, as well as some key reflections on student
experiences gathered from my personal interactions with the scholarship recipients
over the four-year period. In addition, by examining the higher education context that
motivated the study, I provide an introductory context for the case studies that follow in
later chapters.
My involvement with the research team engaged in this study was as a person with
insider knowledge of the scholarship programme and ideas about the experiences of
women students in South African universities. Carnegie included a budget for research
in the original grant to the DoE. Given the dearth of literature on women students in
universities in the science and engineering fields, the establishment of the scholarship
programme offered a useful opportunity to engage in some related research in this
area. However, while Carnegie and the scholarship programme itself were interested in
addressing some key questions, the focus of the research, its methodology and operation,
and any reporting or publication decisions were left to the discretion of the research team
(see Chapter 2 for a description of the research project and methodology).

2
Gender, Identity and institutional culture
Why scholarships for women?
Since 1994 significant progress has been made in addressing the representation of both
black1 students and women students in the higher education system in South Africa. The
proportion of female students in the higher education system grew from 44 per cent in
1993 to 55 per cent in 2006.2 While the participation of women in the higher education
system overall has improved significantly, women are still particularly under-represented
in certain disciplines, including areas of science and technology and all areas of
engineering. Some figures from 2006 reflecting participation rates of women in particular
subject areas demonstrate this quite clearly: mathematical sciences, 39 per cent; computer
science, 37 per cent; and engineering, 24 per cent. In addition women, particularly black
women, continue to be under-represented at master’s and doctoral level in all fields, and
senior academic posts remain dominated by men. In this regard the patterns of gender
participation seen in South Africa are beginning to mirror international trends. In other
words, although South Africa has its specific forms of inequality, the gender-inequity
figures are not that different from those of the developed world. Yet the inequalities
at all levels are still stark, and hence are a major policy concern. The South African
Reference Group on Women in Science, in its study on the participation of women in
science, engineering and technology in South Africa, highlights some of these trends and
proposes ‘initiatives that reduce sex-based discipline choices (for men and women) and
promote the career advancement of women in academia and public research institutions’
(Department of Science and Technology 2004: 47).
Much of the key international and South African literature on women in higher education
has focused on women in postgraduate studies and in academic positions, and on the
barriers that women face in climbing the academic ladder (De la Rey 1998; Morley 1999;
Shackleton 2007). This literature also highlights the barriers to progress in academia
that exist for women. There is, however, a paucity of literature on how and why young
women in the sciences make decisions not to continue with postgraduate degrees and
become scientists. In South Africa, very little research has been conducted on student
experiences beyond a few individual campus reports. Not much has been published on
the experiences of women students in male-dominated areas of study, despite some work
carried out by the Centre for Research in Engineering Education at the University of Cape
Town (UCT), particularly by Jeff Jawitz and Jennifer Case (1998, 2002). Hence there were
strong motivations for commissioning this study.
In places such as the United Kingdom, where the school curriculum has focused on
encouraging girls to enter science careers for some time now, young women still do
not choose to go into certain careers that are perceived to be male-dominated, such as
engineering (Hill 2004). In South Africa, the current policy context encourages gender
equity in higher education at all levels, women participate in higher education overall
in greater numbers than do men, and all the universities involved in this study have
missions and policies supporting gender equity. The universities also have policies in
place to discourage sexual harassment (see Bennett et al. 2007) as well as programmes
that specifically aim to help women be successful at all academic levels. At the policy
level at least, then, there is a supportive framework for women to succeed in science and
engineering subjects and in academia generally.
1 In this monograph, ‘black’ is a collective term referring to the African, Indian and coloured population in South Africa.
2 The statistical data in this paragraph were extracted from the DoE Higher Education Management Information System
(HEMIS).

3
The Carnegie--South Africa Undergraduate Women’s Scholarship Programme
The policy context is, in general, a positive one. It is not yet clear, however, how much
the recent changes in both national and institutional policy have contributed to greater
equity. Very little research has focused on the choices that young women make in
contexts where they are being encouraged to take up careers in science. Debates about
student choice remain to be examined. It is not clear to us, for example, how many
students in the Carnegie scholarship programme chose to apply for the scholarship
merely because it was available to them and was their only obvious source of funding for
higher education study. (Some discussion about student choices of study appears later in
this chapter.)
The study reported on in this monograph was conceptualised in a broader context of
policy concern in South Africa with the lack of sufficient high-level skills in all areas,
including the economic sciences (hence the inclusion of some students in these fields in
the scholarship programme). The National Plan for Higher Education (NPHE) advocates
a shift in the ratios of students studying in different fields – moving towards a greater
proportion of students in the sciences and economic sciences and towards a lower
proportion in the humanities and social sciences than are reflected in the current ratios
– and seeks to address the ongoing equity concerns particular to the South African
context, especially the numbers of black students in these fields (DoE 2001). In this
context, government programmes such as the Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition
(JIPSA) were introduced in 2006 to speed up the implementation of the National
Skills Development Strategy. High-level skills in engineering, science and technology,
particularly information and communication technology, are one part of the group
of targeted skills in this strategy, which is part of a broader programme to accelerate
economic growth and development.
An additional policy concern is the low throughput rate of students in the public
higher education system. A DoE study of a cohort of students commencing in 2001 and
concluding in 2004 showed high rates of dropout (30 per cent after the first year, 50 per
cent by the fourth year) (DoE 2005b). Unfortunately, a sex-disaggregated analysis of these
data has not been conducted. Further research and analysis into these issues needs to
be done, investigating in more detail what contributes to dropout and accounting for the
issues related to completion time (that is, the fact that the majority of students do not
finish in the minimum time allowed for undergraduate degrees).
It is clear that poor throughput rates are a significant problem for the public higher
education system. Scott, Yeld and Hendry took this as a starting point for their study on
improving teaching and learning in South African higher education. They note that while
access to higher education has increased significantly for black South Africans, black
students continue to perform more poorly than white students, and the participation
rates of black South Africans are still low relative to those of other population groups,
in particular white students. While the overall participation rate in higher education is
16 per cent (taken as the total higher education enrolment as a percentage of the 20–24
age-group cohort), the participation rate for white students is 60 per cent; for Indians,
51 per cent; and for coloured and African students, a mere 12 per cent each (Scott, Yeld
Hendry 2007: 10). This is a significant concern, and one that relates to complex social,
economic and schooling-related factors. Scott, Yeld and Hendry also analysed completion
rates of black and white students, and found that in most programme areas black students
complete at half the rate of white students (2007: 17). Their analysis points to the effect
of this as a negation of the achievement of greater access by black students. In addition,

4
they make the point that ‘in material terms, the overall performance of the sector indicates
unsatisfactory utilisation of scarce resources. The loss in terms of human resources is,
however, arguably much greater’ (2007: 19).
Further research on the factors that influence students to drop out or interrupt their
studies is also required. Certainly student funding is one such factor and has been
recognised by government as a key policy concern. The National Student Financial
Aid Scheme (NSFAS), to which government contributed over R1 billion in 2006, is a
key vehicle for helping academically able students in financial need to access higher
education. In 2006, over 100 000 students were given NSFAS funds to support
their studies.
However, because of the increasing demand, compounded by high tuition fees in public
higher education institutions, greater amounts are needed to contribute to financial aid for
needy students. Private sector funds often target certain professional study programmes
such as engineering, actuarial science and accounting, making it more difficult to find
private funding outside of these fields. Universities also contribute significant funds of
their own towards student support. Even students funded by the NSFAS, however, have to
contribute some of their own funds to their education, as it is rare for a student to receive
a bursary or scholarship which covers the full costs of study.
While the majority of NSFAS-funded students have to supplement the financial aid they
receive with their own funds, often with difficulty, many of the privately funded students
and the Carnegie scholarship recipients are all fully funded. This means that the total
amounts of their tuition fees, living expenses and book costs are paid in full. Those
students living in university residences are able to study without any financial contribution
from their families. Indeed, many of the students living at home have been able to
contribute to family living costs through their living stipends. The students in the Carnegie
scholarship programme are all in financial need (although need is defined differently and
more broadly than in the NSFAS criteria). Scholarship recipients include students whose
parents and guardians are reliant on state pensions or social grants through to those
whose parents are informal traders and to those whose family members are teachers and
nurses. All the families of Carnegie scholarship recipients would find university education
a prohibitive cost without significant financial aid.
Scholarship programmes for women are not unusual. FAWE (Forum for African Women
Educationalists) has initiated girls’ scholarship programmes in many parts of Africa.3 In
addition, several organisations fund girls-only scholarships in the developing world (for
example, Room to Read, which has programmes in Cambodia, Laos, India and Zambia,
among other countries).4 Other interventions which aim to increase the participation
of women in higher education include affirmative action programmes. For example,
Kwesiga’s comprehensive study of women’s access to higher education in Uganda reports
on Makerere University’s adjustment of entrance requirements (commencing in 1990) to
provide a points bonus of 1.5 to qualifying women students entering higher education,
which has substantially increased enrolments of women (Kwesiga 2002). In countries
where disparities in education between boys and girls at school level are still marked,
affirmative action projects have been seen as necessary to create access and ensure the
3 The FAWE website is www.fawe.org.
4 The Room to Read website is www.roomtoread.org.

5
success of women in higher education. Arguably, without these programmes access
patterns with low involvement of women would continue. Similar assumptions are behind
the Carnegie scholarship programme: without comprehensive financial support and an
affirmative targeting of women students in under-represented areas, the numbers will not
change, as women students continue to access courses traditionally viewed as the domain
of women.
A key question informed the conceptualisation of the research project reported on in
this monograph: If the element of financial concern for women students is eliminated,
how are they affected? Do they all become successful? Do they persevere in their studies
and complete in the minimum required time? Indications are that this is not the case, as
success at university depends on a combination of educational preparedness, schooling
background, personal factors, motivation, and social and institutional factors. Thus, the
study was guided by the understanding that financial support is a necessary but not
sufficient condition for student success. The scholarship programme was thus set up
based on the belief that scholarships increase access to higher education for people who
may not otherwise have access, and increase their chance of success.
The scholarship project: selection of students and support structure
At the time of this study, the Carnegie scholarship programme was open to South African
female students who were entering higher education institutions as full-time students and
who had matriculated within the previous two years. Preference was given to students in
financial need. All students were first-time entrants to higher education. Application forms
were distributed via the provincial networks to schools. No more than two grade 12
applicants were permitted per school, and principals were asked to decide which two
students to put forward for the scholarship application.
Students were selected for a scholarship on the basis of academic merit. They were
required to be within the top 5 per cent of their class in their grade 12 school year, and
they had to demonstrate high marks in maths and science, particularly if they intended to
study in the science or engineering fields. The final scholarship offer was conditional on
their matriculation results and their acceptance into a public South African university. The
selection process was two-tiered: an initial screening and grading of applications and a
provincial shortlisting process (which involved provincial education department officials
who had been part of this project or of some other gender-related schools project in their
province), followed by a final national selection process.
The scholarship programme office was set up primarily as a funding centre responsible
for administering and managing the scholarships, but it also provided a core formal and
informal support programme. A career development workshop was held for each new
intake of scholarship recipients before they began their university careers, focusing on
preparing students for the university experience (including financial planning advice)
and offering a session encouraging the students to begin thinking about their career
choices and decisions. This initiated a process of self-reflection, which was intended to
assist students in succeeding at their studies but also raised questions about how they
had chosen their course of study and whether or not they had made the right decision.
The workshops were initially planned as a once-off starter support, but as we came to
appreciate the importance of continuing to support and engage with the students, as well
as of building a network among each cohort of students, the support workshops were
implemented as an annual activity, with regional-based workshops to keep the costs down.

6
The workshops drew on expertise from the higher education institutions where some of
the students were located, and relationships were formed between students and support
staff at each of the institutions, primarily through the staff’s role of making payments to
students and monitoring their performance, but also by the staff’s provision of broader
support. Additional support for students was provided through a project webpage, which
included an access-controlled zone for students only. The webpage was also used as
a communication tool, although cellphones remained the principal vehicle for student
communication, given the relatively high levels of access to cellphone technology in
South Africa.
Although a sample of students from three institutions participated in this research project,
a total of 150 students were recipients of the scholarship at the time of the study. Of these,
the majority (more than 80 per cent) were black students, and thus broadly representative
of the racial demographics of South Africa. The students were also broadly representative
of the nine South African provinces, although there was some dominance from the larger
provinces and those with a greater number of high-performing schools (Western Cape
and Gauteng). Students in the total cohort were spread across eight institutions in
four regions of the country: the universities of the Free State, Pretoria, Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, Cape Town, Western Cape, Stellenbosch and KwaZulu-Natal. The students
were studying primarily in the health sciences, natural sciences and engineering
programmes. A small number of students were in the economics and commerce fields,
with an even smaller number in the humanities and education. The primary aim of the
scholarship was to provide funding to increase the numbers of women studying in the
science and technology fields, hence the small numbers in other fields, particularly the
humanities, where women were well represented. As indicated above, all students were
identified as being in financial need, but even within the total cohort there was great
diversity of family income (for example, some students had unemployed parents/guardians;
others came from middle-class families of teachers and small business owners).
Reflections on student experiences
This portion of the chapter consists mainly of personal reflection stemming from my role
as scholarship programme manager. Ongoing monitoring was necessary in order for the
programme to adapt and respond to the needs of the students. The opportunity to reflect
came from ongoing close communication with the 150 scholarship students on various
academic and personal matters throughout my tenure.
As programme manager I had privileged access to both personal and academic
information about the students, who came from a variety of academic and social
backgrounds and were studying in a range of programmes at different institutions. While
carrying out my responsibilities gave me an overview of a wide spectrum of student
experiences, writing about them for this research report is a very different activity from
feeding back ideas to the management of the programme. To illustrate, my role produced
a paradoxical relationship with the students: I was both a support person and a controller
of funds. I controlled the students’ access to the scholarship and their continued funding
from year to year and, at the same time, supported them and facilitated their access to
services. Thus, on the one hand, I provided positive encouragement and support and,
on the other, pressure and sanction where necessary. I had some privileged information
about them and their studies, as well as about their scholarship support. This paradoxical
relationship meant that information could also be withheld from me, as someone in
power over the students, if it was deemed not suitable for my ears.

7
My position required that I provide support to students while keeping an eye on the
interests of the scholarship investment. For example, I would have regular telephonic
discussions with students who had produced worrying mid-year results. I would ask the
student: What is happening? Do you need any help? Is there anything I can do? Have
you thought about obtaining additional support by joining a study group or getting
academic counselling? I would try to ensure that they were making full use of the support
mechanisms available to them and that they were being realistic about their academic
situation, and I also wanted them to know that someone cared. However, behind my
supportive questions and statements lay a strong concern about whether students were
making sensible decisions and choices about improving their academic results. I needed
to assess whether they had analysed their situation accurately and whether they knew
what needed to be done to improve their marks. Further, did they realise that their
scholarship would be in jeopardy if they did not improve their results? I would also
be trying to ascertain whether there were more complex personal reasons for poor
performance. Had something happened in their personal life to affect performance –
such as a family problem or a relationship difficulty – or were they experiencing some
form of depression where a professional intervention might be necessary? Perhaps they
were just partying too much?! In many cases, this kind of information was very difficult to
get out of the student from my relatively distanced position, and because I was not acting
in a professional counselling capacity, I often remained ignorant about the actual reasons
for a student’s poor performance.
On a professional level, my concern was motivated by the need for accountability to the
programme funder. Could we be sure we had selected the right group of students for the
scholarship? Were they headed for success? Could we minimise any likelihood of student
failure? The more successful the group of students, the happier the funder will be and the
more funding can be mobilised for further scholarships.
The reflections that follow are made with an acknowledgement of the study’s
methodological constraints. Many of the ideas discussed emerged in feedback from a
series of student support workshops held between 2003 and 2006. Some of these were
introductory workshops and others were part of the ongoing support programmes put in
place through the scholarship programme. In the absence of a formal evaluation of the
programme, much of the insight gained comes from anecdotal evidence and informal
interaction with students, as well as their comments within the workshop settings. I should
reiterate that I gathered information not as a researcher or an interviewer, but as an insider
working towards the dual goal of supporting students as much as possible while ensuring
responsible disbursement of scholarship funds. It is because of this that my status as
author of this chapter is not so much that of researcher as that of inside commentator.
The perspectives come from a combination of active programme reflection, student
observation, and reports on the student workshops, which include students’ own
reflections (usually offered on an anonymous basis within a group of 20 or more
students) and informal student evaluations of workshops. It is important to note that
the primary role of the workshops was to provide student support, and not to provide
research material for this project. However, it was through the engagement with students
at all these levels that the project was able to grow and develop in response to the
students’ needs, and researchers were able to learn more about the students’ experiences.
Comments and reflections from the scholarship recipients are therefore privileged
information that can provide only a general overview of these students’ experiences
at university.

8
Student experiences of higher education institutions
The reflections on student experiences in this section are organised around five themes:
coping with academic adjustment and pressure; messages of officialdom; career planning;
health; and coping with different identities.
Coping with academic adjustment and pressure
Coping with the academic demands at university was a substantial issue for the
scholarship recipients, and possibly the one into which I had the most insight given my
role in relation to the students. Regardless of one’s academic background, the adjustment
from school to university is an enormous one. Very few students are prepared for the
volume and level of work that they face when entering university. This is often quite a
shock for students, some of whom adapt better and more quickly than others to the new
situation. The scholarship students in this study had particular expectations of themselves
as they were all top performers at their school and in many cases top matriculants in
their province.
Many high-performing students enter university with the expectation that they can
continue to score over 80 per cent in tests and assignments, and they find it difficult
to adapt to receiving lower marks. Families also sometimes find this change difficult to
understand. For many students the transition from school to university is so huge that
they fail subjects in their degree area, particularly in the first year. There can be many
reasons for this: school background is key, but students find academic integration difficult
for all kinds of reasons. Managing study time without regular supervision is a challenge
and takes self-discipline. Finding a balance between the new social life of university and
the heavy academic workload is another challenge. Nearly all the scholarship students
claimed the transition was a major shock, even if they managed to adapt quite effectively.
Such issues are not new to the academic community in South Africa and elsewhere. For
example, Carolyn Jackson (2003) has studied the gendered implications of what she
calls ‘academic self-concept’ and notes that many university students move from being
‘big fish’ in their sixth-form environment to being much smaller fish in a bigger pond.
Positive academic self-concept has been shown to improve academic performance. In
South Africa, university academic development and support programmes have been set
up in response to the fact that South African matriculants are generally under-prepared
for higher education study and that the adjustment they face can be steep. What surprised
those of us in the programme was the consistency of the shock response among the
scholarship students. Our assumption was that students would be affected differently
depending on the quality of teaching and support they had received at their school.
However, although the quality of schooling may influence student academic experiences
differently (from which stems the assumption that students from high-performing schools
tend to cope better in higher education institutions), this should be further tested. It is
not clear from the scholarship students’ experience that quality of schooling has a direct
correlation with success at university.
Furthermore, my reflections on the students’ experiences are informed by the belief
that living arrangements are key to being able to study effectively. Students commuting
between home and the university spend significant amounts of time actually travelling
and may be responsible for home chores as well as their studies. Students in residence
have easier access to university libraries and computer facilities. However, the latter can
be distracted by activities around them in the residence, and unless they have a quiet

9
place to study in their living space they may find studying very difficult. At a number of
universities, first-year students are exposed to a lot of pressure to participate in residence/
hostel activities, including Rag (a fundraising event), house meetings and social events.
In some institutions hostels have their own uniforms, which first-year students are
expected to purchase and wear. There did not seem to be a universal response to these
pressures among the scholarship students. While some black students in particular were
uncomfortable about participating in these activities and felt that residence life increased
their alienation from university culture, others felt that such participation was a way of
making people feel at home.
Some of the psychological challenges for students may be related to the expectations
of family, scholarship providers and the university. Although students are expected to
complete a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in three years, or an engineering degree in
four years, the majority of students do not complete in the minimum time required. Most
students in South African universities will take at least an extra year to complete their
degree. This may be the result of a structural problem in the higher education system,
but it is important to recognise that it is unusual for students to finish in the minimum
time. What the student throughput study mentioned earlier may show us is that not only
have students dropped out along the way, but some students are finishing their degrees in
greatly extended time. Indeed, it may be that you set a student up for failure if you expect
her to struggle to finish in a prescribed time-frame when in fact she would perform much
better with an additional year to complete her studies. Although in the minority, a number
of students in this programme did require an additional year of support.
Data obtained in 2008 from the Carnegie–South Africa scholarship office in the DoE
indicate a 3 per cent dropout rate overall for the programme, which is significantly lower
than the national average – as would be expected where full funding is available. Of
the students that have graduated, the majority are employed in a related area of work
or are continuing with postgraduate study. Seventy per cent of the scholarship recipients
will have completed by 2008. Some of those still to complete are students in medical
programmes, who may take six or seven years to finish their studies.
Messages of officialdom
It is clear through my interactions with students that they took very seriously the formal
and informal messages they received from within the university. Formal messages refer
to those that students received from representatives of the university administration,
residence supervisors or lecturing staff, while informal messages are those they picked up
from fellow students and from the wider university environment.
In this regard, two strong messages predominated in the university culture for a number
of students. The one was a surprisingly common message from lecturing staff to
undergraduate students: one or other version of ‘you will fail’, ‘only 50 per cent of you
will make it through’, or ‘look at the person next to you, one of you will not be here at
the end of the year’. In one support session for a group of over 50 scholarship recipients,
students were asked how many of them had received messages like this, and all but one
or two hands went up.
This negative-encouragement approach attempts to frighten students into hard work but
also feeds into students’ own concerns about their ability to succeed at university. With
students already feeling overwhelmed in many cases, the negative approach can further
undermine self-esteem and lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Among the scholarship

10
students, it is possible that there were some who responded well to the ‘fear’ approach,
but most students seemed to be made uneasy or worried by these experiences. Some
of them seemed to take the messages to heart and assumed that they would be among
those on the failing end. A combination of a negative lecturer and a few low marks can
seriously affect the self-esteem of a student already struggling with the academic and
social challenges of university life. Despite this, a number of students reported that they
liked the independence that being at university offers, and although the work was a
struggle, they accepted this as a reality of the journey towards their goals.
A counter-message was adopted within the scholarship programme: a ‘we believe in
you’ approach, conveying to the students that they were supported even if they did not
do as well as we – or they – had hoped. This approach was informed by the belief that
while it is necessary to build in checks and balances for poor academic performance, it
is still possible to send students encouraging messages. It may be that the ‘sink or swim’
message works for students who are comfortable with their direction and confident about
their own ability. In our experience, however, it was damaging to young people who
were questioning their own abilities, facing tough challenges for the first time and
feeling uncertain about where they are going. We spent a lot of time countering these
negative messages.
The second strong message for many students was that a university career should be a
smooth journey from point A to point B, first year to final year – passing, having fun and
graduating at the end of it. This particular message appeared to exist most strongly in
the informal culture of a university, and suggested that a person is somehow not good
enough if he or she does not fit perfectly into the linear pattern. The reality, however, is
that very few students do in fact proceed smoothly through their university careers.
Roughly one-fifth of the scholarship recipients were formally placed by the university
in programmes with extended completion times. These programmes have been seen by
some as a racist plot to undermine and ghettoise black students, while over time the
success of certain programmes has brought about greater belief in and support for them.
Although the stigma continues, in my experience many students seemed to appreciate
the space, time and support allowed them by extended programmes. Given the reality of
slower completion rates, students who are formally placed in a programme with the space
to complete their studies in a longer period are often in a much stronger position than
students in mainstream programmes. They receive more support, greater understanding
and often special attention which the mainstream students do not get. The additional
strength of formal extended academic programmes is that students do not feel alone
and isolated. While some scholarship students were initially upset about their placement
in these programmes, most of them understood after a while that they were in a much
stronger position. Students not on extended programmes would be held back for failing a
key subject, a much more frustrating and depressing experience.
How do students define success, then, in relation to these messages and their own
standards of performance? They come to university and find out it is tougher than they
thought; they discover they have to adapt to lower performance; in many cases they have
to learn what it is like to fail something; and they are faced with the hard reality of the
study choices they have made. What also influences success or failure is how students
respond to such challenges. Are they willing to access the support that is available at
the well-resourced universities? All the students in the scholarship programme were well
informed about the kinds of services, both academic and psychological, available to

11
them. However, it was often only with significant encouragement from those of us in the
scholarship office, or in some circumstances after making it compulsory, that many of the
students accessed these services. Some answers to how the students in this study defined
success are found in the case studies reported in later chapters of this monograph.
Career planning
Career planning was a key concern of the scholarship programme from the point of
receiving applications through to the graduation of scholarship recipients. The challenges
of recruiting high-performing young women for undergraduate study in the science fields
were considerable. The minimal levels of career guidance at schools, the poor support
and subject advice offered at schools, and the formidable financial barriers to applying
for higher education admission were highlighted through this process. Access to higher
education and science courses in particular is influenced by a complex set of factors.
These include the lack of information about higher education study and subject mix;
misconceptions about the relationship between finance provision and admission to higher
education; the timing of application for higher education study; and the lack of clarity
about what students actually want to study.
In 2003, out of an application group of around 2 000 grade 12 students, only 86 per
cent of the applicants for science programmes were actually studying mathematics at
the Senior Certificate level. Of these students, only 29 per cent were doing mathematics
at higher grade level, increasingly a prerequisite for entrance to university science
programmes. In 2004, out of a group of 1 800 applicants, only 70 per cent were taking
mathematics. Furthermore, out of the 2003 applicant cohort, only 42 per cent of the
applicants had applied for a university place by the time of application for the scholarship
in October of their grade 12 year. This suggested that although the students applying for a
scholarship intended to study at university, very few had actually taken steps to make this
a possibility. Discussions with teachers and principals revealed that many of them were
under the misconception that students should obtain financial assistance before applying
for a university place, whereas most such funding is obtained once a student has obtained
a place to study.
This misconception affected a number of students on the scholarship shortlist. In one
case, a student had applied for a provincial scholarship to study medicine, with the
understanding that by applying for the scholarship she was also applying for a university
place to study medicine. Once she had received a provisional scholarship offer, we
discovered that the university had no record of her application. At this stage, it was far
too late for her to apply for admission to study medicine, one of the most competitive
university programmes, but it was possible for us to assist her in getting a place in the
BSc degree programme. Another student applied to study chemical engineering, another
competitive course. Despite having good results, she was turned down by the university
concerned. She was not placed on a waiting list or in an alternative programme. On
investigation we discovered that she had not put down a second-choice course of study,
and the university had rejected her outright. Again, after some negotiation, we were able
to obtain a place for her in the chemistry department by adding a second choice to her
university application form. At registration, she managed to gain a place in the chemical
engineering programme, because she had by then been placed on the shortlist. Both
these cases are examples of students who may have not made it to university without
our assistance, because they did not have adequate information about how to apply for
admission to university programmes.

12
A number of the scholarship students began to question their choice of study programme
early on. Within strict frameworks we were in most cases able to accommodate changes
to the students’ courses, where the changes were carefully considered and supported
by advice from university career counsellors. However, some changes could not be
considered because they were ill-considered or badly planned. A small number of
students made radical changes to their courses which we could not support and advised
against. These decisions were often influenced by family members and, in a small number
of cases, students and their families were prepared to jeopardise scholarship funding
rather than maintain their original choice of study programme.
In several cases, however, we were able to accommodate changes to students’ choice of
study programme, especially in cases where students were able to carry over credits from
previous courses or where the change was well motivated. In one instance, a student
changed from a microbiology degree programme to a degree in film and media studies.
This choice was well supported by the student’s careers advisor, and the student realised
her desire to change early on in her studies. She was persistent in wanting to make the
change and was clearly passionate about her new choice of study programme.
The scholarship programme attempted to address these issues early on through a pre-
university career development workshop, which encouraged students to think about the
reasons for their choice of subject and their future plans, and to reflect on their own
skills and strengths in relation to their course of study. Early discussions with students
showed that their choices of study programme were often haphazard – influenced by
the suggestion of teachers or families; chosen because the scholarship opportunity arose;
and very often selected because the degree course was perceived as the best route to a
good job. Very few students had chosen their courses based on a passion for the area of
study. Ill-considered choices often provoke an identity crisis down the line, as students
realise that it is too late to change their course of study. From experiences with students
in the scholarship programme, it became clear that student decision-making about
career choices is a complex area requiring deeper research, as it is questionable whether
students are in a position to make solid career decisions at the time of entering university.
Only a small number of scholarship students were interested in continuing to
postgraduate studies. Many expressed the view that they wanted to go straight out and
work after receiving their undergraduate degree, and believed that postgraduate studies
would over-qualify them for a job. Very few students had been encouraged to pursue
postgraduate study and to consider academic careers. After a student support session in
which scholarship recipients were introduced to young women academics in the early
stages of their academic careers, one student commented that she would really like
to become a researcher, but that she had no idea that ‘someone like me’ could be an
academic. She was in the third year of a BSc degree programme, and this was the first
time that she had been encouraged to consider postgraduate study.
Nonetheless, a number of the scholarship recipients have gone on to do postgraduate
studies.5 While the majority of students, particularly those who did not attend formerly
advantaged ex-Model C schools, reported receiving no career guidance support at school,
a more important issue they raised was that school did not prepare them for the level
and rigour of academic work at university. This comes through in more detail in the case
study chapters as a dominant challenge for many students.
5 Carnegie–South Africa scholarship office, DoE, 2008, pers. comm.

13
Health
Students in higher education are often affected by stress-related problems. For some
students, this stress is directly related to coping with rigorous academic demands,
but students also experience stress as they face the complexity of adjustment to
university life at all levels, including academic, social, financial and other personal
issues. My reflections with regard to this theme are informed by the belief that financial
independence does not appear to eliminate stress entirely. A number of students
identified as being generally ‘stressed’. However, a few also identified as being depressed.
With support from student counsellors and, in some cases, from external psychologists
and psychiatrists, these students were able to address at least some aspects of their
depression. Some of the depression may well have been influenced by external factors
such as family pressure, but it is impossible to state this with certainty. The real causes of
depression were not clear from interactions with students and from limited psychological
reports. In a few cases, it is possible that the students had some kind of substance-
abuse problem. What is certain is that depression, in whatever form it comes, has a clear
effect on academic performance. A small number of the scholarship group developed
depression in their second and third years. This was evidenced by high-performing
students dropping their marks in some cases by 30 or 40 per cent.
A majority of the scholarship students were preoccupied with issues of food, exercise and
weight. These issues were brought up regularly by students at the support workshops.
Students found it difficult to manage their weight, particularly those students in catering
residences or hostels who were not in control of cooking and preparing their own food.
Students struggled with finding time to exercise and controlling the amounts and type of
food they ate. Having to eat at set times also left little flexibility for students wanting to
control their eating. Student discussions often revealed strong views about weight. They
believed that women should be thin and should be able to control their weight, that fat
is a sign of weakness, and that having the right looks and wearing the right clothes are
a very important part of being at university. Peer pressure to look a certain way was a
particular difficulty for students who did not come from wealthy backgrounds but were in
a university where there were large numbers of wealthy students.
Despite these issues being a common topic in my interaction with students, they do not
come through strongly in the case study chapters that follow. Indeed, concern about
weight may be too ordinary a set of experiences, or perhaps too personal an issue, to have
been mentioned. In fact, the discussions that informed this theme may have happened
simply as a direct result of the necessary administration of a scholarship programme.
During my four years as programme manager, there were six cases in which students
suffered family tragedies, losing close relatives and breadwinners during their course of
study. Obviously, this impacted negatively on the students’ performance in their studies.
Among the students in the programme, there were two cases of serious illness, and one
student passed away.
Coping with different identities
One of the most interesting and rewarding things about running a scholarship programme
like this was watching students meet challenges, grow, and develop their own identities.
The first year of university is hard. These three cohorts of students entered university with
a strong sense of pride at their huge achievements – getting a place to study at a top
university, and winning a scholarship on top of that. They truly believed that they could

14
do anything, that they were young women in the new South Africa and that this was
their time. This was a highly individualistic group, the TV generation repeating popular
mantras of ‘you can be anything you want’. The dynamic of expectation was fairly high.
Unfortunately, the feeling of ‘I can do anything’ turned quickly into the shock of false
self-esteem for many students. The reality that they were not alone in their brilliance
or achievement, or that no one at university thought they were brilliant, forced them to
re-evaluate what they thought of themselves. This is a difficult process for students to go
through. Toni and Olivier (2004) wrote about this in relation to African female first-year
students at the University of Port Elizabeth (now Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University).
They found that students entering university had very clear goals for successful careers
and felt positive and proud, but that over time they became discouraged and confused,
and this affected their academic identities. The students related this negative trajectory to
the university environment being unsupportive and alienating.
In the case of the scholarship recipients, many students came to value the freedom and
independence that comes with being a scholarship student at university with no financial
worries. Gradually becoming aware of their independence over time, they learnt to
embrace and celebrate it. Those in their second year and beyond would start to focus
on this independence as a very important part of their identity. Many of them mentioned
this as the best thing about the scholarship programme and about their experience of
university. The scholarship programme gave them the freedom to make their own choices
and determine their own lives because they had financial independence, which appeared
to give many students the opportunity to regain some level of confidence in themselves.
At university, students must also learn the difficult lesson that with agency and choice
comes responsibility. In particular, scholarship students had to learn that they had a
responsibility to their scholarship sponsors: they needed to pass their subjects well and to
take the initiative to address problems when they arose. They had to take responsibility
for their work, for their personal decisions and for their own mental health. Some
students had difficulty taking on these responsibilities. For example, one student planned
to abandon her studies in the third year to take on a full-time job, another student took
up an alternative scholarship after two years of funding and a third student changed to
a different course without seeking the permission of the scholarship manager. These
students struggled with decision-making in the context of their academic careers and did
not seek advice. A dilemma for the scholarship programme staff was how to treat students
as adults, allowing them the space to make their own decisions while ensuring that they
were monitored and held to a certain set of values and rules, yet also supporting them
where necessary. Our concern was, where did our responsibility end and theirs begin?
Other challenges related to handling independence and responsibility were budgeting
and managing funds; dealing with diversity (religious, racial and class diversity and other
identities); maintaining one’s own values in the face of peer pressure; making friends and
negotiating relationships; dealing with the challenges of language; and so on.
Family expectations influenced many aspects of student life, but were mostly hidden
from us. In poorer families the scholarship money could create tension as students were
expected to help cover family costs rather than divert funds to their own needs as a
student. Other issues included a lack of understanding of the challenges of academic
achievement by some families, and in some cases strong interference in student decisions.
Sometimes students would take the advice of parents that clearly contradicted the
advice of the university or scholarship programme. In two cases students forfeited their
scholarship because of parental decisions.

15
We discovered that cohort-building was an important way of assisting students in dealing
with the challenges of university. Through being part of a group of students, scholarship
recipients knew that they were being supported and that they were not the only ones
experiencing something difficult or overwhelming. Knowing that an experience is
common to others boosts self-confidence, and workshops gave students a space to share
their problems and to feel less alone.
Conclusion
This chapter has attempted to provide a broad overview of the Carnegie scholarship
programme that funded the students in this study and others across eight universities in
South Africa. It has also presented my reflections of the programme and the students’
experiences thereof over my four years as programme manager. The five themes I identify
as impacting on students’ experiences – coping with academic adjustment and pressure;
messages of officialdom; career planning; health; and coping with different identities –
were discussed in the research planning and incorporated into the project methodologies.
For the scholarship programme, the questions that remained unanswered were: What
are the issues students could not raise through official channels? How can this research
project tell us more about student identities and decision-making in the context of their
university experiences?
While financial support may offer students the freedom to find their independence and
use their agency, this is not a sufficient mechanism for ensuring success at university.
While scholarships offer some protection from financial concerns, they are not enough
to counter the effects of the students’ schooling backgrounds. Nor can the scholarships
ensure students’ preparedness for university study or their social and academic integration
into university life. My experiences in my four years as programme manager have made
it clear that although young people may emphasise their independence and autonomy,
social dynamics and their effect on students need to be investigated more deeply. The
case studies that follow provide insights into what factors students view as significant
influences on their experiences of university.

17
Chapter 2
Overview of the research project
Linda Chisholm
Introduction
The focus on women students by the Carnegie–South Africa Undergraduate Women’s
Scholarship Programme emanates from a foundation’s interest in women’s access and
rights to higher education and public positions.6 It parallels a development discourse that
spans bilateral and multilateral organisations, national governments and non-governmental
organisations. Within recent years this discourse has begun to cohere around the
achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs include two
goals that deal directly with girls and gender equity, but these focus only on primary and
secondary education. Not only do they beg the question of whether potential is realised
when full enrolment is achieved for both boys and girls at secondary level; they also beg
the question of access to higher education.
Since 1994, the South African government has to all intents and purposes revolutionised
women’s access to higher education. Never before in the nation’s history have the
instruments existed to this extent to enable women to succeed in institutions from which
they were previously barred. Substantial gains have been made, and yet the evidence for
women’s under-representation in traditionally male areas and in high-level degree work
continues to stream forth. International evidence suggests that such gender patterns in
higher education are deep and intractable but not unalterable (Arnot, David Weiner
1999). The literature also indicates that providing access is not enough on its own. More
must be done to realise gender equity in terms of participation and outcomes.
In Australia, which experienced a similarly heady but eventually disillusioning period as
did South Africa, feminist studies of institutional culture began to emerge in the 1980s
when it became clear that simply emphasising access and parity in order to redress a
gender imbalance was not in itself either desirable or sufficient to ensure institutional
power and improved outcomes for the majority of women (Blackmore Kenway 1989;
Ferguson 1984; Franzway, Court Connell 1989). These studies were situated mostly
within a strong socialist feminist movement and its broader understandings of the
state and bureaucracy. They highlighted the informal rather than the formal culture of
institutions and explored how ‘hegemonic masculinities’ and ‘femininities’ might operate
to reproduce the ‘impersonal technical rationality of bureaucratic discourse which is the
major barrier to gender equality’ (Blackmore Kenway 1989: 22). Their concern was not
focused only on institutions of higher education, yet the analysis seems pertinent. When
politics and economics no longer seem to pose the main barriers, then there is commonly
a turn to institutional, or cultural, or institutional culture explanations.
This turn has occurred in higher education studies in Africa, where a substantial literature
has developed that focuses on institutional culture to explore the gender dynamics of
universities on the African continent (Barnes Mama 2007; Gaidzanwa 2007; Ismail 2000;
Kwesiga 2002; Mabokela 2000; Mabokela King 2001; Manuh et al. 2007; Pereira 2007).
6 This chapter was written in discussion with, and benefited from the insights of the team members.

18
Some of this recent work, as Lewin shows in Chapter 1, is supported by the Carnegie
Corporation and other foundations. These studies are interested not so much in
quantitative analyses illustrating gender discrepancies in student and staff bodies of
universities as in more fine-grained, qualitative analyses of powerful patriarchal cultures
in the African academy. They describe and analyse attempts to change policy, as well as
programmes that create women’s-only spaces for professional development (Orr, Rorich
and Dowling 2006 and Shackleton 2007; see also Barnes and Mama 2007). They parallel
similar work conducted on race and institutional culture (Jansen 2005; Steyn Van Zyl
2001). Examples of this work are contained in two recent issues of Feminist Africa (issues
8 and 9) that published research from the Gender and Institutional Culture in African
Universities (GICAU) research project undertaken by the African Gender Institute at the
University of Cape Town to investigate institutional culture in African universities. Much of
this work has focused on institutional culture in relation to academic staff.
From this perspective, institutional cultures in South Africa are important to consider
when attempting to understand the differentials in outcomes and effectiveness of the
system or projects for students. After more than a decade of interventions and policies
focusing on structures and access, and apparently little to show for it, institutional culture
seems to hold the key to understanding why, for example, women are enrolling in
higher education in significant numbers but not entering traditional male fields in greater
numbers. Why this is, and how successful or not students are both at university and
beyond, seems to be linked to institutional culture.
But researchers who have used the concept of institutional culture to explain and describe
the discomforts students and staff experience in South African universities all acknowledge
the difficulty of defining it. They invariably discuss it in terms of their own concerns, either
with institutions’ ‘whiteness’ or ‘maleness’ or ‘new managerialist’ practices (Higgins 2007;
Jansen 2005; Shackleton 2007; Steyn Van Zyl 2001). As Higgins has pointed out:
[T]he instability of the term…arises from the fact that institutional culture
looks different, depending on who is seeing it and from where…in the end
institutional culture is less of a concept than a representation that screens
a number of problems…It serves as a surface on which various social
contradictions and tensions can be projected…It is a term that mimes conceptual
density, but lacks conceptual force, while its apparently appealing explanatory
force is often undermined by its actual contents. (Higgins 2007: 114, 116)
For these reasons, our research study was less concerned with an ill-defined institutional
culture than with students’ experiences of academic and social life in institutions that can
be considered to be raced, gendered and classed in specific, historically defined ways,
and with how these experiences link to subjectivity and identity-formation.
The concepts of academic and social integration, subjectivity and identity are also
problematic and elusive ideas that embody a range of assumptions. A theoretical
framework for understanding student integration into university academic and social life is
developed in Chapter 3, on the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The framework is not used
in the same way in Chapters 4 and 5, on the University of Pretoria and the University
of Cape Town respectively: while the broad concepts shaped the approach, analysis
was guided by emerging evidence and research orientations of individual, collaborating
researchers. As far as identity and subjectivity are concerned, researchers in this project
all worked with a non-essentialist concept of identity, an understanding that emphasises
its context-bound – albeit fluid and changing – character and the contradictions and
intersections of class, race and gender identity (see Chapter 5 for further discussion).

19
Methodological framework and design
Focus on gender or women?
Understanding the experiences of both male and female students at universities is
important. Very little is known about how both women and men from different class
and race backgrounds experience these institutions. Both men and women students
undoubtedly experience similar class, race and gender challenges. We know, for example,
that financial constraints and poor preparation in secondary schools trouble the success
of male and female students at university equally. How are dominant gender institutional
cultures and regimes experienced by different genders? How do gender and hegemonic
masculinities and constructions of ‘success’ affect men who come into institutions
diversely constituted as men? How, too, do they affect women? Both international
and local literature suggests that universities, being male-dominated in terms of their
institutional culture and androcentric in terms of their intellectual culture, are tougher
places for women to succeed than they are for men, whether women voice this or
not. This is especially the case when women enter fields such as engineering that are
historically male-dominated and ‘masculinist’ in their culture.
The project reported on in this monograph was originally intended as involving both
men and women students’ experiences of academic and social institutional cultures and
the ways in which these experiences are linked to gender identity and subjectivity. In the
end, the study focused only on women students for two main reasons. One was financial:
available resources limited the size of the study. Another was that the experiences of
young women are themselves worth exploring.
When the study began in 2006, a ‘boys’ failing’ and ‘crisis of masculinity’ discourse had
emerged in South Africa similar to that in other parts of the world. Public discourse was
positioning girls and women students as successful in relation to boys and men students
and drawing away from the continuing inequalities between boys and girls in schools and
the wider society. Any discussion of the position of girls in any public or policy space was
constantly countered by the statement, ‘And what about the boys? The boys are the problem
and require the intervention.’ Similarly, research of higher education was emphasising
high enrolments of women students relative to men and inviting a similar focus.
Researchers first began to highlight the achievements of girls at school as opposed to
boys in the early 2000s (Perry 2003). Provincial departments of education, such as the
Gauteng Department of Education, produced internal research showing that significantly
more boys than girls were failing and dropping out.7 The national Department of
Education (DoE) ministerial committee report on learner retention (DoE 2007) did not
disaggregate information by gender, but the high numbers of dropouts at the upper end
of schooling are often assumed to be male, as DoE statistics have shown that girls stay in
school longer than boys. The DoE’s official statistical analyses that now include a Gender
Parity Index (DoE 2008: 7, 11) enable more careful tracking of gender inequality in
education, and also reveal that in both school and higher education women students are
ahead of men in some areas but not in others. Such evidence does have the potential of
making an argument for greater focus of attention on boys and young male students.
7 M. Sujee 2004, pers. comm. Sujee is the Director of Education Evaluation Planning and Monitoring in the Gauteng
Department of Education.

20
Discussing the impact of the boys’ movement in Australia, Kenway (2004) called for a
contextualisation of its emergence and the recognition that a distinction needs to be
drawn between gender fundamentalism (in the boys’ and women’s movement) and
a gender politics that is more open. The context of emergence of a boys’ or men’s
movement in South Africa and recognition that it is important to consider men in the
society is economic, political and social. On the one hand, financial austerity programmes
and the inability of the state to turn around deep-seated and high levels of unemployment
through economic policy have continued to leave thousands of young men (and
women) on the margins of the society, unable to gain a foothold in it. Efforts to improve
enrolments in the education system have also been unable to stem the extrusion from
schools of boys (along with girls) living in economically stressed households. Politically,
South Africa’s democracy emerged out of intense conflict and violence. As is typically the
case in post-conflict societies, the sudden and very visible rise of women to positions of
power as well as the guarantee of constitutional rights provoked a backlash among men
(Turshen, Meintjes Pillay 2002). Violence against women has thus continued in the new
democracy. Within this context, a discourse of ‘crisis/victim/restore the balance’ (Kenway
2004: 48) has resonated across the board. Important work has been done in South Africa
to highlight the particularities of masculinity in the society and its relationship to the
broader social context. Starting out on this project, we believed that a new focus on
young women students could be illuminating in unanticipated ways. They are part of a
new generation schooled in post-apartheid South Africa. Their gender subjectivities and
how they experience gendered institutional cultures are likely to say something not only
about gender and new constructions of the nation, but also about differentiations between
men and women and among women themselves.
Relationship between the public and private
When we began the study, we had three institutions in mind: family, school and
university. Although the focus was on women’s experiences in higher education, we
wanted to understand the link between public and private institutions. The link between
students’ public educational experiences and their private, personal and family lives –
especially the roles of mothers, fathers, siblings and friends – was considered important
(Arnot 2000; Stromquist 2003). We thus aimed to explore the students’ family and school
background and experience, as well their experience of the higher education institution
in which they found themselves. ‘Experience’ is a tricky concept and is not immediately
accessible or transparent to the researcher. For this reason, we quickly began to interpret
‘experience’ through more specific concepts.
University institutional culture was seen as comprising social and academic dimensions.
Students’ sense of integration into both would provide an understanding of the nature
of the university’s institutional culture and students’ relationship to it. Here, we intended
to focus on the social relationships between young men and women, curricular
content, classroom dynamics, labelling practices, lecturer expectations, peer dynamics,
organisational arrangements, sexual harassment, lecturer and student support and other
academic experiences. These, in turn, were to be contextualised within wider institutional
history and the institution’s social goals and objectives. The links between subject
positionings and the sense of integration into academic and social university life were to
provide the basis for the analysis of gender subjectivity and institutional culture.
Specific questions were formulated for each of these areas. Institutional culture, academic
culture, home and university and adjustments, and career decision-making were all
considered in relation to students’ constructions of themselves and in relation to the

21
concept of ‘success’ and what it meant for them. Through this construct we specifically
intended to understand how students negotiate gendered terrains and constructions of
themselves and others, but we also anticipated that we would elicit a range of responses
from commitment to the institution to indifference (drawing on a typology provided by
Bernstein 1975). As it turned out, some of our assumptions were turned on their heads.
And to understand this, we needed to situate the discourses much more firmly within a
broader historical context.
Negotiating subjectivities in gendered institutional spaces
It was clear from the literature reviewed that much of the existing research was either on
barriers and constraints to entering historically male-dominated fields and more senior
positions in academia or on the success stories of academic women (see Chapter 1).
There was a gap in our knowledge on women at undergraduate level and their social and
academic experiences of institutions.
By far the most exciting work to us was that which probed policy in practice and the
cultural processes of identity formation. The work was originally inspired by the work
of Jane Kenway and Sue Willis (1998), and particularly by Kenway’s cultural materialist
approach to understanding gender relations. Concerned with the material, social and
cultural conditions of subjectivity formation, this approach includes analysis of macro-
and micro-level policy. At the macro-level, gender regimes of education institutions are
written through their policy- and curriculum-making processes. At the micro-level – the
domain of policy in practice – such framings are received, understood and enacted in
different ways.
Through discourse, subjects are constituted and constitute fields of practice. But it is
important to bear in mind that ‘social institutions…are made up of many different and
often contradictory discourses and discursive fields’ (Kenway Willis 1998: xviii). Some
of these are dominant, some subordinate, some peacefully coexisting, some struggling
for ascendancy. For Kenway and Willis, gendered meanings are unstable and constantly
struggled over – it is this aspect, of struggle, negotiation, contingency and instability,
that we wanted to explore more closely in this study. Is social and academic integration
in institutions linked to struggles over gender, gender identity and gender boundaries?
How are these identities linked to family and educational history, career decision-making,
choice and perceptions of success?
Selection of students
Our research focused on students from the geographically and historically distinct
universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Pretoria and Cape Town. We selected eight scholarship
students from each institutional site on the basis of race, social class, year and field of
study. Of the total cohort of 24 students, 5 students were designated white, 3 Indian, 4
coloured and 12 African. The majority of parents were in low income to lower-middle
income brackets. All the students were in traditionally male-dominated fields of study.
Profiles of the student participants are given in Table 2.1.

22
Table 2.1 Student profiles
Name* Racial classification Parents’ income source Field of study
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Khanyisa African Pension grant Physiotherapy
Lucia Coloured Small business Medicine
Nonhle African Disability grant Biomedicine
Sarah White (with a disability) Small business Psychology
Seresha Indian Small business Biomolecular
technology
Thobile African Small business Biomedicine
Thula African Pension grant Medicine
Zoe Indian Small business Engineering
University of Pretoria
Keshani Indian F: Teacher**
M: Teacher**
Medicine
Lerato African F: Correctional officer
M: Unemployed
Economics
Lizette Coloured M: Financial assistant Maths and Science
Marijke White F: Draughtswoman Architecture
Marise White F: Minister of religion
M: Pension grant
Biochemistry
Nolwazi African F: Not known
M: Not known
Informatics
Susan White F: Self-employed
M: Unemployed
Multimedia
Thandeka African M: Deputy Chief
Education
Specialist
Aunt: Unemployed
Chemical engineering
University of Cape Town
Angela White M: Tutor
F: Lecturer
Electrical engineering
Ayanda African M: Teacher
F: Teacher
Medicine
Camilla Coloured M: Unemployed
F: Driver
Biology
Kelebone African M: Unemployed
F: Unemployed
Business science
➔

23
Name* Racial classification Parents’ income source Field of study
Lulama African M: Lecturer Medicine
Nazeema Coloured M: Hawker
F: Driver
Chemical engineering
Ntswaki African M: Unemployed Chemical engineering
Tumelo African M: Unemployed Medicine
*The names used here and throughout the monograph are all pseudonyms.
**F = father; M = mother.
Methods
Our research methods combined a range of qualitative methods: a short biographical
questionnaire, focus group and life history interviews, and visual methodology
(photographs selected by and/or taken by participants). Researchers were divided
into teams of two people per institution, except for the programme officer. Each team
employed the same strategies in each institution. We prepared for the study through
extensive discussion and joint training sessions. All students filled in bio-questionnaires
that provided the information in Table 2.1. An initial focus group interview was conducted
with the eight students (or with however many were available at any one time). Four
students were then selected from the eight and were individually interviewed, once in
2006 and once in 2007. Based in part on existing and new photographs that the young
women had selected, depicting their past, present and future experiences, the interviews
obtained a life history from the students, and also elicited specific information around
their academic and social integration into university life. Finally, one of the students was
observed for a period of a week, in lectures, in the university residence and on campus.
Detailed field notes of observations were recorded. These three data sources – the focus
group, the in-depth interview and the observation data – were used as the basis for the
analysis that follows in Chapters 3–5.
Each method provided information that provided the basis for further, more in-depth
work. Our initial questionnaire was intended simply to glean background information and
perceptions that we could probe in focus group interviews. Our focus group questions
probed different aspects of university culture and students’ sense of integration into
academic and social life, as well as their conscious experience of the university as a
gendered institution. Responses to these questions provided the basis for more in-depth
interviews and observations. We tried to ‘read’ these interviews and observations in
complex ways, as discursive practices, and not as if they provided a direct window into
subjectivity. We also used visual methodologies, not so much as a photo-voice analysis
exercise but rather to ensure that the researched themselves took on the role of researcher
through the use of the camera. The use of photo albums as a methodology was inspired
by similar work conducted at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Instead of photographing
the young women, we handed a camera as well as small photo-albums to the students
themselves. We asked the students to photograph themselves, their friends and their
families, and to write captions beside the photos expressing what the pictures said
about what was important to the students. These albums supplemented the life history
interviews. Students took photographs of themselves with family, friends and boyfriends,
at both formal and informal events marking their lives at university, and described why
these people and events were important to them. One student cogently ended her album
➔

24
with a photograph of her own eyes and the observation that she had photographed them
because that was what she valued most about herself. The photographs thus provided
insight into what the students valued about themselves and their lives.
We met as a team before each major stage of research, assessed the progress of the
previous stage and normally included a training session in some aspect of the research.
Each research team processed, made sense of and wrote up their data separately. While
this decentralised process provided a sense of ownership of the research and data among
everyone on the team, it meant that a unified picture was harder to achieve than might
have been the case with a more centrally controlled study that was less concerned with
the insights of each team member.
The original intention was to return the research to the students for their comments. This
did not happen, firstly because of the difficulty of locating all of the students and bringing
them together in one place at the same time or even separately, and secondly because
the preparation of the chapters themselves went through a lengthy process of internal and
external revision. Indeed, once the first draft had been written, many of us had moved on
to other work, and it was hard to sustain the initial momentum. This also coincided with
the programme officer of the Carnegie–South Africa Scholarship Programme, who had
initiated the project, taking up employment elsewhere.
A study by women on women should engage with questions of feminist methodology.
Standpoint feminists have argued that a feminist qualitative approach inserts the
researcher into the research process and analyses the way that gender power relations
manifest themselves in the research process itself (Harding 1987). We did not conceive of
this project as engaging a specifically feminist approach to methodology, but it is possible
to reflect on the relationships among ourselves and between ourselves as researchers and
students as the researched.
Among ourselves as researchers there were differences, if not of class, then of race, sexual
orientation, age, academic interests and, not least, understandings of feminism and gender.
The research group included younger and older researchers, established researchers and
interns, feminists and non-feminists, black and white scholars. All of us came from the
field of education, but we reflected a diverse spread of interests and theoretical leanings.
As the different chapters in the monograph illustrate, our approaches to the analysis of
the data we collected were informed by these subjectivities.
Moreover, we needed to consider the differences between ourselves and the students,
as well as the relationship of the researcher to the researched, often a relationship with
which the researched feel uncomfortable. In one institution, we tried to ensure that
younger researchers conducted the research, but there were still differences between the
researchers and the students: age did not make the difference; it was the relationship
between researcher and researched. We were meticulous about ensuring that only those
young women who wanted to take part in the study actually participated. In all sites and
institutions, because of the participants’ varying programmes of study and the busy lives
they led, we experienced difficulty in sustained interaction: on the one hand we tried
not to push ourselves into their already crowded lives, and on the other we had to try
to ensure completion of the interviews while respecting participants’ separate lives and
spaces. Maintaining contact was difficult: the use of cellphones among the students was
erratic, telephone numbers often changed, appointments were often cancelled, and we
had to recognise that the project was not as much of a priority for them as it was for us.

25
Among the students, too, there were class, race and status differences. These differences
may have been a factor in some participants dropping out of the study, or being
inconsistent in their participation. These differences certainly emerged in the focus
group interviews through which we probed the students’ experiences of integration into
university culture.
Understanding women students’ gender subjectivities and
institutional culture
The research was conducted just over 10 years after South Africa’s first democratic
elections. It was a time of assessment of the country’s progress on many fronts, and
especially the extent to which economic, racial and gender equality had been achieved.
The most far-reaching assessments placed South Africa in a global context and explored
how globalisation and changes in the national political economy had impacted on such
inequalities. Structurally, South Africa’s integration into the global market remained
uneven, and inequalities and poverty within the country persisted. But political changes
were visible, and members of a new generation had entered universities from schools and
a social context that registered these changes in subtle but quite fundamental ways. These
universities were themselves undergoing significant change.
All our research suggests that the students’ experiences of social and academic integration
were not wholly unpleasant. Although students found the adjustment to university from
school an extremely challenging one, they all appeared to draw on diverse personal
and social networks consisting of various combinations of family, friends and partners
for support. The social class background of students seemed to shape how well they
integrated and performed. Research did reveal ongoing inequalities between men and
women in institutions, as well as the class and race conditioning of those experiences, but
the scholarship recipients themselves denied that such social categories were important
in their lives or had shaped their experiences. Across the board there appeared to be a
resistance to analysing either their own or others’ social experience in terms of gender,
race and class. Both the black and white students we interviewed seemed to us to turn a
blind eye to inequalities even though they were aware of them. They seemed not to want
to name their experiences as sexist or racist; they shied away from such naming, and
did not want to relate it to themselves or accept it. Such identification would probably
associate them with feminism, which, many maintained, was a thing of the past, a ‘white
woman’s thing’, too hard-core and extreme.
The students we interviewed espoused an individualistic, meritocratic ideology in which
the individual is more important than the collective or group, and family and friends are
central to one’s own and others’ success. They argued that they had arrived where they
had through hard work and individual merit. This apparent race and gender denial and
the strong assertion of individual achievement and merit nonetheless sat side by side
with an awareness of race and gender belonging. Also strongly marking the discourse
of the students with whom we worked was the aspiration to live lives in which they
are in control, shape their own destinies, and balance work and family life. The linkage
between public and private spheres was important: they complemented each other; the
students related their public success to their private lives; their private lives reinforced and
supported their public success; and they were expecting this to continue into the future.
It appeared to us that power was operating here in very subtle ways. Choice and agency
seemed to be linked to power and responsibility. Students negotiated power relations

26
through a denial of and resistance to their categorisation but also by taking responsibility
for themselves, owning agency and taking power away from the institution to themselves
in a discourse that says ‘I am responsible for my destiny; I choose (whereas they didn’t
choose); I choose to be included and not to be excluded: it is up to me.’ But that
power came from the fact that they had financial independence, itself the result of a
conscious choice by the programme to select only women. The students were financially
independent, but dependent. These issues were linked to the students’ sense of agency
and independence, but were invisible to them. This abstraction of the individual from the
social and economic context is typical of neo-liberal as well as liberal feminist discourses
(Ringrose 2007). Our research suggests that a powerful unconscious (and sometimes
conscious) liberal feminism existed among the scholarship students, who were selected
and groomed for success by a programme whose raison d’être is a liberal feminist
one in a society that has chosen a social democratic route within a liberal democratic
constitutional framework. Thus the discourse of the students was consistent with the
programme that supported them, and with the public discourse of gender rights and
individual opportunity in post-apartheid South Africa.
To end here, however, would be to deny our own positioning as researchers, our
complicity in the liberal feminist project, and our own struggles and negotiations
over gender meaning. Recent work by Jessica Ringrose (2007) draws attention to
new discourses of successful girls as a metaphor for the rise of a neo-liberalism that
emphasises individual achievement and success while denying the racial, class and ethnic
foundations of such success. Our research is complicit in so far as it has focused on
successful young women students.
Highlighting the individualistic, meritocratic consciousness operative among the students
may help to further the discourse of ‘successful girls’ when the evidence is patently clear
that their lives are as diverse and full of struggle as their social and economic positioning,
and that their achievement remains a class-related phenomenon both inside and outside
the programme. The success of a small group of young women can occlude the relative
failure of a much larger number, who were not fortunate enough to be selected for the
scholarship and thus be freed from financial constraints to become the agents that these
young women claimed they are and wish to be. As Ringrose has argued:
[L]iberal feminism’s gender-only analysis has culminated in measures of
equity through gendered test results which violently obscures socio-economic
difference. This brand of feminism…holds up ‘the girl’ as proof that an
individualising ethos of hierarchical competition, performance and standards in
education is working. (Ringrose 2007: 486)
There is some irony in a situation in which researchers who do not see themselves as
liberal feminists conduct a study that affirms its strength.
In conclusion, then, all the studies observe that students generally disowned group
identities and interpreted most of what they experienced in terms of their individuality and
agency. This discourse is clearly located in South Africa’s national context, in university
cultures that privilege the liberal discourse of individual merit or meritocracy and in the
very selection process of the scholarship that positioned each student as ‘exceptional’.
A feminist analysis is interested in inequalities between men and women, power relations,
the agency of women, links between public and private lives, and institutional culture
in relation to women’s experiences of it. It aims to give voice to the women themselves.

27
When this approach is applied to the subject positioning of young women in this study,
it is clear that there are strong social conditions for its emergence across all institutional
contexts. It echoes dominant national and university discourses, as well as the discourse
of exceptionalism encouraged by the scholarship itself.
The chapters
The chapters that follow cast light not only on the discourses of success of these
successful students, but also on the unstable nature of this success, its constructedness in
discourse and its links to class- and racially-structured experiences. By examining these
students, the lives of those not so chosen are thrown into relief. They require much
greater research and public attention. And finally, by showing how the students navigated
the possibilities open to them and the complex demands and contradictory requirements
made of them, the chapters question the ‘success’ of the discourse as it manifested in
their lives and experiences. Despite financial support, these were full of ambiguity and
struggle, hardship and pain, consciousness of constraints on freedom and boundedness
of choice. The evidence in the chapters that follow ‘troubles’ the discourse of successful
students in different ways.
Across all the institutions, students’ perceived integration was facilitated through
strong supports – from families, friends and schools. The strength of individual cases
demonstrates that in some instances it was mothers – in others, fathers – that mattered
to students; sometimes it was female friends and at other times it was male friends
who supported them; with some, it was a strongly supportive school and community
environment. These social networks were highly significant in mediating institutional
cultures that are not only very different from one another but also acknowledged in much
of the literature to be harsh.
The first of the case studies considers the social and academic integration of young women
at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Chapter 3), the second at the University of Pretoria
(Chapter 4) and the third at the University of Cape Town (Chapter 5). The case studies
are all quite different. Although a common approach and methodology was employed to
explore similar issues, researchers brought their own interests and concerns to bear on
the analysis of the data. The collaborations also produced relatively novel analyses. Thus,
the chapter on the University of KwaZulu-Natal provides a feminist reading of students’
experiences analysed through a framework developed as part of a PhD dissertation to
understand academic and social integration of university students. The chapter on the
University of Pretoria combines historical, ethnographic and discourse-analytic methods
arising from a particularly fruitful collaboration between a South African researcher and
a foreign-born researcher. The chapter on the University of Cape Town draws on the
strengths of social class identity and curriculum analysis frameworks. The chapters all
provide different insights, but ultimately converge on a set of common conclusions.
Chapter 6 attempts to draw these together to answer two different sets of questions
that are posed, on the one hand, by the practical–social concerns of the scholarship
programme and, on the other, by the more theoretical concerns of the researchers.

29
Chapter 3
Female undergraduate students’
constructions of success at the
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Pontso Moorosi and Relebohile Moletsane
Introduction
Available literature suggests that gender is a powerful dynamic in shaping the experiences
of women overall, including their experiences of success in academic institutions as well
as in the workplace. However, women do not always see their experiences through a
gendered lens. For example, Smulyan (2000) studied women principals who claimed that
gender did not have any influence in their lives, yet her findings suggest that gender did
have an effect on them both personally and professionally. More recently, in a study of
female students and their success in mathematics and science, Mthiyane (2007) revealed
that while these young women believed issues of gender did not have any impact in their
lives, their stories suggested otherwise. Likewise, in the study reported in this chapter,
while the young women university students did not associate their academic experiences
with issues of gender, our analysis of interview data indicate that gender was a major
influence in their lives.
This study was undertaken to examine the ways in which a group of young women
scholarship recipients experienced their lives as university undergraduate students in their
respective institutions. In particular, their construction of success in general and their
own success at university was examined. To do this, we employed two frameworks. The
first framework acknowledges the contextual realities of social and academic integration
in the construction of success to highlight the diverse nature of these young women’s
experiences. The second framework seeks to problematise the notion of doing feminist
research with/on young university female students who do not necessarily use gender as
a frame of reference in explaining their own experiences. In this chapter, we specifically
want to highlight the lack of feminist consciousness among young women in South
African institutions and its implications for interventions aimed at changing the gender
regimes of university classrooms.
Women, science and success
The gender debates in mathematics and science have long moved away from the
suggestion that women are innately less able to succeed in these subjects. The debates
are now characterised as a more constructive discourse about factors that shape women’s
success, or lack of it, in these areas of study. Much of the literature on gender and science
focuses on factors preventing girls from participating in science subjects in schools, or on
women scientists who have negotiated the obstacles and are performing well in science
(see Baker and Leary 1995 and Hannan et al. 1996) and the strategies they employ to
succeed (Pritchard 2005).

30
Specifically, many studies which have sought to establish the reasons for the low
participation of women in science have been criticised for their lack of attention to the
contextual factors that impact on these women’s success or lack of it. To address this
issue, a recent study by Hanson (2007) used a multicultural framework to dispel notions
that young women from minority backgrounds in the United States are necessarily
less successful in studying science at high school. The study found that young African
American women studying science often linked their success in the subject to family as
well as their own independence. It also established the influence of parents as a positive
factor on the young women’s success. In the South African context, Mthiyane (2007)
studied factors that shape young women’s participation and success in mathematics and
science at high school and concluded that the home and school had a major influence on
these young women’s achievement in the subjects and that gender had some influence
on their experiences. These studies and others before them (see, for example, Hanson
and Palmer-Johnson 2000) suggest that while young women (particularly of colour) show
interest in studying science at high school, they continue to have higher attrition rates at
university and remain largely under-represented in science occupations.
We identify a gap in studies focusing on young women, particularly African women who
are generally successful in their studies at South African universities, regarding, first, the
ways in which they negotiate the challenges of being a woman studying science –
a traditionally male-dominated area of study – and, second, the ways in which they
construct their success. Thus, in this chapter we discuss the students’ own constructions
of their success and the social and academic experiences that have impacted on it. The
chapter also examines the students’ accounts of their experiences at university in relation
to their gender (and race) identity.
Theoretical frameworks
This study is informed mainly by frameworks which suggest that to understand students’
success, it is necessary to examine their perceptions of the educational experiences in the
institutions they attend. In particular, Tinto’s (1987, 1993) model of student attrition from
university, which suggests that factors within the institutional environment interact with
students’ characteristics to enhance or reduce students’ success, was utilised. Even though
the model focuses on attrition and dropout, the principles it entails and their criticisms
can also be used to explain the experiences of students who succeed at university.
Developed from Durkheim’s (1951) theory of suicide, and Van Gennep’s (1960) study of
the rites of passage in traditional societies, the model suggests that students’ persistence
and success in universities, which represents a rite of passage in modern societies,
requires integration into both the academic and the social systems of the institution. As
such, the individual is incorporated ‘as a component member in the social and intellectual
communities [of the university]’ (Tinto 1987: 126). Lack of integration, therefore, increases
the chances of failure and dropout.
Lovitts (1997, 2000) identifies the factors that produce each type of integration. On the
one hand, academic integration develops when there are formal interactions between
and among students and staff in the academic endeavour. On the other, social integration
develops from informal interactions between and among students and staff outside the
classroom. In addition, a number of factors, including the academic programme as well as
the social and physical structures available to students, might facilitate or hinder academic

Female undergraduate students’ constructions of success at UKZN
31
and social integration. Furthermore, the students’ identities (gender, race, language,
ability/disability and others) also have a significant influence on their social and academic
integration and, therefore, on their success or failure at university.
Thus, a second framework utilised in the study relates to feminist debates on the
gendered identity of women and its influence on their construction of success in
mathematics and science. For the purposes of this study, our reference to feminism
is informed by the understanding that gender cannot be understood outside its social
construction within a particular culture (Weedon 1987), and that to understand young
women’s experiences of social and academic integration in universities, we cannot remove
them from their broader social, political and economic backgrounds. Our contention is
that science as a field of study is influenced by gender structures and regimes that work
against young women’s success at university.
Linked to the feminist framework of analysis is a methodological question on what it
means to do feminist research, particularly on participants who do not necessarily see
themselves as feminists. While feminist researchers do not necessarily agree on what
exactly constitutes feminist research, Lather argues that to do feminist research simply
means ‘putting the social construction of gender at the centre of one’s inquiry’ (Lather
1995: 294). Of particular relevance to our argument in this chapter is the notion that
feminist research is politically committed to changing the position of women in society
by rejecting the possibility of value-free research. This political commitment is not only
supportive of women’s rights; it also reflects women’s own personal experience of
subjugation within a male-dominated society – in this case, the male-dominated natural
sciences faculties in universities. This commitment in feminist research also allows women
to speak out and discuss their experiences in their own words in order to address the
invisibility and distortion of their experiences in ways that are relevant to ending women’s
social position of inequality (Lather 1995). By using the feminist lens, our intention is to
put into focus specific questions which centre on how these young women constructed
their own academic and social experiences, as well as their own world of success in
the institution.
The use of feminist theory in studying students’ experiences in science education suggests
that scientific knowledge is cultural and reflects the gender and racial ideologies of
societies (Brickhouse 2001). In this regard, feminist researchers argue that the gender
regimes of science classrooms at universities tend to benefit the dominant groups (that is,
male students), whose realities differ from those of female students (see Walshaw 2001
and Weedon 1987). Post-structural feminists argue that women’s experiences in science are
not divorced from their material social practices and power relations within the structure
of society (see, for example, Weedon 1987). Thus, we do not see the social and academic
integration of these young women in isolation from their family backgrounds and their
own personal and political location as female individuals within an environment that is
historically male-dominated. Yet we ask: Do the women themselves necessarily hold similar
views? If not, what implications does our analysis have for developing interventions that
aim to change the gender regimes in university classrooms and other spaces?
Women, science and educational success at university
The intention of the study was to investigate the academic and social integration or non-
integration into university life of a group of women students supported by Carnegie
scholarships, and these women’s understandings and constructions of success in their

32
studies. In particular, this chapter reports on the experiences of eight young women
studying science, engineering, medicine and psychology at the various campuses of the
University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). (See Table 2.1, pages 22–23, for a profile of the study
participants.) The study involved a self-completion questionnaire asking for biographical
details; a focus group interview with the students on their shared experiences of
university life, both academic and social; individual life history interviews with four of the
participants; and social and academic shadowing of one of these participants for a week.
From the participants’ accounts of their experiences and their constructions of success
and the role of gender therein, several themes emerged. Based on these, we argue that
a combination of factors seems to play a role in the educational success of these women
students. These factors include their personal identities (race, gender, social class and family
background), their hard work and the programmes they were enrolled in. Most importantly,
their own constructions of success and the factors to which they attributed their success
also played a significant role in how successful they considered themselves to be.
Constructions of success
That all eight participants considered themselves successful became evident in the first
focus group interview we had with them as well as in subsequent encounters. While
they acknowledged being sometimes overwhelmed by their studies and other demands,
they tended to ‘look at the bigger picture’ and generally felt successful. Their measures of
success included a change in their financial status (from depending totally on the social
grant to having enough money to be able to see a better future). Khanyisa’s comment
illustrates this point:
Considering my family background…from standard 6 to grade 12 my school
fees were R80 and I didn’t know where exactly I was going. Fortunately
Carnegie was there. Here actually I am on my third year [sic], so I am definitely
going to be successful, I know it!…Nothing can actually stop me, absolutely
nothing! So, I’m successful.
For others, not having to worry about financial constraints because of the scholarship
made success attainable and motivated them to work hard. Being able to supplement
the family income out of the scholarship money was also an indicator of success for a
number of the participants. For Nonhle, whose parents were both unemployed, success
involved the ability to help her parents as well as her brother:
I sometimes have to look after him [her brother] to have pocket money…so
that just gives me everything, just tells me I’m really successful…
Khanyisa felt much the same way:
I feel that I am really successful being able to take from your own pocket
money and give to home. At home, I, my father is late and my mother, she’s
not working and she’s disabled ’cause she’s had a stroke after my father passed
away…I also give money home and it’s like, it makes you feel wow! I’m strong,
you know!
While the students’ understandings of success were strongly linked to good academic
performance, the young women tended to discard the criteria often used by educators
and researchers to measure academic achievement and defined their success in terms of
multiple indicators. During the focus group interviews, for most of the participants a great

33
deal of emphasis was put on their ability to see and ‘know where I am going’, and being
a university student at third-year level (as most of them were) almost guaranteed success.
In this regard Zoe, an engineering student, asserted:
I think for me success is probably being able to see where I am going in life,
to be able to see where the place I am now will be able to secure me a future
that I would like, that is going to support me through life…
For her part, Thobile viewed success as the ability to balance life’s competing demands:
I think success is…when you are completing all three years of your life and
[there is] balance in whatever you do, whether it’s academic, your emotional
life, your social life, there must be a balance…
For Sarah, success meant overcoming the challenges brought about by physical disability:
For me, to be where I am, third-year varsity, it’s a success for me because I am,
I have a disability, and unfortunately that makes varsity life a bit more hectic
for me. But I am at the top of…I am in the upper academic region and kind
of defying the odds almost…People don’t really have high expectations of you
if you have a disability. So, to be where I am now is kind of, that would be
success, and if I can graduate and do what I want to do and that is to be a
psychologist…that will be the ultimate success.
Other definitions of success included personal growth through the years, from being
a timid girl from the farm who did not know anything about university to becoming
someone who is not afraid to stand in front of a professor. ‘Being happy within’ with
what you have, and ‘fulfilling your purpose on earth’ (which was also linked to the
‘power of the Almighty’) were other phrases used to define success. Thus, while these
young women attributed their success to their own power to act – agency within
themselves to have the ability to do the right things – some of them turned to religion
and also acknowledged the presence of a supreme power in their lives.
Specifically, the participants identified a number of factors as influencing their success in
their studies. These are discussed below.
Factors that impact on participants’ success
What makes a female student successful in the natural sciences and other disciplines
in a university today? To capture the factors to which study participants attributed their
success, we asked the students to comment on what they enjoy most about studying at
university, and to identify what contributed to their positive feelings about these facets of
university life. Different responses were cited in this regard.
Social and academic integration
The participants’ accounts of their lives at university suggest that they were well
integrated and believed that universities were not hostile places to them as women, either
socially or academically. The factors that contributed to these feelings of integration were
many and varied. To illustrate, some of the participants, particularly those from larger
programmes in the sciences, referred to the independence, autonomy and freedom (from
teachers’ and parents’ scrutiny) that university life brings as an important factor in their
enjoyment of being a university student and, therefore, in their success. For example,
Khanyisa commented:

34
The best thing I enjoy, that really used to stress me out in high school, you
know that when you are one of the top students the teachers are always on
you, like ‘you gonna get A’s, you gonna do this!’ You know…it gets to you
sometimes…now it’s like your lecturers don’t care about you…
Referring to the independence that studying at university brings, Seresha, a student in
biomolecular technology, observed:
When I left home, actually I was very eager to go to varsity too, because I
believed that I need time to be by myself, to be able to sort of make my own
decisions and learn how the world works. My parents were very protective
people…so when I got there I found that I could actually stand on my own
and make decisions that I could be proud of at the end of the day. I have
made some that I am not proud of, but I’ve learnt from those.
A third participant referred to the relative anonymity of individual students in lecture halls
and elsewhere as freeing students to enjoy studying and succeed academically.
On the other hand, other participants, particularly those studying in smaller programmes
(such as medicine and other health sciences), talked fondly about the sense of ‘family’
they experienced with their fellow students, forming communities of practice and learning
that facilitated their success. Thula, one of the medical students, had this to say:
Well, the nice thing about it…at medical school, it’s really like a family, close
community, very close, really. You literally know everybody from your first-year
class to the final-year class, you know everybody.
Some of the participants, however, reported experiencing difficulties in adjusting to both
the social and the academic environment at university. They often spoke of individuals
and groups ‘doing their own thing’. Referring to the negative impact of social class and
racial alienation, for example, Zoe explained:
Ja, I heard about other campuses that there are cool hang-out spots because
even if you are allocated in groups, then they say: Are you sure you are in this
group?…They judge you the way they see you. They don’t even give you a
chance to explain yourself or anything…They will talk about cars: ‘My mother
is going to buy me this car’…But for me, I know I will buy myself a car once
I’ve finished my degree.
Thobile, who was studying biomedicine, found sharing a room with a stranger in the first
year stressful and alienating. She elaborated:
She came in with her uncle, she woke me up and she started talking, talking.
I didn’t get a chance to say a word. I just remember I went out, I went to the
bathroom, I cried because I felt like, oh my God! I’m nothing! She was all over
the place, criticising the place, when I didn’t see a problem…
A significant finding related to social integration at university was the consensus among
the participants that there was no support from lecturers, who ‘do not care about you’,
with some students reporting acts of racism by demonstrators and lecturers in classes. For
example, Thula commented:
So the sense of families are amongst the students [sic], not between students
and staff. There’s a big gap between students and staff, major gap!

35
Nonhle, a chemistry student, asserted:
If you can complain about the pracs…somehow it seems as if they will look at
the colour of your skin or check who you are before they really, really listen to
you. That’s the problem of our department and hopefully they will try and sort
it out, because even if you write a supp it’s like, they will look at the student
and…then all these people fail. That’s how we fail, most of us.
In contrast, Sarah, the only student enrolled in the humanities, felt supported by both
students and her lecturers, perhaps because of her disability:
Lecturers know you and who you are. But the lecturers are very understanding…
We have their office numbers and they give us consultation times and we are
free to email them. Also ‘psychers’ have the – what is called? – staff liaison
committee…Every module has two or three class reps who take your problems
up to them…Ja, they are generally understanding and they will help you as
long as you are prepared to work and you go to them with a problem.
The participants all recognised the negative impact of a lack of social integration on
academic integration, and possibly on academic success. The medical students were the
most vocal in this respect. Lucia’s comment illustrates:
It’s the same by us where there is this constant communication with other years
[in the res]…always, like evenings, weekends, people are there supporting and
giving you assistance if you need it for whatever reason.
The participants also talked about what they found most difficult about studying at
university. Nonhle cited the difficulty of learning to relate to different people, including
fellow students and lecturers:
It’s very difficult having to socialise with all sorts of people, I really had a
difficult time [initially]. I’m still having a difficult time now, some people call me
antisocial and whatever, but I’m managing.
Khanyisa cited the academic demands of her programme as hindering social interaction
with fellow students:
I battled to make friends in my first year…For me, work takes me a lot longer
than it would for anybody else because of getting access to it and all that. So, I
don’t really have much time for a social life, and I’ve got all these scary friends
who, I don’t know how they do it, but they go out, they get hammered and
they come home and they sit down and do assignments at two in the morning
and hand them in the next morning…
Others referred to the difficulty of having to balance the personal, social and academic
aspects of their lives. For Lucia, living at home while studying at university presented
particular challenges:
Living at home you still maintain that same life at home. Like, you have
responsibilities in the house…and then it’s your schoolwork, [which] is so
much more as compared to high school and then trying to adapt…But really,
it’s not just about you, because there’s other people involved, and having to
incorporate all these people and still maintain and perform academically.

36
Referring directly to academic integration, a few of the students cited the challenges
of new technologies they had to learn upon arriving at university. These ranged from
photocopying machines to computers to advanced technology in specific departments
such as engineering. Zoe remembered:
…my first day going alone to a computer lab. I never touched a computer
[before that]. I didn’t know where to start…
Others cited language as a barrier to their integration into university learning. Coming
from a rural school, Khanyisa experienced alienation in her first year on the basis of her
low English-language proficiency and her lack of familiarity with some terms that were
used. She recalled:
In my first year, English was not my thing. It was really difficult, even in lecture
theatres…Like, in my school it was just Zulu. Ja, now in the lecture theatre [it’s]
English all the way. If you don’t understand, ‘come to me in my office’. I go
there and it’s still English. Ja, but now I’m coping.
This difficulty was sometimes exacerbated by a lecturer’s language background – for
example, if the lecturer was foreign and spoke with a non-English accent, it was an
additional challenge for those already experiencing English as a barrier to their learning.
Lucia did not struggle with the English language, but she had this to say about coping
with lecturers’ foreign accents:
Sometimes the lecturers have accents…they come with accents that are from
Russia. We spend time guessing what accent we are listening to, but ja, it’s
hard to understand. Not only do you have to understand new concepts, but
also what the lecturer is telling you…
With regard to curricular and pedagogical issues, the participants referred to a variety of
factors that facilitated or hindered their learning success. One factor participants identified
as hindering learning was related to the negative impact of large classes and the lecturers’
attitudes. Nonhle lamented the lack of individual consultations with lecturers, particularly
during practicals, because of large classes:
Not one to one…mostly done in groups because there’s a large number of us
now. Before it used to be one to one with lecturers where we discussed the
pracs and get interviewed on it to check our understanding.
The same student also referred to the tendency of lecturers to normalise failure by telling
students straight out in their introductory lectures that the failure rate in the module is
high, perhaps triggering self-fulfilling prophecies among many (Rosenthal Jacobson
1968). Seresha explained:
So if 20 people pass in a class of 250, you know it’s normal and 20 pass with
supps, and they tell us things like that and it’s like, oh! Where will I fit in?…
When I was in school I was…with top students. I knew where I fitted, but now
I’m not clever anymore.
Clearly a number of factors contributed to these women’s social integration into university.
But what gender-related factors might facilitate or hinder academic and social integration
of students into university life?

37
The social and academic impact of gender relations
As stated earlier, we were interested in understanding the role and impact of gender
on the success and/or failure of these students at university. Informed by the notion
that feminist research centralises the social construction of gender (Lather 1995) and
that female realities differ from male realities (Weedon 1987), this study examined the
participants’ perceptions of the role of gender in their educational experiences and
their educational success. Because there were already indications that these participants
rejected the notion that gender inequality tended to marginalise them and to present
obstacles to their success, we decided to pose a specific question to them in the focus
group interview: ‘Do you find the university a hostile place for a woman?’ Contrary to our
expectations, there was an overwhelming consensus that the university was not hostile to
women, and that students ‘don’t think of ourselves as boys and girls, we are just one big
class together’. For example, Thula, who had earlier commented that medical students at
the university saw and treated each other as ‘family’, answered the question as follows:
I don’t think so, I don’t, and for me it’s not like we’re treated differently from
the guys by either the lecturers or our fellow students, males and females. The
guys respect us in our family, they are there to help us if we need it.
Seresha, a biomolecular technology student, agreed:
It’s normal, just like how it is for guys, it’s for girls. In class, at res, we don’t feel
any less than guys. I don’t, ever! Sometimes you feel better than them. Ja, even
with the tests and everything, we can do as much as they can.
On the one hand, then, while these students rejected the notion of gender as a
determinant of their integration and success in their studies, their responses highlight
the role played by their perceptions of their social integration and, by implication,
their views of the institutional cultures in their study programmes. Their perceptions of
their programmes as inclusive and supportive seem to have positively influenced their
constructions and experiences of success.
On the other hand, while the students agreed that there was equality between the sexes,
some of their comments belied this sense of equality. A few cited incidents of unequal
and gendered treatment, especially from male students. Lucia asserted:
Some of the guys are childish. Do you think they understand that, do you think
they know that you can do as well? Ja, for us they respect us for keeping up
with them, OK, giving them competition.
Putting the burden of responsibility for addressing this unequal treatment on women
themselves, Thula contended:
I think I experienced this mainly because I’m in the SRC…There’s only
two women on the SRC…and guys have this thing, you know: we can’t be
represented by this little girl…I’ve had exposure to such stereotypes and such
comments, but like I said, it’s how you respond to them and, you know, take
the challenge.
Furthermore, the medical students in the group reported that their male counterparts
tended to downplay women’s ability to succeed in specialised fields and in fact did not
expect them to study these. As Lucia observed:

38
There are some specialties where there is male predominance, so they look at
you if you coming into that and want to be a surgeon. You get downplayed
because you are female, but it’s never in your face.
Contradictions in the participants’ responses regarding the role of gender also emerged
in relation to age and/or level of study. For example, on the one hand, the participants
unanimously agreed that the university was not hostile to them as young women. On
the other, some of their responses suggested that junior students, particularly in the first
year at university, did experience some hostile behaviour from senior male students. A
comment by Khanyisa illustrates this:
Senior guys will come tell you, like, when the first-years come, they’ll tell you,
‘I got this textbook, I’ll help you with this and that’, then they’ve got other
intentions, they’re devils!
For Nonhle, it was essential for every young woman who comes to university to have her
own agenda in order to avoid being abused and taken advantage of by male students.
She commented on the exploitation of young female university students by older senior
male students:
There is that thing that, as a female first-year student, you are there to make
somebody’s bed warmer, cosier, but the basic thing is that the guy’s agenda
overrides the female agenda.
To explore further the participants’ perceptions of the role and impact of gender on
their success or failure at university, we asked them what their views were regarding the
Carnegie scholarship and the need for it as an intervention targeting women only. In
contrast to their responses above, in this respect the participants did acknowledge gender
inequality as a problem and the scholarship as a necessary intervention for empowering
women, as men had ‘had their time’.
The participants also cited personal relationships as important in their social and
academic integration in the institution, and ultimately for their success. For some, having a
boyfriend meant having social and sometimes academic support, while for others having
female friends was more useful. For Zoe, having a boyfriend was a source of support:
My boyfriend is my constant support and inspiration. Since we are both
studying engineering, we are able to relate and understand each other’s dreams,
aspirations, challenges, pitfalls and achievements. He can make me laugh when
I am depressed or stressed, and gets me to take a break when I am about to
crack. He loves me and makes me feel secure about who I am and where
I’m headed.
Thula also regarded very highly the support she received from her boyfriend:
He is very supportive. We are studying medicine together…He has been a very
great friend to me as well, he is the friend I can call when I have major issues.
And I think our relationship – we used to be friends before we started going
out. So we are very much friends and we talk about anything and everything,
problems, whether they are family or related to my friends. He is just a support
that I really need and I value him a lot.

39
In contrast, Nonhle did not have a boyfriend at the time of the interview and her reasons
for this included the fact that boys are a constant headache that affects one’s freedom.
She observed:
You have to worry about how you look, how you behave. Not that I am not
behaving or anything. But how you behave, how you act around other boys
and other girls, and you have to give first priority, and you have to phone him,
and if he doesn’t phone you get worried, and he goes for a party [and] you get
worried. There is so much freedom when you don’t have a boyfriend.
Although the study participants indicated that they would like to get married and have
children one day, they asserted that their academic success came first, and they believed
they needed to be ‘successful’ and established before getting married and having children.
For most of them, success meant independence and careers, and marriage was not part
of the equation. In other words, getting married was seen not as part of the success, but
as something one can do when one has already achieved success. In this regard, Thula
remarked:
It [marriage] is not the sort of thing that would crush my world if I don’t do it.
It’s not a very important thing to me, and I think also it’s a bit overrated and
people just go through marriage as a stamp to something sometimes. It doesn’t
really make that much difference in the person’s life, or where it does make a
difference it’s not a really desired difference.
For Thula, her career came first and she believed that marriage was one of the things she
would have to sacrifice in order to pursue her career. She was aware that society expects
a woman to be married and have children to be successful, but she did not subscribe to
that. In contrast, Seresha saw marriage as part of success and was already prepared to
have her career take second place once she started her family. For her, it was important
to live up to the norms of society.
So what does this tell us about young women and their construction of success within
the gendered frame? We return to this question later in the chapter. The next section
examines factors outside the university which the participants identified as impacting on
their success in their studies.
Factors outside the university
While the participants in this study regarded institutional factors as having played a
major role in their success at university, they also attributed their success partly to factors
outside the university. These included family background and schooling experiences.
Family background
As Table 2.1 shows, the study participants came mostly from low-income backgrounds.
As such, financial issues were always critical for most of them. In fact, for most
participants it was the family’s socio-economic status that fuelled their determination to
succeed in their studies. Khanyisa, one of the participants whose life history we collected,
illustrated this point:
There are three pairs of twins in my family and there is nine of us all in all…
My father was the only one working…So me and my twin brother were the
first ones to go to varsity…And then when I was in grade 11 my father lost his
job because the company had gone overseas. But he was trying hard to help

40
us finish our studies, and seeing us doing well motivated him to support us. My
father knew that we were at school, and he would rather let the family sleep
without food rather than us not going to school or having problems at school
because they have not paid.
For others, it was the role modelling by parents and/or other relatives that motivated
them to do well. Nonhle’s story illustrates this:
But they [parents] were such an influence ’cause they were top at their school.
They were at the same school in the same class competing for position one.
They were very intelligent. Even when we were at school, they always told us
about their time when they did so well and how they fought for first position
and sometimes both of them would come out first. So that alone was an
influence and even we got interested in going beyond matric.
Other role models were outside the immediate family but within the extended family
set-up. For example, Seresha’s mother was not educated, but her aunt went to university
and was always encouraging and motivating family members and sharing her experiences
with them. Thula’s uncle also played a big role in inspiring, motivating and encouraging
her to ‘dream big and do big things’.
Participants also drew considerable social support from their extended family members.
Most recounted their close relationships with their siblings. For example, Khanyisa and
her twin brother had always been very close:
I always talk about him [my twin brother]…He has been there for me ever
since. Even when I got discouraged that none of our elder brothers passed
matric [and we were not going anywhere] and we were losing hope in a way.
But my twin brother was there to say we are going to go somewhere and
do something.
Seresha commented:
My sisters are my best friends. We share secrets, clothes, the good and bad
times. They force me to relax and remind me there is more to life than
studying…they provide constructive criticism.
Nonhle’s family support was also very sound and, according to her, had been
strengthened further by their trust in God. Describing her relationship with her family,
she stated:
My family is amazing…I am telling you. It’s not all the time that one is placed
in such a beautiful family, you know. And when people complain about their
parents and how they are pressuring them, you are thinking, God, thank you
for giving me the family that you have given me. Because I am telling you
there is never a time that they will turn their backs on you, never ever. I don’t
know, maybe it’s because I don’t get up to too much of bad things or whatever,
but they are always supportive in everything I do.
All the participants reported that they had very supportive families, including parents and
siblings. The family influence seems to have impacted on their lives in an unexpected
manner. For example, while one might expect that these women would be from
families where parents and/or siblings were educated and perhaps mostly in the science
field, these findings show the contrary. None of the family members the participants
identified as their role models had a qualification in science or a job in a science-related

41
occupation. Instead, most family members were not even well educated. However,
their support for their daughters’ education was unwavering. Another noteworthy trend
among these participants was that they did not measure family support in monetary
terms. In fact, it worked the other way round: some supported the family or siblings with
their stipend, and enjoyed doing it because it gave them a sense of responsibility and
accomplishment. For them, being able to give something to the family was a symbol
of success.
The influence of schooling experiences
With a few exceptions, the participants mostly regarded their schools as not having
played a significant role in their preparation for university. In the focus groups as well as
in the life history interviews, they cited lack of career guidance as a major hindrance in
their development. Khanyisa’s experience illustrates this:
I didn’t know anything, I don’t want to lie. So my high school, the deputy
principal gave me this career guidance thing and then I read it, but even
though I read it I didn’t understand anything because he gave me when I was
applying already. So I just saw this physiotherapy and I didn’t know anything
about it. But I just applied for it.
Nonhle experienced racism at a previously Indian school where there was no expectation
that she would perform well. She remembered that as an experience that pushed her to
work hard and prove to her teachers that she could make it:
You know when you are doing well and…people become suspicious. They
think you [the African student] are probably copying or you have your ways or
whatever. And it was on two occasions that I was blamed for copying during
the test and I cried in front of the class when the teacher told me that because
I had never copied in my life and someone just gives you a zero and says you
have copied. So I really had to prove myself because the marks that I had they
could not believe that a black student is doing so well.
However, while teachers and schools do not seem to have provided direct career
guidance, some of the participants recalled the major role their schools and individual
teachers played in preparing and motivating them to succeed and go to university.
Lucia recalled:
Ja, there was a teacher that really pushed me, I know my English teacher, my
bio teacher, they set these standards that, you know, you need to achieve, you
can do it if you really put your mind to it, you can achieve…They knew that…
circumstances could be better, but they [encouraged you to] accept that and get
on with it and do what you have to do.
In a similar vein, Sarah’s school also seems to have played a major role in getting her to
be where she was:
I went to…a school for the [disabled]. They teach normal academic subjects
from grade 0 to matric and you write the same matric exams as everyone else
in this province…I was also under a lot of pressure from my teachers because
they expected 80s from me and so Lord help me if I didn’t get them…I
really looked up to and admired my maths teacher, poor woman, she was so
patient…[She] always encouraged me, you can do it, you just got to assure the
rest of the world that you can be normal and you can do your work and just
do your best.

42
While the young women’s accounts suggest that their school did not play a significant
role in preparing them for university life, inspirations to study towards a science degree
seem to have been more achievement oriented. As high achievers at school, a science-
related career seemed inevitable: these students were pushed towards the sciences by
their schools and teachers. Thula, one of the medical students, recalled:
I don’t think I was really influenced by anybody; in fact I did the influencing.
So I don’t know how I stumbled on medicine really. It was that thing that
when you are a high achiever you are either going to do medicine or actuarial
science and I think that is part of it.
Getting good grades in mathematics and science was an indicator for most of the
participants that they would follow a career in the sciences. A few students cited a
particular teacher whose encouragement and influence pointed them towards university
study and a career in the sciences, but on the whole schools and teachers seem not to
have played any significant role in the career choices of these participants. Perhaps this
is not surprising, since post-apartheid educational reforms resulted in the retrenchment
of counsellors and guidance teachers in many schools, particularly the under-resourced
schools that could not afford to pay for extra staff on their own.
Discussion
Our research suggests that both academic and social factors have played a reciprocal
role in the participants’ success in the programmes in which they are enrolled. The
scholarship dealt with one major aspect of social integration (finances) and in turn helped
young women develop a strong sense of individual independence which has enhanced
their success.
One of the frameworks we have used to analyse the participants’ experiences of their
university study (Tinto 1987, 1993) suggests that to understand students’ success it is
necessary to examine their perceptions of their educational experiences in the institution
they attend. For us, the participants’ accounts demarcate some important lessons for
addressing the social and academic needs of female students in higher education
institutions generally, and those on scholarship programmes in particular.
The participants in this study considered themselves successful in the various academic
programmes they were enrolled in (mostly in the natural and health sciences, with only
one student in the humanities). Similar to the findings of Moletsane’s (1995) study of the
success of scholarship-sponsored black South African students studying in US universities,
the participants in this study often discarded the criteria for measuring success commonly
used by educators and educational institutions and defined success in general, and their
own success in particular, in a variety of ways. To them, success meant more than high
marks and good progress towards completing their studies. For some, success meant
feelings of self-worth and pride in the programmes they were enrolled in. For others,
it was defined by their ability to supplement their family’s income with part of their
scholarship money.
The participants identified several factors as impacting positively on their success.
Firstly, an analysis of their personal characteristics as distinct individuals presents their
success as inevitable. To illustrate, their personal biographies, characterised by histories
of high academic performance from high school to university, high levels of motivation,

43
propensities for hard work, and educationally and socially supportive families, suggest
a high likelihood of success. Secondly, the participants’ experiences, both social and
academic, in the institution also influenced their success. For some individuals, hard work
seemed to dominate as a contributing factor to their success; for others, it was their social
experiences – for example, positive and supportive relationships with fellow students and
friends – that had a major influence on educational success.
Thirdly, in terms of their academic experiences, the model utilised in this study suggests
that universities which are committed to students’ success usually adopt and implement
policies and practices that enhance their educational experiences. Contrary to this,
participants in this study, with a few exceptions, reported poor interactions with and
support from staff, particularly their lecturers. They attributed this to the large classes that
often characterise the undergraduate teaching environment in South African universities.
While the students sometimes regretted this, they nevertheless welcomed the anonymity
and the autonomy that university life brought them, freeing them to do their ‘own thing’
and perform well in their studies.
Linked to Tinto’s framework of social interaction, our feminist analysis additionally offers
a useful understanding of how the young women at university constructed their success.
On the one hand, these young women’s constructions of success were not separated
from their social conditions. Rather, success was viewed in terms of where they came
from in relation to where they had arrived. On the other hand, their success was due
to their individual effort, with schools and community not viewed as having played any
major role. Further, although sexism hardly formed part of their vocabulary, these women
students were aware of the upsurge of feminism and acknowledged the usefulness
and necessity of interventions such as the Carnegie scholarship programme which are
informed by liberal feminism with its emphasis on the increase of numbers of women
in science. Longino and Hammonds (1995) argue that there is always a conflict in the
interpretation of gender, science and feminism, and that this conflict lies centrally in the
questions that are asked. Our conflict in this research lies in the ‘genderless’ constructions
of success in these young women’s experiences and our ‘gendered’ analysis and
interpretation of these. Utilising feminist frameworks, we expected gender to have played
a major role in the participants’ experiences in the university and were curious to find out
the factors to which the participants attributed their success in their male-dominated fields
of study. On the surface, their accounts seemed to reject notions of gender inequality in
the institution and the programmes they were enrolled in, with all of them vehemently
denying that gender was a (negative) factor in their academic lives.
Feminist research values its political commitment towards women’s social change and
acknowledges subjectivities and the value-laden nature of feminist researchers. So, while
we were careful not to impose our own feminist framework on these students’ accounts
of their experiences, further analysis of their accounts presented a different picture. A few
grudgingly admitted to experiencing low expectations of their performance by lecturers
as well as by their fellow male students at best, and sexual harassment and targeting,
especially of younger (new) students by older male students on campus, at worst. It is
within this conception of the young women’s experiences that we problematised the lack
of gender consciousness in the young women’s accounts. The non-feminist dispositions
of the participants suggest that while notions of gender inequality were rejected by the
participants, evidence from their own accounts suggests that it in fact played and would
continue to play a role in their social and academic integration and alienation in the
sciences, and maybe even in their success and retention in these fields. So, then, what

44
implications does their rejection of notions of gender inequality in educational settings
and programmes have for the development and implementation of interventions that aim
to change the gender regimes of these programmes?
That the women in our study were subjected to low expectations of performance from
their lecturers and fellow male students, and that as young first-year female students they
were subjected to sexual harassment by senior male students, suggest that the gender
regimes are still very unequal in this academic institution. If not addressed, these may
continue to present obstacles as young women strive for academic success in male-
dominated fields such as mathematics and science. On the other hand, their rejection of
and resistance to notions of gender inequality, as well as the determination they showed
towards knowing and fighting for ‘their agenda’, is highly remarkable and may explain
their seemingly anomalous success in the male-dominated fields of study in which they
were enrolled. This is arguably where their agency as individuals and their strong sense
of responsibility, which helps them see themselves as powerful victors, comes into play.
As Giscombe (2007) concluded, individual agency and strong intellectual abilities work
together to prevent women from becoming helpless victims of their circumstances.
Perhaps their denial of gender inequality in their programmes gave these young women
the resources and agency to compete in the male-dominated science fields (see Hanson
and Palmer-Johnson 2000). However, what happens when the reality of gender inequality
surfaces and young women are marginalised, harassed or even abused? What happens
if gender-based obstacles prevent them from succeeding in their studies? Would the
communities of learning, as identified by the students from the medical school in this
study, as well as social support from friends and family members be enough to support
all young women to succeed? The communities of practice formed at discipline level in
some faculties provide a useful model upon which such forms of social support could
be built to ensure the recruitment, retention and success of women in the sciences at
university. What needs further explanation is how we can strengthen such informal
support structures and develop appropriate interventions informed by, among others,
Tinto’s (1987) model of student attrition at universities to help facilitate academic and
social integration necessary for students to succeed in educational institutions.
Conclusion
So, what can we learn from this? Firstly, the participants in this study considered
themselves successful. They attributed their success to their personal attributes, their
own intellectual abilities, their motivation and propensity for hard work. Moreover, they
succeeded because of the social and academic relationships they had in the institution,
the home and elsewhere. While they reported poor support from lecturers, and while
they experienced acts of racism and gender discrimination in the institution, the
communities of practice they formed with fellow students, as well as their supportive
relationships with friends and family, provided enough motivation and support to
guarantee them success. From this vantage point, we argue that it is a combination of the
students’ characteristics and effort, the social and academic experiences they have had
in the institution, as well as their responses to these that determines their success. While
personal attributes are an important element in the success of these students, the extent
to which they feel socially and academically integrated into the life of the institution plays
a significant role in how successful they become.

45
Secondly, while the participants denied the existence of and rejected notions of gender
inequality, particularly claims of women’s inferiority to men in relation to academic ability,
their own accounts of their experiences in the institution suggest that gender inequality
continues to play a negative role in the participation of women in the sciences. Thus,
utilising feminist frameworks, which are politically committed to changing the position of
women in society by putting the social construction of gender at the centre of research
(Lather 1995), we argue that interventions are needed that seek to highlight and address
the gendered ways in which academic and social spaces in the university impact on the
recruitment, retention and success of women in the sciences.

47
Chapter 4
Negotiating social and gender
identity: The worldview of women
students at the University of Pretoria
Iriann Haupt and Linda Chisholm
Introduction
Since 1994, South Africa’s Constitution, legal apparatus, and programmes in government
and across different types of institutions have made the achievement of gender equity
a major priority. Recent research assessing these efforts has pointed to growth in young
women’s enrolment and improved academic performance but has also shown that race
and class continue to determine which young women achieve in what areas, and that
gender violence and abuse both inside and outside institutions continue to play a role
in women’s lives. A major question is why these gender-based differences persist and
what role gender violence plays in their persistence. A less frequently asked question
is how young women who have successfully negotiated their way through school and
into conventionally male terrains experience and negotiate often contradictory gender
expectations of them.
Analyses of gender and education at the end of apartheid showed that whereas young
women were coming through school in equal numbers to boys, and were studying
similar subjects with similar results, gender differences emerged once they entered higher
education and the labour market. Although women’s participation in higher education
has been equal to and in some cases greater than that of men, male and female students
typically gravitate to gender-defined fields and areas within fields. If, for example, women
enter medicine in larger numbers, they will also be more concentrated in the ‘softer’ areas
associated with femininity, such as paediatrics. In post-school and post-higher education
contexts, women’s role in the public sphere is not only marginal but also sharply raced
and gendered.
How young women from different class and race backgrounds in post-apartheid South
Africa who have successfully negotiated their way through the school system into the
sciences and other subjects not traditionally defined as women’s work are experiencing
their university contexts and constructing their identities and futures might provide
important insights into a number of deeper questions about the society: to what extent
has the ethos and practice of institutions changed to support women’s full participation
in both the public and private spheres and how is this perceived and understood? In
addition, such an investigation is important not so much for what it tells us about the
young women themselves as for what it suggests may be missing or absent for young
women who have not ‘succeeded’ – where success is defined as entry to university in
the traditionally male fields of the sciences, medicine, engineering or architecture and as
following this trajectory into relatively high-status jobs in the future.
This study draws particularly on Kenway and Willis’s (1998) understanding that gendered
meanings in social institutions are unstable and constantly struggled over (see Chapter 2

48
for elaboration of this idea). This aspect – of struggle, negotiation, contingency and
instability – is the primary focus of our investigation. Is social and academic integration in
institutions linked to struggles over gender, gender identity and gender boundaries? How
are these identities linked to family and educational history, career decision-making and
choice? We argue that the students who participated in our study saw themselves as free
and socially, academically and institutionally integrated, but that there were nonetheless
constraints on this freedom. Their discourses displayed an unstable mix of a present and
future-oriented race and gender weariness and awareness, a strong sense of individual
merit and achievement as opposed to racial or class belonging, a construction of racial
difference as cultural difference rooted in the past, an apolitical orientation to the social
world around them as desirable, and a reality of interactions in classrooms and on the
campus strongly marked by race and gender inequality.
Our research focused on eight Carnegie scholarship students from the University of
Pretoria (see Table 2.1 on pages 22–23 for a profile of study participants). Interviews and
observations provided direct information about the young women’s lives, but they also
generated insights into their social constructions of their experiences. As such, this chapter
is a narrative (re)construction of the discourses in which the selected young women
expressed their experiences. Indeed, the chapter problematises the notion of ‘voice’ as
unmediated manifestation of ‘reality’; the voices we hear in these narratives are as much
constructed as they are constructing, revealing as they are hiding, confident as they are
silent. The voices of the young women represented here are those of a generation of
transition: a generation characterised by a strong emphasis on individuality, independence
and cultural pluralism as well as by the heavy weight of the historical ‘baggage’ of South
Africa’s past.
The evidence for the University of Pretoria suggests that the young women were not
estranged, alienated or indifferent to the institution; indeed, they demonstrated a fair
degree of social and academic integration and strong identification with the institution.
More interestingly, the discursive evidence also suggests a degree of integration into
current post-apartheid, dominant constructions which to some extent belie the continuing,
deeply ambivalent position that women occupy in the social and public sphere. The
students in our study expressed views of themselves as women who have rights in the
public and private realms, are able to balance multiple demands, and can fulfil multiple
objectives in both public and private life with little cost or detriment to themselves. They
expressed weariness with public discourses about race and gender, preferring to see racial
and class differences primarily in terms of the more neutral construct of ‘culture’. They
exhibited a strong sense of individual agency and independence.
We argue that, in most instances, their perceived integration was facilitated through
strong support – from families, friends and schools. The strength of individual cases
demonstrates that in some cases it was mothers, in others fathers, that mattered;
sometimes it was female friends, other times it was male friends, who provided key
support; and in some instances it was a strongly supportive school and community
environment. The boundaries of expectation were tested in limited cases; most often, the
young women lived out expectations of themselves at this age and stage of their lives in
the protected educational environment of the university.
In this chapter we examine the experiences of these young women, attempting to
convey their simultaneous sense of confidence and security as well as vulnerability and
insecurity, the strength of their convictions and their social contexts. We look first at

The worldview of women students at the University of Pretoria
49
the way in which the students positioned themselves and others in terms of race, class
and gender; we then examine their constructions of their experiences of academic and
social integration at the university, and the influence and support of families, friends and
communities; and finally we provide evidence of how they saw themselves and viewed
success in relation to their own raced and gendered identities. Before presenting our
findings, however, we first discuss an ethical research issue related to the institutional
context of the study.
The ethics of examining institutional culture
A major ethical issue in the methodology of this project was how to maintain
respondents’ confidentiality while ensuring that we were able to demonstrate the
significance of the results. This relates to the question of institutional identification, an
important issue for the HSRC Ethics Committee, and deserves some discussion. The HSRC
Ethics Committee was concerned in particular about preserving anonymity of all research
participants. This concern raises broader issues related to the purpose of research.
In the case of institutional identification, much of the significance of our results relates,
for example, to the historically constructed, specific character of institutions in terms of
race and privilege. To speak about social constructions of success outside of the context
of who is speaking and in what context would render the results meaningless. It matters
in South Africa whether an institution is historically advantaged or disadvantaged, because
institutional culture is strongly linked to the raced and gendered character of universities.
It also matters which institution it is among the historically advantaged or disadvantaged,
as each institution has a specific history. For this reason, it was decided that while it was
important to maintain the confidentiality of students’ identity, it was equally important to
identify the institution, much as Jonathan Jansen does in his Harvard Education Review
article (Jansen 2005). In this article, Jansen describes his experiences as a black dean at
a South African institution that he explicitly identifies as the University of Pretoria. The
article shows how race, gender, history and institutional culture constitute emotional
terrain in which decanal leadership plays itself out in the volatile post-apartheid era. The
article has ultimately contributed positively to the university in highlighting the tensions
that make change difficult.
Race, gender, history and institutional culture provide no less of an emotional terrain for
students. Thus we too are explicit in identifying the institutional context of our study,
the University of Pretoria. Our aim in identifying the institution is not to shame or to
praise; rather, it is to relate the emotional work of gender boundary maintenance and
construction to the institutional context which is also ‘emotional terrain’. To present the
experiences and constructions of the young women outside of a real understanding of
the institutional context is likely to lead to a partial understanding of the issues. In the
interests of a whole, complex understanding, then, the institutional confidentiality is not
maintained. However, the identity of the young women is protected, and the names used
in this chapter are not the real names of the students.
The University of Pretoria is historically an all-white institution that was established in
Pretoria in the nineteenth century. Linked closely with Afrikaner nationalism since its
inception, the university was close to power and the apartheid state until 1994. Since
then it, like all other formerly white universities, has changed the character of its student
enrolment. However, as at other universities, the staff has remained largely white. It is one
of the largest universities in South Africa, following closely after the largest, the University

50
of South Africa, and the recently merged institutions now known as the Tshwane
University of Technology, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and North West University.
In 2004, black students comprised 41 per cent of all contact students at the University of
Pretoria and 99 per cent of its distance education students. Female students comprised
53 per cent of its contact students and 72 per cent of its distance education students
(DoE 2005a: 29). Thirty-six percent of its students were in the fields of science and
technology, 15 per cent in business and 48 per cent in the humanities. Compared with
these enrolments, only 13 per cent of instruction and research staff were black, and
44 per cent were female (DoE 2005a: 40).
Whereas Jansen’s article (2005) draws attention to how the deeply conservative history,
politics and traditions of the university play out in the contemporary era, his student,
Venitha Pillay, highlights the continuing ‘masculinist’ culture of the institution (Pillay 2006).
Such a culture is not necessarily bound up with the biological sex of the incumbents; it
is rather a style that can also categorise the social behaviour of women. She argues that
‘the institutions involved in the incorporation process have been historically masculine
in their outlook and image but, more importantly, they remain masculine’ (Pillay 2006:
599). The institutional terrain in which the young women in our study found themselves
and in which they made sense of their lives is thus one which has changed its enrolment
patterns in the post-1994 era, but in which dominant history, race and gender remain
powerfully inscribed.
Academic and social integration: race, class and gender
Interviews and observations show that the University of Pretoria students in our study
believed themselves to be academically and institutionally integrated. These students were
tired of the public discourse of race while being positioned in and by it. They wanted to
see themselves as ‘normal’ when they interacted among same-race or same-sex groups
rather than as aberrations from an abstract ideal. They emphasised the importance of
the individual and of individual merit and achievement even though they themselves
had been selected on the basis of their gender. They denied that race had any salience
on campus and in their own lives, and they saw racial difference as rooted in culture,
an orientation consistent with how race positioned individuals in apartheid discourse.
They preferred a disengaged, apolitical approach to student life, where dominant student
politics was right-wing. They were comfortable but variably confident and shy in lectures.
They were strong feminists while denying that they were such, and they drew strong
support from families, same-sex friends, boyfriends and peers.
Institutional integration: free but constrained
According to their own testimony, the young women were well integrated both socially
and academically and did not experience any discrimination. On the whole, they reported
that they experienced the university as a safe place, where they were treated equally,
were recognised and could develop themselves. The safe space of the university was
counterpoised to the unsafe outside space – the inner space is one where they were
protected and secure; the outside world was one of danger and violence. Their security
was a fragile one, however: after a mugging spree in the men’s residences, the university
had introduced security guards who were available to escort women at night. The security
guard was an ambivalent figure, representing at one and the same time the violence
in the outside world and the protection from it – as Nolwazi, a young African student,
expressed it, there were so many that they constituted ‘an invasion of privacy’. Whether
the university was in reality a safe or hostile space, the young women were constructing

51
their social environment in terms of ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ spaces, in so doing assimilating the
surrounding violence in the society to their understanding of how and where they could
move in it. Academically, they experienced the university as challenging and requiring
hard work, but not as constraining.
The young women were aware of gender stereotypes, but claimed that these did not
play a role in their lives and did not affect them at university. Thus Nolwazi argued
that ‘it’s been proven men are better programmers because they grow up playing Play
Stations while we play with dolls, but I’ve never felt pressure or anything. I can program
just as good as that man.’ And Thandeka likewise felt that ‘there are really no gender
issues here. I mean, I haven’t heard any of my friends complain about it in different
faculties, that “there’s this lecturer, he does this with the guys and the guys do this”. No.’
In fact, if there was any gender discrimination it was brought on by ‘the young women
themselves’. Far from the university being a restrictive environment for women, it was
seen and experienced as a place of opportunity and free expression. Again, the women
expressed a form of ‘gender blindness’ on the part of the institution, as well as from their
own perspective. As suggested by writings on race, this gender-blind approach often hides
the subtle realities of taken-for-granted gendered behaviour and assumptions. There is a
division of the world into a space in which ‘gender happens’ and a space in which ‘gender
does not happen’. In creating this division, much as the ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ space was
created, the young women differentiated their world from one in which there is inequality
and discrimination. In their view, the world they occupied at university was a free world.
Race and gender weariness
The importance of the individual, as opposed to membership of a racial group on the
basis of skin colour, featured prominently in the students’ accounts. They consistently
did not want to make, or be exposed to, any distinctions based on skin colour. They
expressed a weariness of ‘the whole black and white thing’. Considering themselves as
part of a new generation, they ‘almost have a need to just accept each other by who
you are, who you are as a person’. They all asserted that ‘people in general want to be
evaluated for who they are and what they have accomplished’. They did not want race
quotas in residences, but would rather have it that ‘people could go wherever they want.
If there is a whole floor of white people, or a whole floor of black people, so what?’
The same emphasis applied in the discussion of class and status. Individual merit and
accomplishment was the basis on which people should be judged; money ‘doesn’t – and
shouldn’t – make a difference’.
Their emphasis on the individual and their refusal to make distinctions based on race
translated into a pronounced apolitical attitude: politics is ‘not our thing’. Interestingly,
Susan speculated that it ‘may be the way the courses are structured…that makes us feel
more independent’. They did not want to be involved in campus political organisations
such as PASMA, an organisation of predominantly black students affiliated with the
African National Congress, or VF and TAS, both organisations of Afrikaans-speaking white
students. Those organisations were regarded as ‘too extreme’, especially as they ‘are
associated with a lot of violence’. They wanted to judge and be judged as individuals who
speak, think and act for themselves.
Despite this race weariness, all students reported a correlation of race and class. African
students saw white students as having greater financial resources and coming from
wealthier families. Thandeka explained: ‘Most of our [the African students’] moms and
dads don’t drive Land Rovers, and we still have to take taxis to go home and can’t get

52
fetched and stuff.’ Awareness of race and class as an interrelated source of exclusion
became obvious in Thandeka’s account: ‘I think it’s quite intimidating, walking into a
place that is full of a certain kind of people. I mean, if you walk into a restaurant that is
just so up there, full of rich white people, and they think, ‘OK, she’s a rich black person’,
you kind of feel, OK, this is not quite my territory.’
Making jokes was a light-hearted way of dealing with ‘the whole black and white thing’.
On the one hand, these jokes gave expression to their ‘weariness’ of race (as well as
gender) politics. Susan, a white student, related an incident in her class in which she
countered one joke about race with another one about gender: ‘I was looking for a stapler,
and he asked me if I didn’t ask him for a stapler because he was black, and it’s a bit
weird, but then you can see that he is joking, and then it’s fine and then you joke back…
and eventually my comment to him was “because I’m a woman”.’ On the other hand, these
jokes were tools used to depoliticise race relations and make race and skin colour a much
less sensitive topic that could be spoken about jokingly without offending people. Keshani
said: ‘I have black friends that go to our other black friends and say, “You’re blushing,
you’re going darker” [laughs], so they diss each other as well.’ Susan added that making
jokes about such differences was ‘almost like you’re celebrating your difference, and
[accepting] it, you can understand it and see it and it provides a lot of fun’.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that racial stereotypes have been completely reduced to
an unproblematic topic and a source of humour and jokes. The students told us about
a cake sale by VF and TAS on the main campus, where cakes were priced R5 for white
students and R2 for African students. Students who could prove they were members
of the ANC did not have to pay anything for a cake, provided they paid money into a
‘corruption box’. Whereas all interviewees expressed a weariness of race quotas and
policies, the way VF and TAS interpreted this topic in their cake sale was perceived as
too offensive, particularly because of the negative, right-wing image they have of these
Afrikaans student organisations. It became clear that making jokes about stereotypes was
something that belonged to circles of close friends where students could be sure they
would not offend anyone. Susan explained: ‘I’m sure you find people where you can’t
even go there, if you make any distinction they would be immediately offended.’
Racial difference as cultural difference: ‘What else is there, other than
cultural difference?’
Students saw differences between people as stemming from different cultural backgrounds
and upbringing rather than from membership of different races. As they consistently
spoke about ‘white’ and ‘African/black culture’, it became clear that their understanding
of culture was highly essentialised. Culture was seen as a static determinant of standards,
values and morals and of ‘how you behave when you’re amongst other people’. Knowing
about the particularities of other cultures provided guidance to understanding people’s
behaviour. As Keshani put it: ‘When we try to sit and analyse why that person did that,
you can always say [it] might be a racial thing, oh, not really a racial thing, cultural, ja.’
Asked about what cultural differences she had observed among her fellow students,
Keshani, convinced that ‘there must be’ a difference, expressed surprise that she could not
spontaneously think of an example.
Nonetheless, race as a (visual) marker of difference was recognised as having an impact
on the interactions among people. Susan reported that she once walked into a restaurant
where ‘there were only black people sitting, and I mean not light skinned, dark skinned.
And I’m not a racist, I accept people and I don’t have issues with it, and for me I was

53
so surprised at my reaction. I was almost frightened, I felt out of my place, I felt almost
threatened, like this is their space, I’m leaving. And I think that is something at a very
low, almost survival level. You do realise differences and you do see groups together.’
Thandeka speculated that ‘maybe it’s because we relate better to our own kind’ and
further that ‘it’s a subconscious thing, it’s something like that, it is just a normal thing to
do, go with your own kind’. She also reported that she felt virtually ‘invisible’ to white
students when they met her outside of the campus, or when an Afrikaans group did not
hand out a free newspaper to her.
In lectures, white and black students generally did not sit in mixed groups and one rarely
saw a racially mixed group during a stroll on the university campus. Groups of black or
white students often talked among each other in their respective mother tongue. While
language or the separated way of being seated in the classrooms created social fields
that tended to be mutually exclusive, the occasional entering of a student into a group of
people of a different race highlighted the fluidity and permeability of boundaries for those
who wished to cross them. However, in general, classrooms seemed to be predominantly
characterised by a mode of white and black students comfortably studying and learning
next to, but not really with, each other.
Students acknowledged, however, that people from the same race ‘tend to cluster’ and
‘it’s not often that you get multiracial groups’. Because this was regarded as natural or
instinctive behaviour, it was not problematised. Generally, there was a strong avoidance of
seeing race as a problematic issue or source of exclusion. Keshani even considered that
‘maybe it’s because I don’t want to see it like that…one can feel excluded if you want
to see yourself as being excluded’. Thus, inclusion was regarded as an active process
of engagement rather than a passive process that is directed by others, be it groups of
students or institutions such as the university. Whereas differences were recognised, the
common experience of similar ‘student problems’ – such as heavy workloads, difficult
topics and long nights of studying – created a shared identity that, according to the
students, transcended the boundaries of culture, race and class.
However, the students did engage in processes of negative othering. Nolwazi highlighted
that ‘in black culture’ the respect for people in general, and especially for elders, is highly
valued whereas ‘the whole swearing thing, I picked it up in most of the white people…
It’s wrong, you know, you’re degrading the other person, it’s wrong. Why do you have
to use such language? Yet I find with the white people they speak like that with each
other.’ Nolwazi generally felt that ‘most white people are very disrespectful, very, very
disrespectful’ in their interaction with lecturers. Susan stated: ‘I find often that black
students, they would talk on their cellphones, they would walk out of class [talking] on
their cellphones, they would chat in class, they would come in late.’ However, she quickly
added, ‘I can’t say from my experience if this is really a specific culture or specific race
[thing]’, and she stressed that complaining about workload to the lecturer, swearing or
coming in late was a type of behaviour that could be found among black and white
students alike, thus emphasising the internal heterogeneity of racial groups. Black and
white students were thus constructing one another as culturally different using exactly the
same examples in doing so.
Gender and race in lectures
Observations of lectures were conducted over a week. The atmosphere in these lectures
can be described as relaxed. Students seemed to be comfortable and confident enough
to ask questions. In most classes the majority of students were white and male, and the

54
male students were also the ones that attracted the most attention from the lecturers. All
lecturers were white and Afrikaans-speaking and, with one exception, male. Both female
and male students seemed to feel comfortable with both male and female lecturers.
However, a female student, regardless of race, rarely commented or posed a question.
Whereas white students of both sexes sat together and white female students interacted
very confidently among their male fellow students, African female students tended to sit
with each other, often right in front of the lecturer.
All students saw differences with regard to academic performance and motivation among
African and white students. Susan distinguished ‘people that want to really go on with
a project and achieve, or people that are just cruising through’ and found that this was
often related to race. This was supported by Nolwazi, who explained that most black
people have a ‘laid-back’ mentality and think that ‘in the end we all have the same
degree’. According to her, white students ‘want to perform, they want to get distinctions’,
whereas black students just want to ‘get through this course’. Nolwazi did not have an
explanation for what the ‘x-factor’ might be that made white students more willing to
perform well than black students. Certainly, more research is needed on whether this is
true or whether it is yet another example of the racialised perceptions of students, given
that it was not an issue raised at any of the other universities studied.
Some of the male white students in the lectures, all in their very early twenties, were
confident enough to attempt a ‘flirt’ with the female researcher and one of their
comments revealed the belief that ‘if pretty students join the group we’ll get better
marks’. Nolwazi and a friend of hers, a female Indian student who was not part of the
study, both reported that although there were fewer male students in one class, one of
their lecturers still preferred to call them to the board. Nolwazi and her friend also said
that even when they were confident in the topic, a call to the board to solve a problem
in front of everyone else made them ‘go blank’. According to them, the male students
were much more confident, and even if they did not know the answer they were ‘cocky’
with the lecturers and would ‘sloppily write something on the board’. All this points to
a continuing presence of gender stereotypes and, possibly, resulting gender inequalities.
Although the female students were aware of the existence of such stereotypes, when
directly asked about them they maintained they were not affected by them. This confirms
the results of the first round of research, which revealed a high degree of gender
blindness among the female students.
Socially integrated, quintessential feminists: ‘I’m not a strong feminist, but…’
As with awareness of gender stereotypes, the young women were fully aware of the
social pressures to get married and have children. Some were more sceptical than others
about marriage. But they all expressed the need and the confidence to find and balance
families and careers: to have careers of their own, defer the gratification of having a
family, but combine a family and a career nonetheless. For them, everything was possible:
a fulfilling job and children in a happy marriage or as a single parent. For one young
woman, herself brought up by a single parent, marriage was not necessarily the answer.
By free choice, God’s will or parental arrangement, having a partner was still part of the
women’s sense of themselves and their futures. At one level, these were well-adjusted
young women, fulfilling the social expectations of themselves as much as they created
them for themselves. At this point in their lives, there was little constraint on their dreams,
which they saw no reason to be frustrated.

55
Caution and restraint were evident, however, when they reflected on the lives of friends,
family and peers whose lives did not conform to this women’s magazine idyll: a cousin
who left school to have a child at the age of 22; parents who lived happily with three
children born out of wedlock until the pressure from a granny forced them to tie the knot
against their will; ‘mom’s friends who are all getting divorced, all of them, and they’ve got
horror stories about their marriages and I’m thinking, yo, I really don’t wanna go there’
(Nolwazi); women bringing up children alone; husbands who had abandoned their wives;
fathers who had many wives and were not present to their children.
Through all this shone a fierce and stubborn independence; an insistence that ‘there’s
no rush to get married’, as marriage might be ‘overrated’; a recognition that cheating on
a woman could happen with or without a ring on a finger; and the belief that ‘stunning’
and ‘proper’ children could emerge from a single-parent household. There was also a
deep commitment to equality in gender relations. Domestic duties should be equally
shared. Nolwazi expressed it this way: ‘I’m not your cook and I won’t be ever in my life.
If I feel like cooking, of course I will, and chances are that I will do it more often than
I won’t, but I don’t want people to expect that. He shouldn’t think now it’s my duty and
I must make him supper. Ha! Never!’ And children should be jointly reared to enable
women to work. In this regard Thandeka commented: ‘What makes him more superior
to me? Why can’t he be at home and I’ll be at work? That I totally, eish, I feel so strongly
about that. I don’t believe that women should now sit and take care of the babies and
then the man goes to work.’ Dependence was anathema.
And even for Keshani, coming from a close-knit family who had done much to support
her studies, there was ultimately a recognition that ‘it’s not gonna be easy to balance a
career and a family’. If she had to choose, however, she would decide for marriage/family
and against her career. Her transcendent view of the beauty of marriage was balanced
by seeing the reality around her – in her case, an aunt – a doctor – who was widowed
and left with two small children on her hands. Both children ‘need full attention’ and ‘so
she left them with her parents while she continued to study for her degree. Also the head
of a hospital where she works, her life was transparently “not easy”. So I don’t think it’s
gonna be easy.’ When Keshani indicated in the focus group discussions that she was not
sure whether career or family was more important and did not know what she would
do if her husband would want her to stop working, all the other young women strongly
opposed her. She responded that ‘sometimes, maybe, if you have enough money, then
maybe I can understand’ why a woman might agree to stop working.
Social support: families and friends
Most of the young women talked about the big difference between the expectations of
school and university academic life. For most, school did not prepare them for university
life. ‘The learning only starts now,’ said Nolwazi, referring to the spoon-feeding and rote
learning that characterise high school contrasted with the pressure, study methods and
expectations at university. For some it was the newness and difficulty of the concepts, ‘the
fundamentals’ to be mastered, that were the big challenges; for others, the sheer size of
the task resulted in ‘sleeplessness nights’. But it also depended on the subject, as Keshani
felt that memorisation at school prepared her for the memorising work required for a
medical degree. Nonetheless, she commented that being at university ‘is like learning to
swim in a deep sea’.
All the young women acknowledged the support of family, friends and boyfriends in their
lives and in their integration into the unfamiliar world of the university. The families from

56
which they came and to which they referred varied tremendously. Relationships in families
were also complex. For one of the young African women, Nolwazi, who came from a
well-educated family, her mother was the role model, the father the decision-maker; for
Thandeka, mother, sister, uncle and granny played important roles, while the impact of her
once-absent father trying to recreate ties created emotional confusion and distress.
For the young Afrikaans woman Marise, who came from a small, conservative town that
was once the capital of a homeland, sisters and boyfriend along with family expectations
were the key supports. Her boyfriend, with whom she had been at school for six years,
came from Europe and a family that debated issues. He encouraged her to develop her
own opinions. He was an important influence, but so were the assumptions in her family
that university was the ‘end point’ of education and not a privilege. As she came from a
large family where resources were always stretched, financial independence was a strong
motivation for higher education – as it was for several of the other students too. Marise’s
rebellion against her Christian upbringing, the encouragement of her boyfriend and her
parents’ expectations of higher education for their daughters all created a strong sense of
independence and helped facilitate a relatively easy integration into university life.
Whereas religion was something to rebel against in Marise’s case, God was the reason
for achievement and support in another. Christianity was and remained the constant
companion of Keshani, who came from a deeply conservative, recently immigrated Indian
family where ‘I would be the horse and they would control me and I wouldn’t want them
[to]’. In her case, her brother was the key support.
Family cohesion was strong in all cases, and a major source of support. Familial
relationships were overwhelmingly positive and supportive. However, a negative
relationship with a family member could have the opposite and very detrimental effect
on personal and academic life. Thandeka said: ‘When I’ve had a falling out with my dad,
it’s horrible, I just get this…ah, you see, it’s like…a bummer! And you’re bummed for the
whole week.’
All the young women had broken up with long-term boyfriends during the first one or
two years at varsity; they felt they had ‘outgrown’ these high school relationships and had
‘moved on’ in comparison to their former boyfriends. However, they had maintained good
friendships with them and still assigned a certain degree of significance to them in their
current life.
Family was important to the young women, and so too were their friends. Whether it was
their group of friends, or their special, best friend, fellow female friendships mattered. For
Nolwazi, her friends were ‘always there’ for her, each very different and each playing a
special role. It is as if they provided a substitute family. She recounted how she once had
to stay on campus for three days in a row, and how her friend had brought her breakfast,
lunch and supper, a change of clothes, ‘and mints ’cause I couldn’t brush my teeth on
campus’. This friend acted as a loving mother, carer, companion: ‘She has always been
there, when I am laughing, when I am crying, when I am sad, when I am happy, she has
always been, and she is not judgmental, that’s what I love.’
A key issue in close female friendships was that these friends ‘are always there for you’,
through thick and thin, supporting, assisting, unquestioning, casting no judgement.
Another of the young African women, Thandeka, belonged to a Christian ‘discipleship
group’ that was a major source of support: ‘So if I’m struggling with school, I’m struggling

57
with guys, I’m struggling with my family, they know about it and they are there for me,
and we meet, like, every week…They just help me to grow spiritually and…socially [and]
as a leader as well.’ She talked about how the group was formed: ‘You know how it is,
all the black students just flock together’ – providing some insight into how race was a
source of support and solidarity in friendship networks in an unfamiliar environment. For
Keshani, God’s hand was discernible in her meeting of her best friend: ‘It was just weird
how we clicked.’ Meeting her friends was a mystical expression of ‘just special moments
in my life’.
There was one student for whom same-sex friendships were more difficult. For Marise,
who had rebelled against her father’s religion, whose sisters provided a source of strength
and whose boyfriend was an important influence, relationships with other women were
more difficult than relationships with young men. She acknowledged differences between
herself and young men – ‘I know I’m still much more emotional than guys’ – and that
‘there’s a basic part of me that correlates with women’, but ‘it’s just that I feel that it’s
easier to connect with guys’.
Social support: communities
A source of pride to the family, a source of admiration to the community: so one of the
young African women, Nolwazi, characterised how she was viewed by her community.
She described the community in which she grew up as one where a university degree
was uncommon, students dropped out of school early to have children and many went
on to doing drugs, and so by comparison, ‘hey, I’m a queen. People just think the
world of me…People don’t dream big in my neighbourhood…I’m already the cream
of the crop.’ Another African woman, Thandeka, who came from a white suburban
neighbourhood, commented on the distance and lack of connection between the
community and her success: ‘You know how white people are…it’s just, well, they’re
there, we’re here, we’re cool, as long as they don’t bother us and we don’t bother them,
that’s it, so that’s that, but other than that, no, there isn’t much really.’ She expressed
distance, but so too did the young Afrikaans woman, Marise, who went to an Afrikaans
church and an Afrikaans school: ‘The people are very judgemental out there. The aura
is very much different to Pretoria…I don’t feel as if I, I felt as if I belonged in the
community, but not as if I stood out or as if I was noticed that much. I mean, I know
I achieved very well, but I wasn’t one of the popular people, not like a cheerleader
or something.’ For both Thandeka and Marise, in different ways, there was a sense of
alienation from the community and indifference towards it.
These feelings contrasted strongly not only with Nolwazi’s views but also with those of
Keshani, whose family struggled to survive on arrival in South Africa from India. She
reported: ‘[The Indian community is] actually very supportive, especially the friends that
our family has. They are supportive. I’ve mentioned how Indians look to studies. They
always ask, how is it going? It actually keeps me up to standard…looking back on when
I feel that I can’t go on, but I feel that I owe it to all the people who might be thinking
about me and how I’m going through.’ She described her self-doubt when she first
arrived at the university, and how the thought of the community support strengthened
her. She remembers how they said, ‘Wow, you being a doctor, I want to see that’ and
how ‘something in me just said…you know…things like that just stick to me. Even now it
encourages me. Ja, they are very nice and loving people.’

58
The discourse of success among the young women was centred on the idea that a
university degree is a guarantee for a good job and a stepping stone to a successful
life and career measured in material things: ‘You must get your degree, get a job, buy
a house, get a car.’ Once positioned on this trajectory of success – by themselves as
well as externally by significant actors such as parents and communities – ‘you are on
the right track’. The women displayed a strong sense of confidence in themselves as
powerful young women who were in full control and who ‘[wouldn’t] allow anyone to
step on’ them, as Marijke, an Afrikaans-speaking white student, put it. The experiences
of overcoming difficulties at university on their own strengthened their sense of self-
confidence and ability. As a result there was difficulty dealing with or admitting failure.
‘I don’t like failure, it just gets me down,’ said Thandeka when the Carnegie programme
manager checked up on why she failed an exam.
Levels of expectations and ambition were uniformly high. All of the young women
assumed that they would not have any significant difficulties in finding employment
after they had finished their studies. Two planned to start their own businesses once
they had gained a degree of experience in the field. In the case of Nolwazi, it was the
strong academic background of her family that positioned her on a trajectory of academic
success, getting a degree and then a job: ‘It’s like everyone in my family studied. My
dad is educated, he’s got a master’s. Everyone is like doctor, doctor. So for me getting
a degree is just like getting a matriculation certificate. Nobody congratulates you. It’s
like, well done, you’ve passed, and that was it, you know.’ Admitting to not having
fulfilled expectations made her assume a defensive attitude towards the respective
person or institution levelling criticism. The students’ perception of themselves as being
independent, successful women could also have contributed to the already mentioned
race and gender blindness, in the sense that none of them perceived any significant
gender or racial inequities at university.
The degree of integration into the dominant discourses of success varied among the
young women. However, even when departing from the norm, their ideas were still
oriented towards it. Limitations and boundaries were overcome but at the same time
acknowledged as divergent from the perceived ‘norm’ and hence reconfirmed. For
example, Nolwazi described her mother as an admirable example of an independent
woman but at the same time judged that very behaviour by stating that her ‘mom is a
weirdo’. Another time she praised a friend of hers for being strongly opinionated but also
stated that ‘she is not normal’. Statements like these revealed the deep internalisation of
gender stereotypes and perceptions of ‘normality’ and ‘womanhood’, providing insight into
the complexity of the dynamic of boundary breaking, making and (re)confirming.
The different perceptions the young women had of ‘studying’ itself are also revealing.
Sometimes studying was perceived as fun, but equally often it was referred to as hard
work, a source of pressure, stress and struggle – overall it was seen as a means to achieve
a goal. Only Marijke spoke about her subject with passion, bursting out that she ‘just
loves studying’. The other students seemed to be driven more by the compulsion to do
something that would ultimately help them achieve their individually set goals in life:
financial independence and self-realisation as well as status and upward social mobility.
They presented themselves as hard-working students who made sacrifices; this was also
part of their constitution of themselves as successful.

59
Their constructions of success in relation to their gender were also complex. Negotiating
their female identity and their ideas of womanhood (and what is ‘normal’ for a woman)
within the cross-currents of other significant identities – being a student, being a student
in traditionally male fields and being a recipient of a high-profile scholarship – seemed
to be a process that was not always as smooth as they made it seem. A significant part of
their identity was determined by, on the one hand, positioning themselves in opposition
to social norms, conventions and so on while on the other hand linking themselves in
individually selective ways to the very same normalising discourses. What they showed is
not a general rejection of gender boundaries; rather, they confirmed those they were not
(yet) ready to leave behind. Thus they saw themselves as outside conventional gender
stereotypes, neither conforming to them nor holding them, as having overcome them but
at the same time aspiring to the conventional markers of feminine gendered identity.
A strong theme that arises from the data is centred on the notions of independence,
guidance and control. All the young women expressed a strong dislike of ‘being
controlled’ – for example, by Carnegie with regard to their academic progress – and
of being defined or limited in their personal life by ‘social pressure’, especially with
regard to gender roles. They emphasised their current and future state of independence
– in thought, opinion, financial status and emotion. Influences and encouragement to
independence arose from different sources, be it the father who ‘helps me do things
my way’, the ex-boyfriend who was ‘allowing me to become opinionated, to make up
my own mind about things’, or the difficulty of growing up with a single mother, as in
Thandeka’s case. ‘I’m just an independent type of a person,’ she reported. ‘I just had to be
responsible quickly, and I had to be responsible for a lot of things.’
High school did not seem to have played a significant role in channelling these young
women into the fields and careers they were pursuing. Rather, their pursuits were
presented as having resulted from individual choice and self-initiative, especially
with regard to the acquisition of information. Apart from one young woman who felt
‘technically’ prepared for university, all felt that high school had not informed them well
enough about future career options and that they had to acquire all relevant information
by themselves. Knowledge as a resource had been acquired predominantly on their own
initiative. The fact that they had no particular role models underscored their sense of
independence and strong will to use their own abilities and resources to succeed.
Conclusion
We have attempted to present a portrait of some of the Carnegie-supported students at
the University of Pretoria that does not judge them, but places them in the context of an
institution with a history and a society in the process of change. As these students were
selected for scholarships from family and school contexts that have positioned them in
different ways for success in a historically white institution that has been described as
‘masculinist’ in its culture – entry to which is another marker of success – it is perhaps
not surprising that they preferred to see the individual recognised on merit. They
expressed a distinct distaste for racial and gender-based judgements and categorisations
even as they articulated perceived racial differences as cultural differences, and they
were strongly feminist in their orientation to the control they wished to exercise over
their destinies even as they desired a balance and seamless integration of their working
and private lives. It is clear that they will exercise leadership in society in one way or
another. They have been groomed for it, and the values they espoused will, in one way
or another, enable them to do so in particular ways.

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Chapter 5
Social and academic integration of
young women at the University of
Cape Town
Monica Mawoyo and Ursula Hoadley
Introduction
Recent research on undergraduate attainment in South Africa shows there is a 50 per cent
dropout rate of students in the country.8 Both this research and the international literature
suggest that the main obstacle confronting both female and male students in universities
is financial. Students struggle to cover both the direct costs of university education as
well as the opportunity costs of full-time enrolment at university. A study of the Carnegie
scholarship students offers a unique opportunity to examine issues other than finances
that confront students in their academic and social integration into university life. This
chapter explores the academic and social experiences of eight of these young women
at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their experiences at university are explored in
relation to their family lives, communities, high school experiences and UCT’s institutional
culture. (See Table 2.1 on pages 22–23 for a brief profile of study participants.)
Emerging most crucially from the research are the complex ways in which the students
negotiated their academic and social identities in the university setting, which provided
a vibrant and accommodating context for some of the students and an alienating and
indifferent context for others. The young women were at a particular point in their lives –
what was key for them was the transition from their homes and communities to a
university setting defined largely around a new independence and new responsibilities.
This transition is about challenges and opportunities. This study focuses on both of these,
and the ways in which the students made sense of themselves in their new context.
Based on life-history interview data and observations, the data show that the young
women subordinated discourses of race and gender, foregrounding socio-economic and
class-related factors in their definition of self. They emphasised their autonomy, and the
‘refashioning’ (Walkerdine 2003) of their identities in the context of the university. The
question arose as to how we could understand the privileging of this identity in the
students’ discourse around their integration into university life and their conceptions of
success. We also considered the implications for their academic and social ‘fit’ into the
university, a concern of the broader project.
Women and higher education
In recent years, women’s enrolments in higher education in South Africa have been
relatively high. The student numbers at UCT, shown in Table 5.1, follow national trends.
In 2006, total undergraduate enrolments were 51 per cent female and 49 per cent male,
but women were under-represented in the sciences.
8 ‘Half of all SA tertiary students drop out’, Mercury, 29 November 2005.

62
Table 5.1 UCT undergraduate enrolment by faculty, 2006
Faculty %Female % Male
Commerce 44 56
Engineering and the built environment 27 73
Health sciences 71 29
Science 44 56
Humanities 68 32
Total number of students 51 49
While the racial institutional culture has been the subject of some research and discussion
in South Africa (e.g. Jansen 2004), very little has been published, other than internal
institutional reports by transformation officers, on the gender culture and gender regimes
and their relationship to the raced and classed nature of these institutions. In 2006, UCT
had a total enrolment of 15 423 students. Of these, 40 per cent were white, 20 per cent
African, 13 per cent coloured and 7 per cent Indian. Table 5.2 gives the racial profile of
students at UCT.
Table 5.2 UCT student enrolment by race, 2006
Population group Number Percentage
SA African 3 063 20
SA coloured 2 062 13
SA white 6 136 40
SA Indian 1 119 7
Other 286 2
International 2 757 18
Total 15 423 100
A number of studies have explored racial dynamics on campuses and other issues
pertinent to student integration framed in terms of ‘institutional culture’ (see Chapter 2).
However, there is a paucity of studies reflecting the point of view and voices of the
students themselves. This chapter gives voice to students’ experiences of gender, race and
class in their academic and social settings at the institution where they were studying, but
problematises their representations of their experience, fraught as they are with tensions
and contradictions.
Theoretical framework
The questions related to student integration posed in the literature are essentially around
the negotiation of identity. The women in our study were experiencing a shift between two
worlds: that of their community and school, and that of the university. For most this meant
a significant geographical relocation. But it also meant a shift in values, freedom, demands
and responsibilities. The attempt to reconcile the demands of what they knew and what

Social and academic integration of young women at UCT
63
they were coming to know was significant for some. The students also responded to this
‘identity work’ very differently. For all students, it meant a shift from one community to
another. But interviews revealed that what all the students were concerned with was the
projection of particular ‘images of self’ (Goffman 1971). Some of the accounts by students
were positive, emphasising the opportunity and exigencies to ‘create alternative sources of
selfhood’ (Sarup 1986: 33). One of the students, Lulama, put it this way:
Everyone at home had always known me as this really good student, but I
wanted to try something else now. Cape Town is a whole new set of people…
so it was almost like a blank page I could open.
Others pointed out the anxieties, fears and contradictions that their change in
context produced.
Issues of race and gender emerged in subtle ways that intersected with each other. The
issue of class, however, was a dominant theme in the way in which students spoke
of their study motivations as well their university experiences. Social class positioning
differentiated constructions of responsibility and success, in some cases causing anxiety
and fear. However, whereas students conceded that social class affected their educational
and social opportunities, they resisted the idea that race or gender had any impact or was
a constraint.
In this chapter, drawing primarily on the work of Walkerdine (2003), we argue that a neo-
liberal identity – focused on issues of class transition and techniques of self-regulation
and management – was privileged by the young women. For some students making the
transition to university, the tensions and strains accompanying this identity were drawn
out. This was particularly evident in the entry of students from working-class backgrounds
into the elite tertiary education context of UCT.
‘Identity’ as used in this chapter is fluid and adaptive. It is also situationally dependent
and context-bound (Rex 1986: 28). Therefore we regard the expressions of identity by
the young women students as provisional, not necessarily consistent, and evolving in the
deliberation of new systems of meaning, relationships and patterns of behaviour over time.
The analysis is organised in the following way. We address the issues of academic and
social integration separately, although of course they are related (or embedded). We
then look at the women’s career choices and their constructions of success. Following
Kenway and Willis (1998), we use these categories of analysis to probe further the
identity work that the women were engaged in, and the opportunities and constraints that
they perceived and experienced. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the
negotiation of identity especially in terms of race, class and gender.
Academic integration: intellectual life at university
In this part of the chapter we consider the students’ negotiation of their academic
identities. Their academic integration can be seen partly in how they progressed through
their courses, partly through the emotions evoked by their studies and partly through the
ways in which they spoke about the field of study that they were pursuing.
Only three of the eight students had passed all their courses and had made seamless
progress through their studies. The other five students had between them failed 21
subjects, the majority in their first year. The students from working-class backgrounds,

64
and from formerly disadvantaged schools, had failed more subjects. Thus, not all students
were making smooth progress through their degree, despite having been selected for
the scholarship based on academic performance at school. Nonetheless, all the students
emphasised that they were ‘science’ students, stressing the privileged position and
opportunities which they believed their faculty identity gave them. Camilla emphasised
the difference between science students and humanities students through a humorous
stereotyping of humanities students:
They start at, like, two o’clock and they leave at three. And they have a nice
tan and they don’t carry anything besides these teeny tiny little bags that can’t
keep anything but a cellphone and make-up.
Pursuing a scientific career was seen as a means to upward mobility, particularly in an
institution such as UCT, as we will see below. There was an awareness that in fields such
as chemical engineering students were headhunted and offered employment by companies
in their final year of study. As a result of their field, many of the students felt confident
– ‘top of the cream’, as Angela put it. However, this privileged position also produced an
anxiety among the students about producing good results. Kelebone, who was not sure
that her academic results made her stand out in the job market, voiced this uncertainty:
I will find a job, but maybe based on my results people may not take me
because my results are not so great. So maybe they will take someone with
better results over me. But I think I will find a job.
Families and schooling
Family background and previous schooling experiences were part of students’ accounts of
their integration at university. Tumelo related the following:
I am from a disadvantaged background and I grew up staying with my
grandmother, who was illiterate. But she did encourage me to go to school
and kind of like wanted me to be what I am. But she didn’t prepare me
academically. She was just a support for me to pursue what I wanted to do.
With the school, it was a government school where lots of things aren’t there.
You learn if you want to. If you don’t, you don’t. And even the teachers were
not so behind kids, you know. You come to school if you want to – if you
don’t want to, you don’t. So in that sense I wasn’t prepared enough to come to
varsity. I think I must have prepared myself because I wanted to.
Tumelo’s views were similar to the other students from working-class backgrounds who
came through the public schooling system in previously disadvantaged schools. These
students felt poorly prepared for university study, highlighting the lack of dedication and
commitment of their school teachers, and the low level of teaching at their schools. They
felt that they had received very little or no guidance on their academic future plans.
In comparison, the three students from middle-class homes had attended well-resourced,
previously advantaged, ex-Model C schools. They reported having received structured
advice and guidance on tertiary education and completing a university degree, with
schools reportedly being very career-oriented and focused on student development. These
students felt that they had been well supported by their schools, in terms of academic
standards as well as career advice and preparation. These students also came from more
academically oriented families (see parental occupations of study participants in Table 2.1),
contributing to the students’ understanding of university expectations. Angela was one
such student:

65
I come from a very academic family where school and academics and careers
have always been the focus of the family. So in that sense there has always
been that spirit – the spirit of learning at home. And I went to a really good
school where they make sure that basically they sat us down and [asked us]
what do you want to do? What can we do for you to make sure that you get
there? So in that way I came here – I had the support network from home and
I think I had the knowledge from school. So I was very prepared.
For the working-class students, their relationships with their families around tertiary study
were reported to be more complex, bound up with issues of race and the opportunity
costs of sending children to university. Ntswaki, another working-class student,
emphasised her lack of preparation:
I was totally not prepared. Not by my family and not by my school. Because
first of all, with my family I was OK, my sister went to varsity, my older sister,
but then it was a black university. One of those previously black universities…
Then I was the first daughter to go to an interracial varsity. Then people
around my family thought ‘how can you even think of applying to UCT, why
don’t you just try something else’, you know? Go to the University of the North,
go to Venda. You know, all that.
When the students from working-class backgrounds were asked what helped them to
succeed despite these obstacles, they emphasised their own agency. They used terms like
‘believe in myself’, ‘determination’, ‘was up to me’. They also reported seeking support and
encouragement from people outside the immediate family: a teacher, an uncle, a cousin.
Language
Another prominent issue raised in working-class students’ accounts of their integration
into the academic life of university was language. These students had all gone to school
in their home provinces, where the language of instruction at school and the language
in the home was predominantly an African language. Coming to an English-medium
university presented major challenges, especially in first year. Kelebone explained her
experiences to the interviewer as follows:
Interviewer: And your lecturers, are they all white?
Kelebone: Ja.
Interviewer: And how do you feel about that?
Kelebone: Now I’m used to being lectured by them, but in first year it was
just a mission to actually understand or maybe focus…keep up to speed with
the lecturer.
Interviewer: In terms of how quickly they went and the way they spoke?
Kelebone: How quickly they went and, ja, I’ve never been taught by white
people before…by a white person before.
Interviewer: So when you were in high school, were you mainly taught in Sotho?
Kelebone: Ja, but my…two of my teachers were English and they were OK,
they were just not like my white lecturers now.

66
Interviewer: How?
Kelebone: I think they speak fast, they [are] fast sometimes. Sometimes I don’t
really hear what they say, ja.
We return to the issue of language below.
Workload, stress, coping and academic support
Time management appeared to be among the most challenging aspects of university
life for the students, as well as striking a balance between their academic and social
lives. Many of the students expressed feelings of being overwhelmed by the amount
of work expected of them. While being on a scholarship relieved much of the financial
pressure, according to the students it did not affect the pressures of university life as a
whole. In fact, for some students having the scholarship meant that they felt even more
pressure to excel and succeed in order to justify and sustain the funding they received.
Two of the students reported:
Camilla: I think it takes away the financial difficulties to some extent. But the
other difficulties of being a student are still there…The scholarship doesn’t
help you study and it doesn’t wake you up in the morning for your eight
o’clock lecture.
Lulama: And it just feels so much worse because you think, gosh, I really need
this scholarship; my parents will be, like, I was given this opportunity and ‘you
lost it’. I feel the pressure a lot more being on a scholarship.
While the students all prided themselves on being self-reliant and self-motivated,
some of them simultaneously expressed anxiety at having lost the support of
their families.
The nature of support from academic staff also entailed an adjustment for the students.
They all spoke of the difficulties of independent and self-initiated study, and a much
higher academic demand than they had anticipated. Students complained of a lack of
support from lecturers. Angela pointed out:
I think lecturers in general are just very much that you must take
responsibility for yourself, that no one is going to spoon-feed you and
make sure that you are OK and that you are coping, but I think that that
is understandable in that there are so many people that they can’t possibly
look after you individually, so in a way they are quite cold but at the same
time there isn’t another option.
Ntswaki, who reported that students who failed were encouraged by lecturers to change
courses, reinforced the students’ perceptions of an institutional indifference to their
progress. She quoted one of her lecturers as saying, ‘Either that or apply to a technikon’.
The feeling of being cast adrift, and having to take sole responsibility for one’s success,
was a source of anxiety for all the students in the transition from the more pastoral form
of instruction in school to the more remote style in university. Kelebone was the only
student who saw this in a positive light:
I think UCT gives us a chance to excel because of standards. Most of the time I
have to study on my own. It is teaching us to be independent, in a way.

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Classroom observations revealed that the tutorial class was a major source of institutional
support for students with regard to academic work. Here they were provided with a
space in which to ask tutors and lecturers questions and to clarify issues in small-group
work. Ntswaki explained:
During lectures, I focus on taking down notes. Making sense of the course
contents takes place at home in our own time.
Gender and academic experiences
All the young women subordinated gender in the ways in which they spoke about their
university life. The students regarded gender issues as ‘non-existent’, a ‘non-issue’ in their
academic and social integration into the university, and not in any way limiting the extent
to which they were able to make social and academic decisions. But on closer analysis of
the data, particularly that derived from observations, it would probably be more accurate
to describe gender dynamics as embedded. The students spoke in a gender-blind way, yet
their practices and some of their own observations were clearly linked to certain ascribed
roles that were gender-based.
Fieldwork notes include the following observations:
The male students appear to dominate in all of the groups. They are usually
the ones handling and working with the machinery. The girls mainly record the
results or work with the PC. In Ntswaki’s group, Ntswaki sat the entire time on
a chair in front of the PC. She hardly ever actually worked with the machinery.
The two guys seemed to be in control of that part of the experiment; changing
air pressure or valves, etc. Ntswaki’s task was to punch the correct figures into
the PC that correspond with each pressure change and to make sure that the
results of each one was saved in a file on the PC.
Female students also appeared reticent in the engineering lectures. They asked fewer
questions than male students, and hardly ever approached the lecturer once the class was
over. In turn, lecturers rarely addressed their questions to female students, singling out
males instead.
Another student picked up on the subtle suggestions of ‘a woman’s place’ in the academic
world. Studying medicine, she wished to specialise in surgery once she had completed
her medical degree. However, she was concerned about the fact that there were very few
females who succeeded in becoming qualified surgeons or who remained in surgery once
they had qualified. She noted that the sixth-year surgery society was dominated by men,
and comments from lecturers implied that surgery was a male domain, a ‘boy’s club’.
Likewise, another student referred to the unspoken expectation that women would not
be successful in the engineering profession, and that studying engineering at university
was especially challenging for women. Many of the students related this to the multiple
roles of professional and mother. Their comments were, however, highly contradictory.
On the one hand they professed the belief in being able to ‘have it all’ in terms of
family, career and children, and on the other they talked at length about the difficulties
of fulfilling multiple roles. Despite the students feeling on one level that they were in no
way disadvantaged by being women, they also appeared implicated in discourses which
potentially channelled them in particular directions even within their chosen careers.
The fact that most of the academic role models were male may also have played its part
(males constituted 66 per cent of academic staff at the time of the research). Kelebone

68
noted how the staff in business science was male-dominated: ‘Most of our lecturers are
male and the message I am getting is that not [many] women can get to that point.’
However, Kelebone indicated that instead of discouraging her, the fact that she seemed to
be in a male-dominated field was an incentive for her to succeed.
Race and academic experiences
Ntswaki’s earlier comment about going to a ‘white university’ indicates how students’
academic integration was to an extent framed by considerations of race. Camilla had a
similar experience:
But I got flak for going to UCT and not UWC [University of the Western Cape]…
Because UCT is still seen as, like, the white university. And UWC is the coloured
black university. It’s, I think, jokingly called by most university students here as
the bush university…Just because you are from a certain area you have to be
blocked in by the stereotypes that are attached to the place. And I think a lot of
people where I stay are resentful of the fact that I go to UCT, because it is seen
as a white institute. It is like betraying your race or something.
Camilla pointed out the ways in which racial segregation operated within the
instructional sphere:
On the social point of view, at the university I have to say I have never seen
any form of discrimination from them [white students], but otherwise we as the
students, we decide to separate ourselves because you go into a class – I don’t
know if it is me. I used to do this thing [where] I’d go into a class and then not
sit down but just check out what is happening before the lecture starts. You’d
see this group of black people, this small group of Indians, this group of
white people, you know. Like we decide, oh, I want to associate with my
type, you know.
Some of the more negative racial dynamics in classes were also recorded during
classroom observations:
I did notice, however, some racial tensions in class. When a group of white
male students went up to present, one of Ntswaki’s team members poked
fun at one of them, telling me to listen to the way he speaks and that he will
use the word ‘like’ continuously throughout his speech. This kind of sentence
structure, in which the word ‘like’ is overused, is known to be associated
with ‘white’ speech patterns. Similarly, when a black student was presenting,
he struggled with his speech and often said ‘Uh’ before starting a sentence.
Two Indian male students poked fun at his accent and laughed out loud, and
continued to laugh throughout his group’s presentation. Neither the students
seated around them nor the lecturer said anything to admonish them; either no
one noticed this incident or the students were simply ignored. I also observed
a group of four male students, two black and two white. They had to work
together both in the poster and presentation tasks. I noticed that the black and
white students hardly spoke to each other during these tasks. In fact, the white
students worked on the poster alone, while the black students watched them.
In the presenting task, they each worked on their own. The situation seemed
extremely uncomfortable for all the students in that group.
In their negotiation of their academic world, schooling, family, language, gender and race
all emerged as significant factors informing students’ integration. At times the students

69
made these issues explicit, and at other times their impact on their experience was
denied or subordinated. All the students, however, expressed anxiety about the individual
responsibility they had to carry for their own success, which was a significant change for
them in their shift to the university context. They emphasised their own autonomy and
their struggle to be independent, and downplayed issues of race and gender even though
these were apparent both in some of their statements and in the observations.
Social integration: social relationships on campus
Students’ social integration into university was strongly mediated by race and class. Both
categories were invoked by students to describe the ways in which students grouped
themselves, and what marked out people as different from one another. In relation
to gender and social relations, there was a silence among the young women in terms
of their social integration into the university. If gender had made a difference to their
university social experience, either it was not apparent to the women or they chose not to
make this explicit. Race and social class were more clearly expressed categories in their
talk of campus life.
Race
According to the students, social relationships on campus were racially defined. Race
relations were not, however, portrayed as conflictual. Kelebone described relations thus:
‘White people don’t mind other people’s business, but they are separate.’ She responded
to a question from the interviewer as follows:
I’ve never had a problem with race on campus. I think it’s, again, I see white
people in [inaudible] they just go to…go together. But also, I think they also
don’t really…I think this thing with white people looking down on other
people, I think it was overrated. Ja, because I see white people here, they
really just don’t care about what other people…they don’t mind other people’s
businesses. Ja, I’ve never experienced any race problems.
Some of the residences were also racially defined. The field notes include the following
observation:
On our way to her flat [Ntswaki’s], we pass a white male student and I ask
whether it is really true that Liesbeeck is a majority black residence. She says
yes, it’s true, and that most of the white students that live there are foreigners
and therefore don’t know any better when they are allocated accommodation
by UCT administration.
Discourses of race were also evident in social language codes. Ntswaki and her friend
referred to a prohibitively expensive shoe shop in the city as ‘shop iyamagho’ – a shop for
white people.
Race was tied to language, but more explicitly to class. Kelebone indicated that she felt
too shy to go out because she was not confident enough to speak English in public, and
she chose friends who were Sotho-speaking like her. She indicated that African students
from Model C schools went out more, as they found it easier to mix because they were
comfortable speaking English in clubs, shops and restaurants.
In contrast the African middle-class students, such as Lulama, did not experience these
kinds of constraints:

70
Sometimes we’re feeling like something really big [so] we go to Camps Bay
for dinner, just in and around, just getting to know Cape Town. I know the
nightlife more, I don’t really know Cape Town during the day. It’s quite a
strange thing, I’m never out during the day.
However, the idea that there are racial tensions and hierarchies at the institution was
negated by the students. Lulama claimed: ‘I’ll honestly say that this is the one varsity that
if there are race issues, no one really knows about them – I haven’t actually experienced
anything like that.’ Lulama, questioned about all her lecturers being white, explicitly
rejected racial categories as defining. She went on to talk about the necessity for rejecting
racial categories, and related this to BEE (black economic empowerment):
It’s just by virtue of the fact that they need a black representation…and you
never know am I good enough for this or am I here just because I’m black. So
I think that’s one reason why a lot of us are going to shy away from and just
try and establish ourselves just to see. It casts a lot of ambiguity because you’re
not really sure.
Although race was visible in how students organised themselves and in their activities,
the students denied that it had any determinative effects on their lives. Social class was
more prominent in students’ accounts of social divisions in the university, and what was
afforded or denied them in terms of their social and academic lives on campus.
Social class
Several of the students were explicit about how social differentiation at UCT was marked
by class. Nazeema commented: ‘And you find rich people…going to their kind. And some
less rich going to their own kind as well.’ Issues of class were particularly pronounced
among the African students. Lulama’s account of class divisions is quoted at some length
to indicate the kinds of distinctions made:
There are two dominant groups among black people: there are the rich black
students who are from certain areas…Class break-ups are quite in your face.
Even going out – you go to a party and there are certain types of people.
It’s wealth. It’s school, it’s the different backgrounds – a lot of it starts from
schooling – it’s also, like, the things that you integrate yourself with – you get
girls who like a certain kind of crowd, the crowd that you are used to. You get
the ghetto group, then you get your Model C type in a corner there. Me and
my friends are called the Model C bunch. We listen to a certain type of music,
we are upper and middle class and we speak in a certain way and we went to
very good schools. The ghetto crowd is kids from the township that all hang
out together, speak a certain way and listen to kwaito and house music. In res
I had a tough time last year. I was told I was so full of myself and people did
not like me or speak to me. The problem is that once you are labelled, it sticks
and people do not even try to get to know you better. It’s a signed deal. I got
a lot of criticism because of my lifestyle. Now they have to talk to me because
I am in house com and in house com you work for the people, so I am now
trying to get rid of the stereotypes labelled against me last year…It’s also about
lifestyle. It would be unfair to expect a person from the township to hang out
with us because they wouldn’t afford our lifestyle. You need money to do the
things that we do.
In the analysis of data from interviews with four of the young women, the strong
relationship between social class and social integration in the university was clearly

71
apparent. Being middle class afforded those students more choice to participate in
university extra-curricular activities and a broad range of social activities. These class
identities were also connected to academic performance. The working-class students felt
they had to work harder. They had more at stake and, having been less well prepared for
university study, had to expend more effort on their studies. Kelebone and Ntswaki were
not involved in any residential committees or activities; and for Kelebone, striving for
good results prevented her from ‘exploring and seeing the beautiful side to Cape Town’.
Social class differences were felt most acutely, however, in the transition that students
made from their homes and communities to the university context.
Community and university: bridging the gap
The shift from their communities and homes to the university emerged as very
significant for the young women. Again, for the middle-class students this move was
less problematic than for those students who came from poorer backgrounds. Angela
came from the university town of Grahamstown, where, in her words, ‘everyone was
in one way or another connected to the university. It’s amazing how many people
work for Rhodes.’ She saw the expectations of her community as geared towards what
she was doing and, as both her parents are academics, she found the culture of the
university familiar.
For the working-class students, however, the shift often entailed guilt over a rejection of
community values and priorities. In some instances this left the students feeling caught
between two worlds. This was especially the case for two of the women interviewed who
came from small rural towns: Kelebone and Ntswaki. Kelebone expressed feelings of guilt
at having left her community:
Kelebone: Ja, I think sometimes I even feel guilty, like, they are still in that
situation and there’s no progress and…my community, I really feel like I don’t
belong there any more.
Interviewer: In what sense do you not feel you belong?
Kelebone: I don’t know people…they don’t…I don’t want to say they don’t like
me…I don’t know if they are scared…afraid of me or maybe they give me too
much respect, but they don’t treat me…as one of their own.
Interviewer: And when you talk about your community, who specifically are
you thinking of?
Kelebone: Neighbours and other people on the street.
Ntswaki felt that the community was ‘jealous’ of her success. Even at school level, she
experienced a culture within her community that was sceptical of success:
Ever since I was in standard 6 I would say…actually, since from my high
school, ja, because people would go to school, not even finish high school
and then drop out, have a child or maybe just decide to stay at home, so I
didn’t want that for myself, and you know people always discourage you,
so I wanted to not really prove them wrong, but show people that this is
doable. Because when you were still in primary school you were acing
everything, and then they’ll say, ‘oh my dear, your time is going to come in
high school where you’ll be kicked by this and that’, but then nothing of that
nature happened.

72
Her initial response was to ‘show them’; and she claimed that part of her decision to
study electrical engineering was motivated by this need to prove herself to the community
that doubted her. This shifted over time:
Because now, it’s not about ‘I want to prove people wrong’, it’s about ‘I want
to get what I want to get’. Ja, because then it was ‘these people are annoying
me and I want to show them that it’s doable’, but now it’s more like ‘I want
to be this, I want to be a chemical engineer’, it’s not about I’m doing chemical
engineering to show these people.
Establishing her identity involved a rejection of community. Her response was to detach
herself from the community she came from: ‘I wasn’t gonna stay at home and be like the
rest of the people around that place.’
For all of the students, success meant moving away from their homes and families
and, to varying degrees, rejecting their communities’ localised notions of success. As a
result, some of the students expressed deep feelings of isolation, loneliness and, in some
cases, struggle.
All the students emphasised the shifts in support structures as they moved from the
context of their community and school to UCT. For some, the gap between the two
worlds was very wide, and the attempt to reconcile the demands of being in these
different worlds was tremendous. For others, the distance travelled from one to the
other was not so far. In addition, different students respond to the ‘identity work’ in the
new context very differently. In a perpetual process of negotiating their identities, UCT
provided them with ‘alternative sources of selfhood’ (other than those passed down
by their families and communities) upon which they were able to draw. This was seen
clearly in the way in which they spoke about choosing UCT.
Choosing UCT
For the middle-class young women, coming to university and completing a tertiary
degree was in fact not a decision as such, but rather a natural progression from school
to university. Hird (1998) suggests that having known persons in higher professions helps
students see possibilities for themselves, and these students all had family members who
were professionals. For the working-class students, however, choosing UCT in particular
meant to some extent a detachment from their communities and in some cases entailed
a struggle, as we saw earlier. All the students commented on UCT as an elite higher
education institution and a privileged choice.
UCT (as opposed to higher education in a broad sense) was perceived by the students
as a means or mechanism for upward social mobility, even though the price of that
mobility was sometimes high (such as potential rejection and alienation from their
communities). The students marked themselves out as UCT students. The elite status
of UCT, and how it potentially positions them, was something that the women were
acutely aware of. This emphasis may also have stemmed from a particular institutional
culture that had become normalised. Steyn and Van Zyl (2001) argue that UCT sustains
a particular discourse around ‘educational standards’, in this way obscuring a cultural
milieu characterised by ‘whiteness’. Nonetheless, in their view UCT offered students a
privileged identity.

73
Success
The students had different constructions of success. These constructions appeared to be
linked to class and the extent to which the students had been exposed to role models.
For students from middle-class backgrounds, ideas of success were framed around
abstract notions of happiness and satisfaction. In their minds, being successful was not so
much about completing a degree and having a job, but about personal satisfaction and
fulfilment. The students’ portrayed their families as reinforcing these notions of success.
For example, one student spoke about aspiring to be like her mother, who, despite
having a master’s degree in accounting, chose an academic career, sacrificing greater
financial rewards for personal satisfaction. Another student spoke of her communication
with her home as focused not on her results but rather on her satisfaction and happiness
with university life.
In contrast, the students from working-class backgrounds all aspired to material notions
of success, such as becoming the CEO or president of a company, or owning a house in
the suburbs. The path towards achieving these goals was typically not well delineated,
and in several instances the means of achieving their goals were unrealistic. For these
students, there appeared to be a considerable mismatch between their optimism for the
future and the social and economic constraints that would need to be overcome. All
the students, however, espoused a discourse of individualisation framed around notions
of internal resources such as ambition and academic ability. They expressed a ‘can-do’
attitude, especially those who sought to move beyond the constraints of lower socio-
economic status.
Thomson et al. (2003) refer to the working-class student’s approach to success as the
illusion of attaining social mobility through education. According to Thomson, individual
resources of ambition and ability do not always translate into success for young people of
economically deprived backgrounds. While a ‘can-do’ attitude is necessary for achieving
success, it is insufficient in the face of structural constraints.
Conclusion
The financial possibilities of the Carnegie scholarship gave young women from different
backgrounds the opportunity to study towards a science or engineering degree. In this
study we were afforded the opportunity to explore issues, other than finances, facing
these young women in the transition from home to university. The analysis presented
here shows that some of the students had a far greater distance to travel than others in
their social and academic integration into the university. In observing the students and
listening to them talk, it was clear that class, race and gender differences mediated the
ways in which the students negotiated their identities. Taking students’ voices as the
object of our study reveals contradictions in how students presented their experiences.
Although their new independence was often embraced, and their discourse was suffused
with a ‘can-do’ attitude and a sense of the ‘free’ subject and autonomous being, the
students expressed a great deal of anxiety in terms of their academic work and in
negotiating the complexity of the social and academic terrain of the university. For the
students from working-class backgrounds, upward mobility carried an ambivalence. Guilt
in reference to the past (and to their communities) and anxiety in relation to their futures
(the fear of failure) tempered the insistence on self-realisation and autonomy. For the
middle-class students, an insistence on ‘happiness’ and satisfaction possibly masked a
deeper and more pervasive injunction to succeed.

74
In a discussion of upward mobility, Walkerdine (2003) identifies the ‘neo-liberal subject’
which emerges from broader economic and political change. Given shifting modes of
regulation, from practices of policing and external regulation to technologies of self-
regulation, ‘the neo-liberal subject is the autonomous liberal subject made in the image of
the middle class’ (Walkerdine 2003: 239). In this view, the subject is completely freed from
traditional ties of location, class and gender, and is completely self-produced. Perhaps
this explains at least in part the denial of discourses of gender and race as determining
aspects of the lives of the students. Walkerdine goes on to argue that the subject is
supposed to be able to choose who he or she is from myriad offerings. But ‘this subject
is actually supposed to be sustained by a stable centre, an ego capable of resilience’
(2003: 241). She continues:
Only the relentless pursuit of this new narrative identity and the ‘success’
implied within it can quieten the other insistent narrative in order to attempt
the impossible task, as Bauman says, the complete displacement of what one
was. (2003: 247)
This may be overstating the case with respect to the young women in our sample, but
it does begin to point to some possible explanations around the silencing of issues of
race and gender. The pursuance of ‘middle-classness’ through education within an elite
institution entailed for many of these women a necessary freeing of traditional ties and
negation of structural constraint. But the new-found agency brought with it a heavy sense
of responsibility, as well as a fractured and anxious orientation to the site of upward
mobility – a somewhat cold, hard institution that catered to the elite.
At a more prosaic level, what does success entail for these students? It is partly about
internalising the dominant discourses and accepting the values of the institution.
Resistance to these, or challenging them, would prove too risky. Such internalisation is
likely to produce the kinds of contradictions and anxieties that are evident in the data.
But more than this, it calls into question the whole emphasis on independence and
agency that the women drew upon. They may simply have exchanged a certain set of
structural constraints for a potentially more oppressive set, in the hope that these would
ultimately give them, at the least, economic autonomy and the bounty that upward
mobility is supposed to deliver.

75
Chapter 6
Conclusion
Linda Chisholm and Relebohile Moletsane
The research reported in this monograph examined the ways in which 24 young women
studying mainly in the sciences, engineering and medicine, but also in the humanities
and management studies, across three universities experienced and constructed their
experiences of being students at university and in traditionally male-dominated fields.
The study speaks to two different publics: a policy public and an academic community.
For policy-makers, foundations and other funders, what is of interest is the extent to
and ways in which the Carnegie scholarship improves women’s access to and academic
success in higher education programmes. Furthermore, for this community, research that
aims to identify the factors within and outside the institution that impact on women’s
experiences and outcomes of studying at university is of importance. For researchers,
this study helps elucidate what ‘success’ might mean for young women studying at South
African universities in traditionally male-dominated fields today and whether or not
these students’ social and academic experiences of integration or alienation are linked to
struggles over gender, gender identity and boundaries.
The participants in the study were all women who, by virtue of their status as university
students, and specifically as studying in traditionally male-dominated subjects such
as science, engineering and technology, had broken several boundaries. By entering
educational spaces historically the preserve of the middle classes, particularly the
white middle class, some participants had broken race and class boundaries. With few
exceptions, the participants had all broken gender boundaries by entering fields of
study common for male but not female students. For female students to be studying
‘male’ subjects meant that they were both vulnerable and strong at the same time.
While this made them exceptional in many ways, they were also extremely vulnerable,
for in traversing this boundary, they had entered a masculine domain that placed their
femininity as socially constructed into question. How the young women in this study
negotiated their ‘success’ and their gender identities in these contexts is important because
it speaks to a society where gender boundary-crossing often elicits extreme reaction –
witness the wearing of miniskirts and the wearing of trousers and the results these have
recently provoked.9
This study has not measured whether or not the Carnegie scholarship programme leads
to success, but what it has established are the feelings, experiences and constructions of
success among the participants. By and large, these students reported feeling successful, but
they did not define success in terms of grades alone. On conventional measures of grades
and throughput, however, there is evidence that they have been successful. As Lewin shows
in Chapter 1, the dropout rate from the programme is low – much lower than the overall
national average. Most students who have graduated are now employed in fields for which
9 In July 2007, a woman in Umlazi township near Durban was stripped naked and had her shack burnt down for
wearing trousers. Men in the township were demanding that all women wear skirts or dresses. And in March 2008,
hundreds of South African women marched to a Johannesburg taxi rank, where a woman was sexually assaulted for
wearing a miniskirt. (Accessed 15 November 2008, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7276654.stm – 50k – Cached – Similar
pages; and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6917332.stm.)

76
they were studying or are continuing with postgraduate study. Nearly three-quarters of the
students who started in 2002 will have completed their degrees by 2008.
In order to understand the women’s feelings, experiences and perceptions of success in their
studies, our interpretive framework focused on their integration into social and academic
life and the ways in which this was linked to the scholarship and, more importantly, to their
constructions and experiences of success. In the section below, we discuss this aspect.
Academic and social integration
The case studies of the three universities in this study revealed that the students’
perceptions of success were facilitated by a number of factors: the financial support from
the scholarship programme, the informal support of family and friends, the students’
personal efforts, their religious convictions and their belief in themselves. In Chapter 1,
Lewin highlights the importance of the official messages that the students received
and, in particular, the impact of negative encouragement on the part of lecturers. In a
similar vein, in their own discussions of sources of support, the participants rarely, if at
all, mentioned their lecturers and the role they played in their success. This contrasted
sharply with their recollections of the positive encouragement they had received from
teachers at school. Given the low expectations of performance from their lecturers and
fellow male students, as well as the sexual harassment of female students by senior male
students reported especially at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), it is indeed
surprising that so many of the young women had relatively sturdy self-perceptions. But in
this regard the more personal insights of the programme officer need to be set alongside
those from the formal research process. Whereas the insecurities and self-doubts of
students were visible to the programme officer, the more formal research process did not
surface them to the same extent. This suggests that the young women were struggling
with and over their academic and social identities.
Much of the evidence from the three case studies reported in Chapters 3 to 5 seems to
suggest that institutional culture (whether its ‘whiteness’ or ‘maleness’ or ‘managerialism’)
was not experienced or constructed as a major problem by the majority of students
in this study. On the face of it, students seemed to be integrating well into university
culture, both academically and socially. Often this did not mean a lack of awareness of
the existence of racism or sexism. The students simply did not construct it as a problem
that affected them and their studies or their lives in the institutions. Thus, Moorosi and
Moletsane (Chapter 3) show that students at UKZN saw themselves as personally strong
and as socially supported to get ahead. While the students reported poor support from
lecturers and experienced acts of racism and gender discrimination in the institution, the
communities of learning they formed with fellow students, their personal effort and hard
work, their belief in themselves, as well as their supportive relationships with friends and
family provided enough motivation and support to guarantee them success. Integration
was constructed but not necessarily experienced as a seamless, harmonious process.
While students often denied the existence of gender inequality, particularly of women’s
inferiority to men in relation to academic ability, their own accounts of their experiences
in the institution suggest that gender inequality continues to play a negative role in the
participation of women in universities generally, and in the sciences in particular.
Haupt and Chisholm (Chapter 4) and Mawoyo and Hoadley (Chapter 5) found similar
contradictions at the universities of Pretoria (UP) and Cape Town (UCT) between what
was observed in practice and what emerged in the participants’ discourse. As at UKZN,

Conclusion
77
students at UP described a certain race and gender weariness. Even as they denied that
race and gender inequality had any salience on campus and in their own lives, and our
lecture observations across the institutions showed that both female and male students
seemed to feel comfortable with both male and female lecturers, it was also true that
female students, regardless of race, rarely commented, posed a question or handled
machinery and other equipment during practicals. Furthermore, whereas white students
of both sexes sat together, and white female students interacted very confidently among
their male fellow students, African female students tended to sit with one another, often
right in front of the lecturer. By the same token, students said that they enjoyed freedom
of movement, but described how they needed to be escorted by security guards on
campus at night.
Likewise, while race discourses were present in the speech-acts of Mawoyo and Hoadley’s
participants at UCT, they also negated the idea that there were any racial tensions and
hierarchies at the institution. Whereas the chapters on UKZN and UP comment on
contradictions and ambiguities between, on the one hand, what mostly low-income
students said about their campuses and themselves, and, on the other, what was revealed
in their more unconscious statements as well as in their observed lived experiences,
Mawoyo and Hoadley observe sharp differences at UCT in the experience of low- and
middle-income students. Here, middle-income students seemed to have socially integrated
far more quickly than working-class women, for whom the shift to university life was
much more difficult to negotiate. For example, the acceptance of success for one student
meant a necessary rejection of community, which was ‘jealous’ of her success and needed
to be ‘shown’. Other contradictions included the fact that at the same time as these
students embraced their new independence, and displayed a ‘can-do’ attitude, a sense of
the ‘free’ subject and autonomous being, they also expressed a great deal of anxiety in
terms of both their academic work and in negotiating the complexity of the social and
academic terrain of the university.
Mawoyo and Hoadley link these contradictions to the experience of class as dislocation.
This experience of dislocation carries with it instabilities of identity. Some students had a far
greater distance to travel than others, literally and figuratively, in travelling to the university.
Traversing this distance created ambivalences that included a sense of guilt about the
past (and their communities) and anxiety about their futures (in the fear of failure). These
emotions tempered their insistence on self-realisation and autonomy. Thus, the silencing of
race and gender in the discourse of the participants may be an expression by working-class
students of their pursuit of ‘middle-classness’. This carries a necessary negation of structural
constraint but also a fractured and anxious orientation to the site of upward mobility.
From a gender-analysis perspective, the dislocation can also be linked to the gender
boundary-crossing of taking up fields of study that are traditionally male-dominated.
Ambivalences are created here too – ambivalences about identity, and especially
gender identity, as this is what is threatened in the new environment. The silencing and
subordination of gender identities may well be linked to these struggles over gender
identity in a context of class- and gender-crossing. Denying gender identity is a way for
a person constituted as ‘successful’ (by having crossed and broken gender boundaries)
of negotiating a space that is in reality a very unequally gendered space. Thus students
negotiated the boundaries they have crossed by pretending they do not exist. Their social
and academic integration into new social spaces for themselves as much as for the society
is thus predicated on silencing and subordinating a gender identity. It may thus be easier
to foreground racial, cultural and class identities than it is to foreground gender identities.

78
The participants’ perceptions of being socially and academically integrated into the
institutions were constructed alongside those of being successful. One of the questions
the research asked was related to whether the participants regarded themselves as
successful, and the ways in which they defined such success. In the section below we
discuss their constructions as presented in the preceding chapters.
If the young women across the institutions did not define success in terms of
conventional measures such as grades, what was their measure of success? Moorosi and
Moletsane (Chapter 3) show that the UKZN participants defined success in terms of
achieving balance, personal growth, happiness in life and a change in their economic
status as a result of the Carnegie scholarship. For Mawoyo and Hoadley (Chapter 5),
the UCT participants’ constructions of success were linked to their class-belonging: for
middle-class or middle-income students, success was framed around abstract ideas of
happiness, satisfaction and personal fulfilment, whereas students from working-class
backgrounds aspired to financial success and independence. For Haupt and Chisholm
(Chapter 4), the UP participants, regardless of family income, valued the financial
independence that a degree and secure career would ultimately give them.
Haupt and Chisholm argue that integration into this discourse of success centred on the
idea that a university degree is a guarantee for a good job and a stepping stone to a
successful life and career measured in material things. Yet, even when departing from the
norm, the participants’ ideas were still oriented towards conventional markers of success.
Their constructions of success in relation to their gender were also complex. On the
one hand, a significant part of their identity was determined by positioning themselves
in opposition to social norms, conventions, and so on. On the other hand, they were
linking themselves in individually selective ways to the very same normalising discourses
they were seemingly rejecting. What they showed was not a general rejection of gender
boundaries; rather, they confirmed those they were not (yet) ready to leave behind. Thus
they saw themselves as outside conventional gender stereotypes, neither conforming to
them nor holding them, as having overcome them but at the same time aspiring to the
conventional markers of feminine gendered identity. As Mawoyo and Hoadley conclude,
the participants seemed to have internalised the dominant discourses and accepted the
values of the institution. Given their particular vulnerabilities, resistance to these, or
challenging them, would prove too risky – both practically and in identity terms.
While we did not expect to find angry young women – angry about race, class and gender
inequality – we did not expect what we did find. We did not expect the degree of denial
and rejection of institutions as raced, gendered and classed that we found. This is a finding
that goes against the grain of the continuing evidence of racial and gender violence in
higher education institutions, most vividly illustrated not only in rapes on campuses, but
also in a video distributed in February 2008 by five white male students at the University
of Free State showing five black cleaners at a traditionally white men’s residence on the
campus being ‘initiated’. Amid loud laughter, they are shown taking part in races, downing
beers and drinking a mixture in which a student had secretly urinated. The incident was
titled ‘integration’.10
10 Accessed 15 November 2008, http://www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=17345.

Conclusion
79
What does this all mean? It is clear that the 24 young female students across three very
different institutional sites, from different backgrounds, and with extremely limited contact
with one another shared very similar experiences and understandings of their realities.
The question arises as to whether we are seeing something unique: these students are
generationally many years away from their mothers and grandmothers. Or are they? They
also seem to give the lie to studies that emphasise the experience of racism and sexism
on South African campuses. Or do they? We have not found what we expected to find,
and so we must ask whether this was a question of the lenses we employed (compared
to those employed by researchers in the other studies); whether it was the methodology
we used; or whether what we have found simply demonstrates that women are not a
‘homogenous (undifferentiated) group’, that there are a range of possibilities for women
and femininities that fall outside the stereotypes of women as victims, and that young
women students do have agency and can and do negotiate the racial and gendered
terrains in which they operate in ways that minimise the impact of these institutional
characteristics on them.11
Implications
Interventions like the Carnegie–South Africa Scholarship Programme are intended to
change the society by promoting the access and success of women in higher education.
Through this programme, 150 young women have been added to the number of people
studying in designated ‘scarce and critical skill’ areas in South Africa. The programme has
increased access of people who would not before have had the chance to study in these
fields, whether because of race or class or gender. Were it not for the scholarship, these
women may never have had the chance, or have been given a chance, to enter higher
education. In a context where inequalities of access and achievement are constantly
remarked upon, we acknowledge that this makes a difference to the society, the
institutions and the young women themselves.
However, if we are to probe deeper into questions about the nature of the society and
its institutions, and its impact on gender equality therein, studies that seek to go beyond
these kinds of assessments are necessary. From the study reported here, we have learnt
from a group of young women that for a range of complex reasons related to the
changing nature of the society and its institutions, the radicalism of the paths traversed
and boundaries crossed has probably resulted in a disposition among students that belies
the enormity of changes they have undergone and are undergoing in their own lives.
What we are probably seeing is how higher education institutions continue to reproduce
the leadership of the society in historically specific, deeply gendered and differentiated
ways, and how the nation and gender co-construct one another.
But we need to go further than this and say that the evidence from this research also
shows that access itself does not change or alter or permit reflection upon uncomfortable
institutional realities. Scholarship programmes for women affect the lives of individual
students, but they do not affect the institutions themselves or the broader inequalities. For
that, their number and impact is still too small.
11 See Fennell and Arnot (2008) for an illuminating discussion of the need for educational research to disrupt
stereotyped images of women in the South with new research that challenges the universalising images of ‘Third
World women’.

80
The project raised a number of questions that we think deserve further research. We
need to know how the experiences of men and women differ, if at all, and also how
the experiences of non-scholarship students compare with those of scholarship students.
We also need to know more about curricular and extra-curricular arrangements that will
change class, gender and race relations at universities and other social institutions. Lastly,
we need to know more about how the lives of these young women will unfold when
they enter the real world of work and family.

81
CONTRIBUTORS
Linda Chisholm is a Director in the Education, Science and Skills Development Research
Programme of the HSRC.
Iriann Haupt is a PhD student in the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Ursula Hoadley is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the University of
Cape Town.
Thandi Lewin is Chief Director: Equity in Education in the Department of Education.
Monica Mawoyo is an independent consultant specialising in teacher education, skills
development, occupationally directed research, educational policy implementation, and
information and communication technology in teaching and learning.
Relebohile Moletsane is a Director of Gender and Development in the Policy Analysis
Unit of the HSRC.
Pontso Moorosi is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.

83
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