Gender, racial and social discrimination in academic studies in BrazilA personal testimony

Abstract

In this chapter, I present my experience as a Brazilian female academic, working in several levels of the Unesp university administration. Even living in a country of a majority of non-white social deprivileged people, I was only able to really perceive the weight of gender, racial and social discrimination, and linguistic prejudice when I was in the university, first as a PhD student and after as a member of Faculty. As a linguistics teacher and researcher, the first thing that caught my attention was our classes were completely or almost completely composed of white students. The second one was that, in spite of the fact that Language Studies Undergraduate Courses were traditionally ‘female’ courses, university data show that the proportion of male to female students varies, favouring men, as education level increases, from Undergraduate to Graduate studies (Master’s and PhD), and again from these to higher academic administrative positions. To conclude, I present a few of those initiatives, such as including social names in academic registers and, after the adoption of social and racial quotas for students’ admissions, conducting of research that indicates these kinds of quotas do not negatively affect the excellence of the university, instead reducing student dropout rates.