Beating the Odds

Marcia Devlin's Beating the Odds is a practical guide to university careers for women, written with humor about a serious problem. It sets out to help women improve their chances of success and reach their full potential in a system that works against them. Devlin begins with the numbers. In Australia, men hold 75 percent of senior university roles, and there are 86 percent more male than female professors at the top of the academic scale. These figures are not changing, or not changing fast enough. The book speaks to the academic setting, but much of its advice applies to professional women in other workplaces. Devlin draws on her own experience and on that of hundreds of women, many of whom she has mentored, to show the attitudes, tactics and frameworks that have worked despite the odds. Readers learn to identify exactly how and why sexism is holding their careers back, and to plan in ways that offset it. They also learn to respond to tactics such as being interrupted, spoken over or having ideas stolen. The book advises becoming bad at housework at home and at work, and using the time, energy and goodwill saved for career advancement. It also covers channeling anger constructively and laughing at the system. Devlin presents the book as both a call to arms and a roadmap, with the aim of changing how universities operate and pushing toward gender equality in these centers of intellectual power.