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.
University, neoliberalism and hegemonic bodies: narratives of international students in Chile
Autor/in:
Martinez, César Augusto Ferrari
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2022) , S 1–15
Inhalt: This article investigates the production of neoliberal subjectivities in Latin American international students in Chilean universities. In last years, Chile have registered plenty political uprisings regarding its economic, social and gender inequalities. The premise is that Chile is a country where Neoliberalism is rooted not only in the form of political and economic guidelines, but as rationality. It proposes that these forms of thought-action reinforce typically male success stereotypes, dismissing bodies challenged of non-hegemonic paths. Narrative interviews with doctoral students in Chile are used to describe how the topic of academic excellence sustained by the Chilean neoliberal university market materializes differently in each body. Students report the interpellation of success discourses affecting their bodies and relating their nationhood, gender and sexualities experiences to feelings of diminishment, loneliness, discrimination, etc. I argue that the presence of neoliberal rationalities in the Chilean university favours the exercise of sexist practices, naturalized as market practices, and impose normative adjustments on the gender and sexuality performance of students.
Inhalt: This article examines the significance of neoliberalism in re/shaping the gendered timescapes of higher education in Ghana through its intersection with patriarchal forces. It draws from a project aiming to create non-hierarchical, co-mentoring spaces in which participants collaboratively generate feminist analyses. Letter-writing was identified as a form of feminist praxis and an auto/biographical method to access the multidimensional inequalities women navigated in their careers. Opening counter-hegemonic time–space and providing feminist conceptual resources, the women explored their aspirations, experiences, and subjectivities. In Ghana, women are attempting to balance the accelerated temporalities of neoliberal higher education, as productive subjects, with the explicit demands of patriarchy, which construct them primarily in reproductive terms as wives and mothers. Our collective reflections illustrate that intersecting forces are at play that impact women’s higher education careers in unpredictable and contradictory ways.
Beyond the neoliberalized academy: caring and careful practices of women full professors
Autor/in:
Castelao-Huerta, Isaura
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2022) , S 1–16
Inhalt: This article reveals how some women full professors have developed caring and careful practices with their students despite the neoliberalization of public higher education, thus, avoiding individualization and establishing trust and solidarity. It presents interviews with 24 women full professors from a Colombian public university, an ethnographic study with three of them and nineteen interviews with their students and colleagues. The content analysis of the fieldwork shows that the professors have caring practices, which include rebuscarse to ensure the well-being of the students and providing financial support, as well as careful practices such as intervening to prevent harm and being open to listening. Caring and careful practices of the professors serve to improve the lives of the people that are close to them and to build a much friendlier and more supportive university. However, care activities are complex, undervalued and represent a double burden, which is why modifying university policies is an urgent task.
Schlagwörter:academia; academic care; Care; Ethnographie; higher education; Kolumbien; Latin America; neoliberal university; professor care; Professorin; Solidarität
CEWS Kategorie:Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
Inhalt: Grounded in intersectional feminist approaches, this study explores the equity impacts of student evaluations of teaching (SETs) on precariously employed women in the academy. Despite their overrepresentation in the academic teaching workforce, precariously employed women are a demographic group that remains underrepresented in research on SETs. Thirty-four qualitative interviews with precariously employed academic women at a university in Ontario, Canada, were conducted to explore their experiences of SETs. The participants critiqued SETs’ role in perpetuating feminized and racialized labour market precarity, and undermining their professional autonomy and professionalization. They also described how SETs subject them to discriminatory evaluations based on their gender, race and age, and the impacts thereof on their workload and mental health. This study’s findings reveal the importance of recognizing SETs’ impact on equity and the need to change teaching evaluation policy in higher education.
Quelle: Gender and Education, 32 (2020) 1, S 11–26
Inhalt: Drawing on data collected in a cross-disciplinary survey of early-career academics (ECAs) in New Zealand, this article explores the factors influencing ECA conference attendance. Our conceptual framework uses conference attendance as the dependent variable and measures gender, ethnicity, family responsibilities and workload. Three key features affect conference attendance: "demographic characteristics" (background features and prior experiences that affect an academic's willingness and ability to attend), "accessibility" (constraints to attending, such as financing, family responsibilities, institutional support or teaching commitments) and "purpose" (the value placed on attending conferences by the individual, the institution, or the discipline). In particular, we identify differences for women, Indigenous people, and those born overseas with respect to their ability to navigate and their inclination to attend national and international conferences.
Schlagwörter:conference culture; early career researcher; ethnic minority; gender inequality; Konferenz; Neuseeland; wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchs
CEWS Kategorie:Berufsbiographie und Karriere, Diversity, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
‘Homeliness meant having the fucking vacuum cleaner out’ : The gendered labour of maintaining conference communities
Autor/in:
Burford, James; Bosanquet, Agnes; Smith, Jan
Quelle: Gender and Education, 32 (2020) 1, S 86–100
Inhalt: This article extends examinations of the gendered nature of care and service in academia, with a particular focus on the labour of maintaining conference communities. Utilising empirical data from a cultural history of the International Academic Identities Conference, we draw on interviews with 32 conference organisers, keynote speakers and participants to explore the gendered dynamics of reproducing conference communities. While some participants experienced exclusions, most participants described a conference that felt caring, welcoming and like ‘home’. Following this discussion, we interrogate the idea of the conference as ‘home’, asking questions about the gendered division of ‘academic housekeeping’ practices that underpin such home-making. Engaging with feminist theorising of emotional labour, we argue that academic women undertook significant, and often hidden, care and service labour to maintain a homely conference community.
Hidden social exclusion in Indian academia : Gender, caste and conference participation
Autor/in:
Sabharwal, Nidhi S.; Henderson, Emily F.; Joseph, Roma Smart
Quelle: Gender and Education, 32 (2020) 1, S 27–42
Inhalt: Conferences are key sites for the development of academic careers; however multiple studies have shown that conferences are exclusionary on the basis of gender and other axes of social disadvantage. This study focuses on India and as such also incorporates caste as an axis of privilege and disadvantage in relation to access to conferences. Conferences in this paper are framed within a broader professional development agenda, which is the way in which conferences are located in Indian higher education policy discourses, and a social exclusion perspective is taken as the analytical lens. The paper is based on data from a large-scale national study of social inequalities in higher education, which included quantitative analysis of administrative records and qualitative analysis of interviews with academics on their participation in conferences and professional development activities. Key findings include that participation in conferences is proportionally lower for women and scheduled caste academics than for men and upper-caste academics, and that access to conferences is embroiled in relational processes of social exclusion which operate in the academy, despite formal policies being in place. The article recommends further scrutiny of policy implementation and replication of this analysis across different country contexts.
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.
Gendered management in Spanish universities : Functional segregation among vice-rectors
Autor/in:
Castaño, Cecilia; Vázquez-Cupeiro, Susana; Martínez-Cantos, José Luis
Quelle: Gender and Education, 31 (2019) 8, S 966–985
Inhalt: The reorganisation of higher education according to the marketplace logic ? and framed within the process of Europeanisation and globalisation ? has run parallel to a significant rise in the number of women in senior management positions at Spanish universities. This would seem to be a step to more gender equality. However, the analysis of the situation used thus far, based on conventional indicators, may be harbouring a not-so-egalitarian reality. Our approach studies the gender distribution of vice-rectors according to assigned functions in all forty-eight Spanish public universities offering both graduate and postgraduate studies. It does so by creating a typology to exemplify gendered divisions of labour within those positions. The results confirm an uneven gender distribution: women, although mostly in charge of caregiving and housekeeping functions, are underrepresented across the board in areas where strategic power resides and the future of university is decided and where, eventually, gender norms could be changed.