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.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: In response to persistent systemic gendered and racial exclusions in the sciences, unconscious or implicit bias training is now widely established as an organizational intervention in Higher Education (HE). Recent systematic reviews have considered the efficacy of unconscious bias training (UBT) but not the wider characteristics and effects of the interventions themselves. Guided by feminist scholarship in critical psychology and post-structuralist discourse theory, this article critically examines UBT across STEMM and in HE institutions with a discursive analysis of published studies. Drawn from systematic searches in 4 databases, we identify three types of UBT reported in 22 studies with considerable variation in intervention types, target groups, and evaluation methods. Guided by limited cognitive problematizations of unconscious bias as a problem located inside individual minds, interventions follow established patterns in neoliberal governmentality and make available specific feeling rules and subject positions. These current Equality, Diversity & Inclusion practices present a new technology of power through which organizations may regulate affect and behavior but leave structural inequalities and barriers to inclusion intact.
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: The article illuminates how gender inequality in Ireland's higher education sector continues to be constituted at policy and at local institutional levels as a problem that requires ‘fixing the women”. It analyses two gender equality projects' discursive materials targeting female academics in Irish universities, showing that while these projects embrace elements of feminist praxis and critique, they ultimately propagate “cruel optimism”. They do this by exhorting women academics' subjectification to burdensome practices of strategizing, self-auditing and self-promotion, lured by the promise of awards that only a few will attain. Presented are two cases of what we call “promising promotional projects” that we have encountered in our work in our university. We use the term “projects” to refer to time-limited, bounded interventions that respond to “gender equality” as a field of government, where problems have been diagnosed and where practicable and pragmatic solutions are seen to be required. Our discursive-deconstructive reading of these projects' discursive materials highlights how gender equality projects target women for “promotion” through mobilizing gendered technologies of the self.
„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
Perceived social norms and acceptance of transgender students in gendered restrooms
Autor/in:
Monheim, Chelsea L.; Ratcliff, Jennifer J.
Quelle: Journal of LGBT Youth, 20 (2023) 2, S 353–369
Inhalt: Transgender college students report higher rates of discrimination in gendered restrooms than do their cisgender peers. It is critical to understand factors that promote greater acceptance of transgender students using restrooms that align with their gender identity. The current experiment examined the impact of perceived social norms on both acceptance of transgender individuals using various locations and transphobia. Participants were 133 cisgender college students recruited on a college campus that had recently added all-gender restrooms to all campus buildings. Participants completed a prescreening measure of transphobia. During the experimental session, participants read results from a fictional study in which the social norm of their college campus was described as either in favor of (supportive norm) or against (unsupportive norm) the installation of all-gender restrooms on campus. Then participants completed measures of acceptance of transgender individuals in various spaces and transphobia. Supporting the primary hypothesis, relative to those in the unsupportive norm condition, participants in the supportive social norm condition were more accepting of transgender individuals using restrooms that aligned with their gender identity. However, the norm manipulation did not impact personal levels of transphobia between prescreen and post experimental manipulation. Implications and future directions will be discussed.
Quelle: Am Sociol Rev (American Sociological Review), (2023)
Inhalt: How does higher education shape the Black-White earnings gap? It may help close the gap if Black youth benefit more from attending and completing college than do White youth. On the other hand, Black college-goers are less likely to complete college relative to White students, and this disparity in degree completion helps reproduce racial inequality. In this study, we use a novel causal decomposition and a debiased machine learning method to isolate, quantify, and explain the equalizing and stratifying roles of college. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that a bachelor’s degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings among men (albeit not among women); yet, at the population level, this equalizing effect is partly offset by unequal likelihoods of bachelor’s completion between Black and White students. Moreover, a bachelor’s degree narrows the male Black-White earnings gap not by reducing the influence of class background and pre-college academic ability, but by lessening the “unexplained” penalty of being Black in the labor market. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual earnings gaps under a series of stylized educational interventions. We find that interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and bachelor’s completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the Black-White earnings gap.
