A “Chillier” Climate for Multiply Marginalized STEM Faculty Impedes Research Collaboration
Autor/in:
Griffith, Eric E.; Mickey, Ethel L.; Dasgupta, Nilanjana
Quelle: Sex Roles (Sex Roles), 86 (2022) , S 233–248
Inhalt: Research collaboration is key to faculty career success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Yet little research has considered how faculty from multiply marginalized identity groups experience collaboration compared to colleagues from majority groups. The present study fills that gap by examining similarities and differences in collaboration experiences of faculty across multiple marginalized groups, and the role of department climate in those experiences. A survey of STEM faculty at a large public research university found that faculty from underrepresented groups – in terms of gender, race, and sexual orientation – had more negative experiences with department-level research collaborations. Moreover, faculty with multiply marginalized identities had worse collaboration experiences than others with a single marginalized identity or none. They also perceived their department climate to be less inclusive, equitable, and transparent; and felt their opinions were less valued in their department than colleagues from majority groups. Negative department climate, in turn, mediated and predicted less hospitable experiences with department-level research collaborations. These data suggest that multiply marginalized faculty, across different identity groups, share some common experiences of a “chilly” department climate relative to their peers from majority groups that impede opportunities for scientific collaboration, a key ingredient for faculty success. These findings have policy implications for retention of diverse faculty in university STEM departments.
Gendering excellence through research productivity indicators
Autor/in:
Nygaard, Lynn P.; Piro, Fredrik N.; Aksnes, Dag W.
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2022) , S 1–15
Inhalt: As the importance of ‘excellence’ increases in higher education, so too does the importance of indicators to measure research productivity. We examine how such indicators might disproportionately benefit men by analysing extent to which the separate components of the Norwegian Publication Indicator (NPI), a bibliometric model used to distribute performance-based funding to research institutions, might amplify existing gender gaps in productivity. Drawing from Norwegian bibliometric data for 43,500 individuals, we find that each element of the indicator (weighting based on publication type, publication channel, and international collaboration, as well as fractionalization of co-authorship) has a small, but cumulative effect resulting in women on average receiving 10 per cent fewer publication points than men per publication. In other words, we see a gender gap that is not only caused by a difference in the level of production but is also amplified by the value ascribed to each publication.
Inhalt: We study the presence and the extent of gender differences in reference letters for graduate students in economics and how these may affect the start of young researchers' careers. To these ends, we build a novel rich dataset covering ten cohorts of academic job market applicants to two top institutions hiring on the international market. We collect information from the application packages and conduct text analysis of reference letters using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in order to measure gender differences in the style and content of the letters. We then combine the resulting measures with information on the applicants’ subsequent labor market outcomes as extrapolated from the main online repositories. Our results reveal that male and female candidates receive different support from their sponsors and are described in systematically different terms. While female advisors talk more about personal characteristics, only male advisors do so at a different extent for male and female candidates. Such differences in how candidates are talked about affect subsequent career outcomes and explain a non-negligible part (5 to 8% approximately) of the observed gender gaps.
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.
Quelle: Discip Interdscip Sci Educ Res (Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research), 4 (2022) 1
Inhalt: Increasing access, representation, and retention of underrepresented groups is essential across academia. Invited speaker seminars are common practice in academic science departments and serve to disseminate research, establish connections and collaborations, advance faculty careers, and connect trainees to mentors outside of departmental faculty. Thus, lack of representation among seminar speakers can affect both faculty and trainee professional development. This study characterizes gender demographics of seminar speakers across science departments at an R1 institution for the years 2015–2019, using pronoun usage as a proxy for gender identity. We found that most faculty and invited speakers were male, and few were female or nonbinary. The percentage of female and nonbinary invited speakers increased from 2015–2019 along with the percentage of female and nonbinary host faculty. Overall, male faculty hosted fewer female and nonbinary speakers than their female and nonbinary faculty colleagues. This study provides evidence for a correlation between faculty identity and the scientists they host at their department and motivates further studies investigating this relationship at other R1 institutions and institution types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Academic women’s voices on gendered divisions of work and care: ‘Working till I drop . . . then dropping’
Autor/in:
Sümer, Sevil; Eslen-Ziya, Hande
Quelle: European Journal of Women's Studies, (2022)
Inhalt: Our main goal in this article is to discuss the structural and persistent problems experienced by women academics, especially with respect to the gendered divisions of academic tasks and unequal divisions of care obligations in the domestic sphere. The analysis is based on reflexive thematic analysis of the open-ended questions of an online questionnaire on the academic work environment, work satisfaction, stress, academic duties and allocation of tasks, and thoughts on gender equality. Academics from different countries voice their lived experiences, frustrations as well as worries about their future. We aim to highlight how these issues are embedded in the structures of academic capitalism and argue against the tendency to individualise these issues in a bid to inspire an informed collective resistance.
Schlagwörter:academic capitalism; academic care; Arbeitsteilung; Arbeitszufriedenheit; Care; care responsibility; Diskurs; division of labor; domestic labour; Forschung; gender equality; gendered work organization; Lehre; qualitative Analyse; qualitative analysis; questionnaire; resistance; time allocations; work environment
CEWS Kategorie:Vereinbarkeit Familie-Beruf, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
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
International migration of researchers and gender imbalance in academia—the case of Norway
Autor/in:
Wendt, Kaja; Gunnes, Hebe; Aksnes, Dag W.
Quelle: Scientometrics (Scientometrics), 127 (2022) 12, S 7575–7591
Inhalt: Female representation among students and graduates in higher education is growing internationally. This is a promising trend for achieving gender balance in top positions in academia. But there is still a long way to go, as women accounted for 26 per cent in top positions at European higher education institutions in 2018. In this article, we examine the influence of international recruitment of researchers on the gender balance—or the lack of gender balance—in Norwegian academia. We draw on data from the Norwegian Register of Research personnel, linked with population statistics from Statistics Norway. These data show that 38 per cent of the researchers at Norwegian higher education institutions in 2018 were born abroad. The share of foreign full professors has increased from 16 per cent in 2001 to 27 per cent in 2018, while for postdocs there has been an increase from 31 to 69 per cent. In terms of overall gender composition, a higher percentage of the foreign-born researchers are male compared with the native Norwegians. The incidence of international recruitment differs significantly across academic fields and is particularly prevalent in engineering. This is also the field where the gender balance is most skewed generally. Taking these variables into account, we conclude that international migration is not among the factors contributing to the gender imbalance in Norwegian academia. In fact, international recruitment has contributed positively to the gender balance in Norway in the majority of the fields analysed.
Schlagwörter:academia; full professor; gender inequality; higher education; international academic mobility; Migration; Norway; Norwegen; recruitment; Rekrutierung
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Hochschulen, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis