Slow scholarship and wellbeing: Humanising the academic machine

Although the number of women in higher education has increased over the last 40 years, these increases have predominantly furnished lower academic staffing positions (Carchalo& White, 2008). For instance, 75% of the fractional full-time and the majority of academics at Level A (associate lecturer/tutor) are women, while the senior ranks of Professor (Level E) and Associate Professor (Level D) remain male dominated (May et al., 2011). In addition, women academics are also more likely to be employed on casual or short-term contracts than their male counterparts and Carvalho and Machado (2010) reveal that at the end of a PhD women earn less, and are more likely to be engaged in casual work, than men.