After 20 years of low pay and neglect, I’ve quit academia to make it better

A simple fact: it’s hard to relate to other people’s experiences if you have not walked in similar shoes. Women, particularly women of colour, will likely relate to my story most.

I was an “academic lifer” – I went straight from school to undergrad to postgrad to teaching and research in Australian academia. But my rise was far from rapid. I watched white men and women progress to full professor so quickly that their seat at their graduation ceremony was still warm. But while I was awarded my PhD at 27, by the age of 43, when I quit, I still had not become an associate professor.

I’ve also seen many other academics struggle like me. And, as a good researcher, my eye is on both the pattern and the outliers; the latter does not negate the former.

When I got married, my academic career took a serious hit. I dropped to part time and moved cities to be with the family I was marrying into; my husband already had three children. At my new university, no one knew me to vouch for me, and the 10 years of experience that I brought was not counted. So I started at the bottom of the hierarchy an associate lecturer: the same position I had been stuck in for a decade at my previous institution.

I loved the job I left, but I had also come to see that no one there encouraged me to progress. I was good cheap labour, so if I wasn’t making noise, why should they? No one told me that my half-time salary was not going to feed so many mouths (my husband was not earning at the time) and that I had the power to negotiate a better contract. No one told me that men with three children, stellar qualifications and a decade of experience would not likely be offered, much less accept, an associate lectureship.

Within six months of starting the new position, however, I started making enquiries to HR about how to change my contract to Level B (lecturer). They told me I could only do that by applying for promotion. After jumping through that bureaucratic hoop, I asked to go to the highest step within that level to get better pay, and after months of stalling, they finally met with me and we agreed to something in the middle. When the paperwork came through, however, the stated salary was less than we had agreed, making the entire exercise essentially worthless.

Some years later, with a baby added to the mix, I applied for promotion to Level C (senior lecturer). Having brought buckets to lectures to cope with morning sickness (because I knew no resources were available to cover sick days), I was offended at the kind-hearted congratulations I got from colleagues for finally reaching the level I should have been employed at seven years earlier.

I still really needed the pay, and the lack of dignity through recognition was also beginning to wear on me. So I applied for promotion to Level D (associate professor) within two years. However, those two years are all that my assessors saw because they only look at performance since the last promotion. Hence, they thought my application was premature. The full track record of a woman traversing career breaks to create and care for the world’s future workforce for free wasn’t factored in.

Alongside these pay and promotion woes was the utter neglect of a scholar whose work was deemed niche and not lucrative. When I applied for a prestigious fellowship that required a letter of support from a senior leader, leaders across two universities turned me down, citing a supposedly inadequate track record.

But my track record was not weak when looked at pro rata. Moreover, I had fought one rejection after the next to even be there. In the last two years of my academic career, I experienced 65 rejections of 13 of my manuscripts. This is what silencing and oppression look like.

An independent grant adviser told me the senior leaders were wrong to reject me, and a third university respected that advice and submitted my application. The salary would have been a huge financial relief, and I would have got to do important work. But I didn’t get it.

Academia now reminds me of modern slavery. After I first realised that my hard work at my new university would not be seen and rewarded, I began keeping a daily record of hours worked, with time-stamped evidence. When I was denied promotion to associate professor, I presented them my spreadsheet and asked for the total value of the unpaid overtime – nearly $118,000 – to be paid back. But they refused. (I have since presented my case to the Australian Senate economics committee’s inquiry into wage theft.)

That refusal was hardly a surprise. I – like many others – had even had to pay publishers’ exploitative open access fees out of my own minuscule wage. And I wasn’t even entitled to rest; my sole application for sabbatical in 20 years was rejected.

But here’s the redemptive part. When Australian universities were looking to shed 10 per cent of their staff during the pandemic, I put my hand up for voluntary redundancy and used that money to build the only academic publishing platform on which scholars can earn from sales of their full texts.

I decided that the time to correct all the financial exploitations that publishers and universities perpetrate had come. All the rage was put to good use, and I got to end my academic career on a high, with a new professional identity.

I no longer see myself as an academic; that grieving is finished. I now see myself as a business owner. And the mission it champions is “voice equity”.

Pooja Sawrikar is founder and director of Scholar Freedom.