“The ethos expected from a management professor forces us to act straight”: Heterosexist harassment against gay professors in Brazil
Autor/in:
Freitas Oleto, Alice de; Palhares, José Vitor
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: This study aims to analyze how gay Brazilian professors experience heterosexist harassment and the implications of this type of violence for the interpersonal relationships of these professors and for the teaching-learning process in the academic environment. To this end, we conducted an exploratory study with a qualitative approach. The data were collected through an online survey using the Google Forms platform based on cases reported by 13 gay Brazilian professors working in a technological or higher education institution at the time of the harassment. Our data suggest that most respondents suffered heterosexist harassment in the workplace with violence being more explicit when the professor is more effeminate. Furthermore, we found that the naturalization of games considered harmless and homophobic jokes in the workplace can compromise the fight against heterosexist harassment in organizations. As a result, respondents report behavioral and workplace changes to fit into social norms and to be socially accepted, physical and psychological problems, professional and interpersonal relationships, adversely affecting educational experiences.
Are we failing female and racialized academics? A Canadian national survey examining the impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on tenure and tenure‐track faculty
Autor/in:
Davis, Jennifer C.; Li, Eric Ping Hung; Butterfield, Mary Stewart; DiLabio, Gino A.; Sangunthanam, Nithi; Marcolin, Barbara
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused the abrupt curtailment of on-campus research activities that amplified impacts experienced by female and racialized faculty. In this mixed-method study, we systematically and strategically unpack the impact of the shift of academic work environments to remote settings on tenured and tenure-track faculty in Canada. Our quantitative analysis demonstrated that female and racialized faculty experienced higher levels of stress, social isolation and lower well-being. Fewer women faculty felt support for health and wellness. Our qualitative data highlighted substantial gender inequities reported by female faculty such as increased caregiving burden that affected their research productivity. The most pronounced impacts were felt among pre-tenured female faculty. The present study urges university administration to take further action to support female and racialized faculty through substantial organizational change and reform. Given the disproportionate toll that female and racialized faculty experienced, we suggest a novel approach that include three dimensions of change: (1) establishing quantitative metrics to assess and evaluate pandemic-induced impact on research productivity, health and well-being, (2) coordinating collaborative responses with faculty unions across the nation to mitigate systemic inequities, and (3) strategically implementing a storytelling approach to amplify the experiences of marginalized populations such as women or racialized faculty and include those experiences as part of recommendations for change.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: In this paper, we theorize the intersectional gendered impacts of COVID-19 on faculty labor, with a particular focus on how institutions of higher education in the United States evaluate faculty labor amidst the COVID-19 transition and beyond. The pandemic has disrupted faculty research, teaching, and service in differential ways, having larger impacts on women faculty, faculty of color, and caregiving faculty in ways that further reflect the intersections of these groups. Universities have had to reconsider how evaluation occurs, given the impact of these disruptions on faculty careers. Through a case study of university pandemic responses in the United States, we summarize key components of how colleges and universities shifted evaluations of faculty labor in response to COVID-19, including suspending teaching evaluations, implementing tenure delays, and allowing for impact statements in faculty reviews. While most institutional responses recenter neoliberal principles of the ideal academic worker that is both gendered and racialized, a few universities have taken more innovative approaches to better attend to equity concerns. We conclude by suggesting a recalibration of the faculty evaluation system – one that maintains systematic faculty reviews and allows for academic freedom, but requires universities to take a more contextualized approach to evaluation in ways that center equity and inclusion for women faculty and faculty of color for the long term.
Schlagwörter:academic career; COVID-19; faculty; Gender; Hochschule; intersectionality; Intersektionalität; Lehrevaluation; neoliberal university; neoliberale Hochschule; people of color; race; tenure; USA; wissenschaftliche Karriere
CEWS Kategorie:Diversity, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
Care in times of the pandemic: Rethinking meanings of work in the university
Autor/in:
Altan‐Olcay, Özlem; Bergeron, Suzanne
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: In this paper, we challenge the meanings of work that marginalize academic activities associated with care and contribute to inequitable gender divisions of academic labor. We argue that the pandemic crisis and the revision of the meaning of “essential work” that accompanied it has served as a catalyst for such concerns to get a hearing. But while there has been significant attention paid to domestic care demands and their impact on academic labor, there is less focus on the caretaking work we do in the university even though the gender unequal distribution of teaching, mentoring and service work has also intensified in the pandemic. We argue that this is in part due to the institutional discourses and practices that continue to devalue many components of everyday academic labor. In order to challenge these limits, we extend ideas from Feminist political economy (FPE) to university settings in order to reframe academic labor and revalue care as an essential part of it. We offer two suggestions, connected to FPE methodologies, for gathering and reconceptualizing data on academic work to push the project forward. We conclude with the argument that this project of revaluing caring labor is essential for achieving goals of equity, faculty well-being, and the sustainability of universities.
Circling the divide: Gendered invisibility, precarity, and professional service work in a UK business school
Autor/in:
Seymour, Kate
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: Within UK business schools, there are large numbers of female and feminized white-collar professional service (PS) employees in disproportionately low-paid, low-status roles, but surprisingly, they are largely invisible within the literature on sexism and gender inequalities in academia. This paper conceptualizes PS experiences by examining how forms of gendered invisibility affect professional staff working in the hybrid “third” space between academic and administrative realms. I develop a conceptual analysis of invisibility—of invisible work and as invisible worker—arising from the performance of professional and academic work. This allows me to analyze and distinguish forms of what I call service, professional and professional-academic housework, demonstrating how these are thoroughly imbricated in dominant patriarchal cultural ideologies of gender. In developing this schema, I draw self-reflexively on my own experiences of “circling the divide” within a UK business school, developing a rich, multi-perspectival account of the ways visibility and invisibility were experienced in the role of a particular third space professional and “academic-in-waiting.” This paper therefore contributes a systematic conceptualization of gendered invisible housework performed by PS staff within a politicized third space of UK business schools. It also brings often hidden PS “academics-in-waiting” into the literature on feminized precarity in the academy.
Schlagwörter:academic housework; business school; gender inequality; invisibility; MTV; professional service; professional staff; sexism; UK; Verwaltung
CEWS Kategorie:Hochschulen, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
Impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on the productivity of academics who mother
Autor/in:
Kasymova, Salima; Place, Jean Marie S.; Billings, Deborah L.; Aldape, Jesus D.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: The aim of the study is to document how academics who mother have reorganized work and childcare since the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States, how those shifts have affected their academic productivity, and solutions proposed by academics living these experiences. We collected data via an online survey and, subsequently, by conducting qualitative interviews with a subsample of participants. From June to August 2020, 131 female-identified academics who mother were recruited via a Facebook group, Academic Mamas, and participated in our online survey. Twenty participants were then interviewed via phone or Zoom to explore more deeply the experiences of academics who mother. Results of our research suggest that since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressure on academics who mother is immense. Analysis of the qualitative data revealed three major themes: (1) inability to meet institutional expectations; (2) juggling work and family life; and (3) proposed solutions. Our results suggest that significant efforts must be made by academic institutions to acknowledge and value the childcare responsibilities of academics who mother and to create solutions that fully address the challenges they face in meeting the academic expectations and requirements that largely remain unmodified despite the pandemic.
Twice a ‘housewife:’ On academic precarity, ‘hysterical’ women, faculty mental health, and service as gendered care work for the ‘university family’ in pandemic times
Autor/in:
Docka‐Filipek, Danielle; Stone, Lindsey B.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: Extensive research has explained women's pandemic-related workforce exodus as driven by the presumed pressures of gender disparate private, domestic burdens. The impact of gender asymmetries in academic labor on faculty well-being is less understood. We examined the effects of job-related factors on faculty mental health, a critical measure of precarity during the initial Spring 2020 “lockdown” and transition to remote work. Faculty (n = 345) were recruited via social media to participate in a survey on their work/life pandemic experiences. Women were over-represented in our sample, yet respondents at both the highest and the most tenuous ranks were underrepresented. Gender, teaching load, having dependents, and greater financial concerns were associated with higher depression and anxiety. Critically, women's heightened mental health risk was not explained by the other predictors. Results indicate women faculty's well-being and career advancement are threatened by disparate, obscured service burdens both within the academy and at home during the pandemic.
Gendered workload allocation in universities: A feminist analysis of practices and possibilities in a European University
Autor/in:
Steinþórsdóttir, Finnborg S.; Carmichael, Fiona; Taylor, Scott
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: The negotiated allocation of teaching and institutional service workload in universities is a key determinant of the quantity and quality of all work for academic staff. There is abundant quantitative evidence that women and men experience differential outcomes from faculty, school, or departmental workload allocation processes and convincing theoretical explanations as to why this happens. We add to this knowledge through feminist analysis of a mixed methods case study of an academic unit in a European University, focusing on gendered dynamics in the workload allocation processes there. Our analysis follows the “sweaty concept” methodology proposed by Sara Ahmed as a means of developing feminist theory that is founded on embodied experiences of discomfort in worlds that are not welcoming. The concept we develop through this is “inequitable modeling”; it suggests that while workload allocation processes are understood by model designers as a managerial tool to enable transparency and fairness (forms of procedural equity), the managed, especially women, experience them as opaque and unfair (forms of lived inequity). We conclude by questioning the principles and outcomes of such tools in achieving gender equity, and then describe how a feminist approach to workload modeling and allocation might be implemented.
Perceptions of Gendered‐Challenges in Academia: How Women Academics See Gender Hierarches as Barriers to Achievement
Autor/in:
Eslen-Ziya, Hande; Yildirim, Tevfik Murat
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: Despite the egalitarian and collegial philosophy in its ideals, academic market is segregated and gendered where women receive fewer rewards than their male counterparts, are under-represented, segregated and excluded from participation in the formal and informal academic structures in academia. The country contexts, the gendered academic organizational settings as well as everyday interactions all play a major role not only in women's participation within academia, but also how they perceive their future in academic institutions. This research note, through an original survey with over 200 academics, attempts to study the latter assumption by looking at women academics’ perceptions of their work life, their challenges, as well as aspirations. Our results show that, those perceiving strong hierarchy in the realm of work are significantly more likely to believe that being woman in academia harms their job prospects. We also show that, not only were they pessimistic about the challenges facing them at the moment, but they were also more sceptical about women's potential in overcoming such challenges in the future.
From pure academics to transformative scholars? The crisis of the “ideal academic” in a Peruvian university
Autor/in:
Manky, Omar; Saravia, Sergio
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2021)
Inhalt: In the last 2 decades, the Latin American university has embarked on a shift toward increasing scientific production, following a pattern common to much of the Global North. Few studies have analyzed how this process has had a differentiated impact on male and female scholars. In dialog with previous studies, we explore the changing nature of the “ideal academic,” accounting for its gendered character in an historically and culturally specific context. Based on a qualitative study, we describe the crisis of a model that idealized theoretical work and exclusive dedication to academia, and show that, in a broader context of feminist mobilizations, a critical discourse is emerging, stressing the need to bridge academic life and professional and political concerns. We seek to contribute to studies on changes in the Latin American academy illustrating the gendered ways through which the neoliberal university ends up being contested in the Global South.
Schlagwörter:academic career; academic work; Gender; global south; ideal academic; neoliberal university; Peru; wissenschaftliche Arbeit
CEWS Kategorie:Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis