Business schools and faculty experiences of sexism: Gender structure tensions within and outside these schools
Autor/in:
Hughes, Emma; Donnelly, Rory
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: In this paper, we advance knowledge and theorization on the sexism experienced by faculty not only inside but also outside the physical boundaries of business schools. We enrich existing knowledge of gender and sexism by applying Gender Structure Theory (GST) to provide a more multi-dimensional analysis of the role of individuals, interactions, and institutions in shaping gender structures. Engaging with this theoretical framework, we use mixed-methods and data, integrating statistical data on gender in UK business schools with qualitative data from interviews with 52 academics from 15 schools to provide a nuanced insight into sexism at business schools. The framework developed from the findings extends GST by adding a specific “organizational” dimension, which is needed to examine interorganizational differences and how cultural and material organizational processes are influenced by wider national/international processes. We also identify three key interactional tensions cutting across the dimensions examined: organizational versus interorganizational relations, agency versus dependency, and employment relationships versus stakeholder relationships. The findings generate pressing implications for policy and practice in business schools and academia more broadly.
Women's leadership gamut in Saudi Arabia's higher education sector
Autor/in:
Akbar, Hammad; Al‐Dajani, Haya; Ayub, Nailah; Adeinat, Iman
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: This paper explores women's leadership in Saudi Arabia's three university settings—gender segregated (women or men-only), unsegregated (co-educational) and the majority of partially segregated universities where women's campuses exist within male-dominated universities. While Saudi Arabia's accelerated reforms are creating new opportunities for women's leadership, these are not reflected in the higher education sector yet. In adopting a feminist institutional theory perspective, this study employed a feminist qualitative approach, including 14 semi-structured interviews in Saudi Arabia's three university settings. The findings revealed that the barriers to women's leadership were most significant within the partially segregated universities, rendering women leaders as effectively powerless. In contrast, women's leadership flourished in the women-only university setting. As such, the findings suggest that the dominating partially segregated model is ineffective and problematic for women's leadership, and contradict the dominant view that gender segregation disempowers women. These insights have implications for the transformation of Saudi Arabia's higher education sector, aligned with the Kingdom's Vision 2030 policy.
At the intersection of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and business management in Canadian higher education: An intentional equity, diversity, and inclusion framework
Autor/in:
Ruel, Stefanie; Tajmel, Tanja
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: In this study, the authors address the persistent discrimination cis women face in the Canadian science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) higher education context. Pulling on the notion of interrelationships that cross educational faculty boundaries and on intersectionality scholarship to unsettle the structural and disciplinary domains of power, the authors ask, “How can business education and STEM education work together with respect to social considerations, such as gender/race/ethnicity/etc., and social equity and inclusivity, within the Canadian higher education system?” This study aims to build on these interrelationships among diverse, complex individuals who participated in a graduate-level STEM and business management summer institute to provide an evidence-based and intentional equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) framework for STEM higher education contexts. Using a mixed-methods approach, which saw data collection via a survey instrument and semi-structured interviews, the subsequent quantitative analysis points to expanding interrelationships to broader areas beyond STEM and business management programs. The close reading of the collected qualitative data, via antenarrative spirals, elevates the participants' complexities beyond focusing “just” on their intersecting identities to looking at their perceptions of STEM fields, the order that ensues and the potential for the undoing of that order. The findings, results, and analyses of these collected data led to an intentional EDI framework, the main contribution of this study, constructed into three main pillars represented by the figure of a tree: the foundational elements (roots) built on individuals' complexities and experiences of Othering, the interrelationships (trunk) possible across various educational and professional dimensions, and a call to structural change initiatives (branches) with the possibility for growth in other areas. This work then contributes to not only filling a significant literature gap and building awareness regarding EDI concerns in STEM contexts via active interrelationship-building activities but also to unsettling the structural and disciplinary domains of power by embracing a holistic strategy to address systemic discriminatory practices in the Canadian STEM higher education context.
„Mit Geschlecht hat das aber nichts zu tun“ : Über die Schwierigkeiten von Professorinnen, über Geschlecht (nicht) zu sprechen
Autor/in:
Paulitz, Tanja; Wagner, Leonie
Quelle: GENDER (GENDER – Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft), 15 (2023) 2, S 117–131
Inhalt: Historisch wie aktuell finden sich in Interviews mit Professorinnen Konstruktionen von Geschlechtsneutralität, mit denen sie versuchen, die Widersprüche zu bearbeiten, die sich aus der Meritokratienorm der Wissenschaft und gleichstellungspolitischen Versprechungen einerseits und alltäglichen Erfahrungen in der Hochschule andererseits ergeben. In einer aktuellen qualitativen Untersuchung an Hochschulen (Universitäten, Hochschulen für angewandte Wissenschaften, Kunst- und Musikhochschulen) wurden erstmals seit den 1980er-Jahren Erzählungen von Professor:innen über alltägliche Erfahrungen bzw. deren Einordnung in eine vergeschlechtlichte Organisationskultur analysiert. Zentraler Befund ist die regelmäßige und proaktive Dethematisierung von Geschlecht als relevanter Faktor für erfahrene Marginalisierungen. Diese Aussagen werden im vorliegenden Beitrag nicht als nahtlose Deskription einer heute erreichten Geschlechtsegalität gedeutet, sondern als Praktiken der Bürgschaft für eine vermeintlich erreichte geschlechterneutrale Hochschule sowie als eigene Statussicherung auf der Position als Professorin und meritokratisch anerkannte Leistungsträgerin.
Both historically and currently, interviews with women professors reveal constructions of gender neutrality with which they try to work through the contradictions that arise from the meritocratic norm of science and equality policy promises on the one hand and everyday experiences in higher education on the other. In a recent qualitative study conducted at higher education institutions (universities, universities of applied sciences, art and music academies) professors’ narrations about everyday experiences and their placement within a gendered organizational culture were analysed for the first time since the 1980s. The key finding is the regular and proactive de-thematization of gender as a relevant factor in experienced marginalization. In this article, these statements are not interpreted as a seamless description of that gender equality that has been achieved to date, but as practices that vouch for a supposedly achieved gender-neutral university and that serve to protect one’s status as women professors and meritocratically recognized high achievers.
Intersectional barriers to women’s advancement in higher education institutions rewarded for their gender equity plans
Autor/in:
Crimmins, Gail; Casey, Sarah; Tsouroufli, Maria
Quelle: Gender & Education, (2023) , S 1–18
Inhalt: This paper reports on a research project designed to understand the work experiences and career opportunities of people working in higher education institutions (HEIs) across the UK, which received formal recognition for supporting gender equity between 2015 and 2020. The findings reveal multiple intersecting barriers to women’s full engagement, inclusion, support and career success in higher education, despite the implementation of organization-based gender equity plans, and institutional inter/national recognition for advancing equity. Most axes of de/privilege that are based along lines of gender, race, ethnicity and religion are enacted as everyday sexism that resist gender equality policy. Moreover, our findings suggest that ‘place’ is a constitutive element of intersectional dis/advantage, not merely a context within which compounded barriers to inclusion and advancement may exist. In addition, the findings demonstrate that whilst inter-categorical intersectionality is based on the notion that all social categories (such as age, race and gender) are equally salient, the degree of importance of any category will likely depend on location or context of the phenomena being examined. Our findings therefore invite further, iterative and translocational research into the impacts of the intersections of gender, ethnicity, race and religion in spaces of higher education, particularly those with colonial legacies and presence.
Schlagwörter:Athena SWAN; career development; gender equality plan; gender equality policy; Gleichstellungsplan; Gleichstellungspolitik; Great Britain; higher education; Hochschule; intersectionality; microaggression; Organisation; sexism; spatial analysis; UK
Academic women’s silences in Iran: exploring with positioning theory
Autor/in:
Lotfi Dehkharghani, Leila; Menzies, Jane; Suri, Harsh
Quelle: Gender & Education, (2023) , S 1–18
Inhalt: In this paper, we seek to understand the complexity of women outside ‘the centre’ of scholarship by exploring women’s silences in an Iranian University. Building on a framework of external and internal silencing and positioning theory, we analyse in-depth interviews with 15 women and five men from an Iranian University. Using inductive and deductive approaches to data analysis, we find that women's silences are influenced by their positioning due to constraining forces stemming from the political and societal environment as well as their own perceptions of self. We find prevalent storylines rooted in the broader patriarchal Muslim society, sexist cultural norms and unjust laws in Iran that reify women’s oppressed position, exclusion, and silence within the academic workplace. Manifesting through socialization processes and stereotypical perceptions of gender roles, these prevalent storylines silence academic women and position them to be silent. We identify emerging emancipatory storylines that foster women’s positioning from being silenced to being heard.
Schlagwörter:academic work; exclusion; Interview; Iran; muslim woman; Norm; positionality; qualitative method; silencing; women
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Hochschulen, Geschlechterverhältnis
Power and the perception of pregnancy in the academy
Autor/in:
Percival Carter, Erin
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: Becoming pregnant as an academic is risky. Many who want to become or find themselves pregnant structure their lives and careers to try to mitigate the potential negative effects of pregnancy on their future careers. Yet research continues to suggest that having been pregnant or being a mother significantly reduces the likelihood of career success compared to either being child-free or a father. While in some cases success is defined as research productivity, in many cases, it is defined as simply remaining in academia. Governments, societies, and institutions bemoan the resulting “leaky pipelines” and speculate as to the causes of seemingly reinforced glass ceilings. Yet, underlying so many of the formal and informal conversations, norms, and policies surrounding pregnancy and academia is an implicit assumption that pregnancy and pregnant people are the problem to be solved and solutions thus require repairing some deficit created in the individual by pregnancy. In this article, I argue that pregnancy discrimination in academia is in large part a problem resulting from power and how it is wielded against pregnant people, both by institutions and by individuals. Using both a personal narrative account of the process, experience, and outcomes of pregnancy in the academy resulting in filing a formal Title IX complaint and a review of contemporary research on power, discrimination, and pregnancy, I explore how academic structures and systems nominally tasked with supporting equity can instead serve to exaggerate power differences and foster discrimination.
Women’s refusal of racial patriarchy in South African academia
Autor/in:
Raymond, Zaakira; Canham, Hugo
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2022) , S 1–18
Inhalt: This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through a discursive thematic frame. We found that while all participants experienced gender-based discrimination which hinders academic progression, the barriers experienced by black women academics are compounded by the intersections of race, gender, and motherhood. Patriarchal and racist institutional, disciplinary and departmental cultures served as further challenges to belonging. On the other hand, through counter storytelling and refusal, women created alternative spaces of sociality where suffering co-exists with pleasure, refusal and survival. Ultimately, the paper suggests refusal as a generative theoretical lens to surface the complexity of women academics.
“Flying under the radar”: Postfeminism and teaching in academic science
Autor/in:
Doerr, Katherine
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: Neoliberal academia is marked by vertical and horizontal gender segregation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a particularly concerning case. Women with PhDs are underrepresented, and when they do participate, they are more likely than men to be in teaching-intensive roles. Beyond equality concerns, this is problematic because when women are interpreters rather than producers of disciplinary knowledge, the STEM enterprise remains gender-biased. Using data from a 2-year ethnography with physical science faculty in teaching-intensive roles, this paper argues that gender inequity is reproduced through postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. Participants who are mothers say they are flying under the radar at work. They self-surveille as they engage in both paid labor as university educators and unpaid carework at home. Importantly, when participants challenge hegemonic gender norms, they attract the radar's attention and are sanctioned. This study contributes to a growing understanding of how and why women are marginalized in STEM careers. Women with science PhDs fulfill their university's teaching mission with minimal support for the implied compensation of work-life balance, leaving the institutional structures which privilege men's participation in STEM research intact.
COVID-19 and the Gender Gap in University Student Performance
Autor/in:
Bratti, Massimiliano; Lippo, Enrico
Quelle: IZA Discussion Paper, (2022)
Inhalt: The gendered impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been observed in many domains, such as labor market outcomes and mental health. One sector that was particularly disrupted by the pandemic was education, owing to the need to close educational institutions and move all learning activities online. In this paper, we investigate the gender gap in university student performance, focusing on a large public university located in one of the European regions most affected by the first pandemic wave (Lombardy, in Northern Italy). Despite concerns that the pandemic might have had a heavier toll on the educational performance of female students, our empirical analysis shows that the gender gap in student progression (number of credits earned) was not affected by the pandemic and that in some college majors (social sciences and humanities) women even improved their GPA relative to men
Schlagwörter:Benotung; gender gap; Leistungsdifferenzen; Leistungsfähigkeit; public universities and colleges; student; Student*in; Universität
CEWS Kategorie:Hochschulen, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Studium und Studierende, Geschlechterverhältnis