Would Virginia recognise the room?

Reflecting on the place of and spaces for women in higher education, this poem responds to Virginia Woolf’s (1929) feminist text A Room of One’s Own. The title, Would Virginia recognise the room? references Woolf’s still relevant critique of the exclusion of women from intellectual life by restricting access to the same support, resources and spaces as men. Since Woolf’s time, women’s enrolments in Australian universities have outpaced male enrolments (Larkin, 2024), however, while women are now over-represented at the lowest academic levels they continue to be underrepresented in senior academic and executive positions in these same institutions (Hamilton, Williams & Baird, 2022). The systematic exclusion of women continues via ‘infrastructural violences’ (Rodgers & O’Neill, 2012) such as classroom and office temperatures set to suit male metabolic rates and furniture and building designs that prioritise male body proportions. It also persists through the ‘infra-structural violences’ (Pavoni & Tulumello, 2024) associated with the emotional labour of navigating these spaces and the near constant surveillance, scrutiny and lack of belonging experienced. These forms of violence—both infrastructural and infra-structural—continue to subtly reinforce women’s discomfort and exclusion in academic spaces that, although presented as neutral, are designed to privilege masculine norms and ways of being and belonging.