Un/making academia: gendered precarities and personal lives in universities
Autor/in:
McKenzie, Lara
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2021) , S 1–18
Inhalt: Recent scholarship on universities explores how academics’ families and partners restrict their careers and how academic labour limits these relationships, both in highly gendered ways. Such research less often considers how people’s close relations might unevenly support them in continuously relocating; dedicating unpaid time to ‘career development’; or taking on or influencing them to remain in short-term, poorly paid precarious roles. This paper explores precariously employed post-PhDs in Australia, investigating their gendered careers and personal lives. Drawing on interviews at three public universities, it shows how women with children and partners in particular raise concerns over how their relationships and work interact. Here, certain kinds of workers – men and single women, unencumbered by family responsibilities and restrictions on travel, and with access to financial resources – appear better able to navigate moves to more secure work. This paper argues that support from close relations is productive and restrictive for precarious academics’ careers.
When faith intersects with gender: the challenges and successes in the experiences of Muslim women academics
Autor/in:
Ramadan, Ibtihal
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2021) , S 1–16
Inhalt: This paper explores the experiences of eight Muslim women academics (MWA) within a range of sciences and humanities disciplines. The data draws from my doctoral study which examined the experiences of men and women Muslim academics at UK universities. Findings from in-depth interviews with participants highlight the intersectionality of religio-gendered identities as central to their experiences. Being hijabed in academia triggered gendered-Islamophobic micro-aggressions, whose potential impact on the participants was buffered by their resilience, positive outlook, and belief. Further, they capitalized on their visible faith to demystify negative perceptions about Muslims and to advance their career-through utilizing the diversity logic within academia, while recognizing its tokenistic nature. Despite facing challenges, the participants share certain qualities that facilitate success, with agency being the uppermost quality.
Schlagwörter:academics; akademische Karriere; Großbritannien; Intersektionalität; Islam; microaggressions; Muslim; muslim woman; Rassismus; UK
CEWS Kategorie:Berufsbiographie und Karriere, Diversity, Europa und Internationales, Geschlechterverhältnis
Inhalt: Women's underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) impedes progress in solving Africa's complex development problems. As in other regions, women's participation in STEM drops progressively moving up the education and career ladder, with women currently constituting 30% of Africa's STEM researchers. This study elucidates gender-based differences in PhD performance using new survey data from 227 alumni of STEM PhD programs in 17 African countries. We find that, compared to their male counterparts, sampled women had about one less paper accepted for publication during their doctoral studies and took about half a year longer to finish their PhD training. Negative binomial regression models provide insights on the observed differences in women's and men's PhD performance. Results indicate that the correlates of publication productivity and time to PhD completion are very similar for women and men, but some gender-based differences are observed. For publication output, we find that good supervision had a stronger impact for men than women; and getting married during the PhD reduced women's publication productivity but increased that of men. Becoming a parent during the PhD training was a key reason that women took longer to complete the PhD, according to our results. Findings suggest that having a female supervisor, attending an institution with gender policies in place, and pursuing the PhD in a department where sexual harassment by faculty was perceived as uncommon were enabling factors for women's timely completion of their doctoral studies. Two priority interventions emerge from this study: (1) family-friendly policies and facilities that are supportive of women's roles as wives and mothers and (2) fostering broader linkages and networks for women in STEM, including ensuring mentoring and supervisory support that is tailored to their specific needs and circumstances.
Quelle: Universities as political institutions. Higher education institutions in the middle of academic, economic and social pressures. Leasa Weimer (Hrsg.), Terhi Nokkala (Hrsg.), Leiden; Boston: Brill Sense. 2020, S 262–286
Inhalt: The probability of reaching a permanent academic position is strongly gendered in most if not all higher education systems. Though a widely studied phenomenon, few studies problematise the way national contexts – both academic and non-academic – that shape employment structures and national gender regimes are interpreted by individual academics, and frame their career strategies and the ways of subjectively coping with the norms of academic careers. Aiming to fill this research gap, this chapter compares the subjective representations of early career academics in terms of career expectation and articulation between professional and private sphere in two contrasted national contexts; Finland and Switzerland. Focusing especially on international mobility, the paper aims to reveal how national polities matter to understand young academics’ strategies and how these strategies are shaped – or not – by gender relationships in the era of the so called ‘internationalisation’ of academic labour markets and the norm of the academic staff mobility.
Schlagwörter:Finnland; Gender; Geschlechterungleichheit; international academic mobility; Mobilität; Schweiz; wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchs; young academics
CEWS Kategorie:Berufsbiographie und Karriere, Europa und Internationales, Geschlechterverhältnis
Gendered strategies of mobility and academic career
Autor/in:
Nikunen, Minna; Lempiäinen, Kirsti
Quelle: Gender and Education, 32 (2020) 4, S 554–571
Inhalt: In universities, being mobile and international has become ever more important for academics’ career prospects. This article explores junior and other insecurely employed researchers’ experiences of geographical mobility in relation to their personal life, career, employability and value as scholars. The aim is to discover the gendered strategies researchers use to combine mobility with intimate relations and personal life. Furthermore, what gendered ideas of mobility, employability and career success do researchers themselves construct? These aspects of mobility, particularly focused on gender, are analysed in three cases: Finland, Italy and the United Kingdom. These states are all (currently) members of the European Union and have implemented its internationalisation policies. The data consists of qualitative interviews gathered in 2009 and 2010. We suggest that the value and capital of academic labour are evaluated differently in the three different locations. Additionally, gender, age, academic age and life situation motivate different mobility strategies.
New managerialism in the academy: Gender bias and precarity
Autor/in:
Steinþórsdóttir, Finnborg S.; Brorsen Smidt, Thomas; Pétursdóttir, Gyða M.; Einarsdóttir, Þorgerður; Le Feuvre, Nicky
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), 26 (2019) 2, S 124–139
Inhalt: In the era of global competition, academic institutions are increasingly being managed as efficient organizations where early career academics are the most vulnerable group in the academic hierarchy. We use gender budgeting to deconstruct the financial and managerial processes and procedures in a selected academic institution in Iceland. Drawing on multiple data collection methods, we argue that new managerialism enhances the precarious position of early career academics, especially women and those in the more feminized fields. Furthermore, we show that the system's bias in favour of so‐called hard science generates gendered consequences for early career academics. We demonstrate this structural gender bias in each of the first three stages of an academic career: PhD, postdoc and other temporary positions, and assistant professorship. By highlighting the gendered consequences of new managerialism, we want to direct attention to the need to include a gender perspective in the budgeting and all the decision‐making processes in academic institutions.
‘You must aim high’ - ‘No, I never felt like a woman’: women and men making sense of non-standard trajectories into higher education
Autor/in:
González Ramos, Ana M.; Räthzel, Nora
Quelle: International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 10 (2018) 1, 17 S
Inhalt: It is no secret that the ‘glass ceiling’ preventing women advancing to leadership positions exists in academia as well. Spain is no exception. Gender relations are usually investigated independently of other power relations like class and ethnicity. In our sample (80 men and women in different academic institutions across Spain) we found that not only women but also men from working class backgrounds have difficulties making successful academic careers. Therefore, we use an intersectional approach to investigate the relationship between gender and class. Comparing two life-histories, we explore what strategies individuals employ to overcome the barriers with which they are confronted. We present the stories of a woman with a middle class but non-academic background and of a man with a working-class background. Their strategies can be understood as the result of specific individual trajectories under specific societal conditions, but they also illustrate the barriers and possibilities men and women with non-standard backgrounds encounter in academia. Analysing successful strategies as well as their limitations, we aim to provide perspectives that might contribute to changing the culture of hegemonic masculinities in academia.
CEWS Kategorie:Berufsbiographie und Karriere, Diversity, Europa und Internationales, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Geschlechterverhältnis, Wissenschaft als Beruf