Queering and diversifying gender in equality work at European higher education institutions
Autor/in:
Mense, Lisa; Sera, Stephanie; Vader, Sarah
Quelle: GENDER (GENDER – Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft), 11 (2019) 1-2019, S 78–91
Inhalt: In den letzten Jahren hat die zunehmende Anerkennung von Forderungen und Bedürfnissen der LGBTIQ* Communities zu Änderungen im EU-Recht beigetragen. Vor diesem Hintergrund plädieren die Autor*innen für ein queeres und damit vielfältiges Verständnis von Gender in den Gleichstellungsdiskursen an Hochschulen. Anhand der Fallbeispiele Deutschland und den Niederlanden werden rechtliche und diskursive Bedingungen sowie die Motivationen, Herausforderungen und Chancen der Akteur*innen im jeweiligen Hochschulsystem aus einer queeren Perspektive betrachtet. Die Beispiele zeigen, wie unterschiedlich die Umsetzung von EU-Richtlinien in nationales Recht erfolgt ist. Sie machen ebenfalls deutlich, dass Veränderungen in den Hochschulen derzeit von hoch motivierten Akteur*innen wie Studierenden, Gleichstellungs- und Diversity-Beauftragten oder einzelnen Einrichtungen angestoßen werden. Als aufeinander aufbauende, analytische Konzepte können „queering“ und „diversifying“ dazu beitragen, heteronormative Vorannahmen und diskriminierende Prozesse im gleichstellungspolitischen Kontext an Hochschulen zu erkennen. Sie erlauben ferner die Entwicklung von Strategien, die die Komplexität von Geschlechteridentitäten und Diskriminierungen berücksichtigen.
Against the background of recent changes to EU legislation to meet the demands and needs of LGBTIQ* communities, the authors seek to situate a queered and diversified understanding of gender firmly at the centre of the gender equality discourse in higher education (HE). Based on case examples, the legal and discursive status quo in German and Dutch HE institutions as well as actors’ motivations, challenges and opportunities are examined through a queer lens. The results highlight how differently EU legislation is transposed into national law. They also show that change is currently driven by highly motivated individual actors, be they students, gender equality and diversity officers, or individual institutions. We argue that queering and diversifying should be understood and used as modes to reflect on and analyse the processes that lead to heteronormative understandings of gender in HE and to develop strategies that take the complexities of gendered identities and discrimination into account.
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), 35 (2019) 7, 248 S
Inhalt: Scholars agree that gender inequality is systemic and that participants in gender equality interventions need knowledge on gender inequality processes. However, a detailed view on the specific characteristics of this knowledge is as yet missing. This article aims to contribute to gender equality interventions by conceptualizing and visualizing systemic gender knowledge as an important condition for transformational change. Combining gender and participatory system dynamics literature, this article first introduces the concept of systemic gender knowledge. This concept captures two main characteristics that make gender knowledge systemic: knowledge on the interaction of gender inequality processes and endogenous thinking, here implying a focus on the organization as the relevant level of analysis. In addition to this conceptual contribution, the research contributes methodologically to the gender inequality inter-vention literature by designing a visualization process, translating written texts into system dynamics models which enable exploration of systemic gender knowledge.
Finally, the research contributes empirically by exploring the systemic gender knowledge of participants in two science research institutes of a Dutch university, finding shifts in both characteristics of systemic gender knowledge. This enables researchers to discern whether gender equality
How Job Sharing Can Lead to More Women Achieving Senior Leadership Roles in Higher Education : A UK Study
Autor/in:
Watton, Emma; Stables, Sarah; Kempster, Steve
Quelle: Soc. Sci. (Social Sciences), 8 (2019) 7, 209 S
Inhalt: This article explores the opportunity that job sharing offers as a way of encouraging more women into senior management roles in the higher education sector. There is a scarcity of female leadership representation in the higher education context, in particular a lack of female leadership pipeline. The article examines the underlying influences that limit the representation of women in leadership roles. To address these contextual limitations the process of job sharing is offered as a possible solution for harnessing the skills and talents of women in leadership positions in higher education and enabling the development of a leadership pipeline. To illustrate how such job sharing could occur the article provides a detailed vignette of a job share between two senior women leaders within a single UK university context and the positive impact this had on the organisation, the individuals and their leadership development. This article seeks to make a contribution by exploring how leadership job sharing can occur and sets out some recommendations for the adoption, negotiation and establishment of job share structures in the future.
Schlagwörter:Frauen in Führungspositionen; Führungsposition; Gleichstellungsmaßnahmen; Großbritannien; Hochschule; job sharing; UK
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Hochschulen, Geschlechterverhältnis
Myriad potential for mentoring : Understanding the process of transformational change through a gender equality intervention
Autor/in:
Leenders, Joke; Bleijenbergh, Inge L.; van den Brink, Marieke C.L.
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), 4 (2019) 2, 139 S
Inhalt: This article contributes to understanding transformational change towards gender equality by examining the transformational change potential of a mentoring programme for women, a type of gender equality intervention both criticized and praised for its ability to bring about change. Drawing upon an empirical case study of a mentoring programme for women academics in a Dutch university, we explore three dimensions of transformational change: organizational members (i) discussing and reflecting upon gendered organizational norms and work practices; (ii) creating new narratives; and (iii) experimenting with new work practices. Our findings indicate five specific conditions that enable transformational change: cross‐mentoring, questioning what is taken for granted, repeating participation and individual stories, facilitating peer support networks and addressing and equipping all participants as change agents. We suggest that these conditions should be taken into account when (re)designing effective organizational gender equality interventions.
Women in Higher Education Management : Agents for Cultural and Structural Change?
Autor/in:
Wroblewski, Angela
Quelle: Soc. Sci. (Social Sciences), 8 (2019) 6, 172 S
Inhalt: This article examines whether and under which conditions a rising participation of women in higher education management contributes to cultural and structural change in science and research. In Austria, the introduction of a statutory quota regulation for university decision-making bodies like the rectorate, the senate, or the university council brought about a rapid and substantial increase in the share of female rectors and vice rectors. However, there are also gender-specific differences among rectorate members: women are significantly younger than men when they take up a rectorate position and switch less frequently from a professorship to such a position. This situation and the gender expertise of the rectors and vice rectors themselves contribute to the potential for change. Explicit gender equality goals and the establishment of gender competence as a qualification criterion for all rectors and vice rectors would be needed to make use of the potential of women in the rectorate to be agents for cultural and structural change.
Quelle: Evaluation and program planning, 77 (2019)
Inhalt: This article analyses the facilitating and hindering factors that have affected the implementation of gender equality interventions in research and innovation in Europe. It applies the evaluation framework developed in the EFFORTI project that recognizes the complexity of evaluating gender equality interventions in R&I, the importance of factoring in context to any sound evaluation as well as the need to distinguish between the design and implementation of interventions in evaluations. It is based on the analysis of 19 empirical case studies carried out throughout Europe and focuses on those structural and procedural factors that have either facilitated or hindered the implementation process of these interventions. Findings include how the governance framework; top-management commitment; bottom-up participation; framing synergies with other initiatives, strategies for tackling resistance; resources; sustainability of actions; gender competence, experience and knowledge and transparency, targets, standards and monitoring; and accessible data and information all contributed to the successful implementation of the interventions.
Schlagwörter:Evaluation; Facilitators; Gleichstellungsmaßnahmen; Gleichstellungspolitik; Implementation; Obstacles; Procedural factors; Structural factors; Strukturwandel; theory of change; Widerstand
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Gleichstellungspolitik
Tackling Violence against Women and Gender-Based Violence : Equality Bodies' Contribution
Autor/in:
Equinet
Quelle: European Network of Equality Bodies; Brussels, 2019. 30 S
Inhalt: Violence against women is a structural and global phenomenon that knows no social, economic or national boundaries. It is a serious violation of human rights, most drastic form of discrimination on the grounds of gender and remains widely unsanctioned. Every day in Europe, women are psychologically, physically and sexually abused in the “safety” of their own homes, stalked, harassed, raped, mutilated, forced by their family to enter into marriage, or sterilised against their will. The revelations of the #MeToo movement across Europe cast a light on the extent of sexual abuse of women and the difficulty for women to speak out
against it1.
The concept of violence against women has been widely recognized since the 1990s in international normative acts concerning human rights. It has been adopted as a legal concept at all levels of the international legal system. The phenomenon is acknowledged in the universal legal system of the United Nations, covering practically all countries of the world, as well as in the regional legal systems of the Council of Europe and the European Union.
Gender-based violence and violence against women are terms that are often used interchangeably as it has been widely acknowledged that most gender-based violence is inflicted on women and girls, by men. However, using the ‘gender-based’ aspect is important as it highlights the fact that many forms of violence against women are not examples of random victimization but are rooted in power inequalities between women and men and
strategies to perpetuate or entrench that inequality2.
Gender-based violence is violence directed against a person because of their gender or one that disproportionally affects persons of a particular gender. The majority of victims are women and girls, although men and transgender people also experience violence, especially where they transgress stereotypical gender norms 3.
Schlagwörter:Antidiskriminierung; Belästigung; gender-based violence; Gewalt gegen Frauen; good practice; harassment
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Sexuelle Belästigung und Gewalt
Dokumenttyp:Graue Literatur, Bericht
‘If you put pressure on yourself to produce then that's your responsibility’ : Mothers’ experiences of maternity leave and flexible work in the neoliberal university
Quelle: Gender Work Organ (Gender, Work & Organization), 26 (2019) 6, S 772–788
Inhalt: Women remain underrepresented in senior positions within universities and report barriers to career progression. Drawing on the concepts of Foucault and Bourdieu, with an emphasis on technologies of the self, this article aims to understand mothers’ academic career experiences. Interviews were conducted with 35 non‐STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) academics in Scotland and Australia, to reveal the gender dimensions of parents’ academic careers, in neoliberal university contexts. The data suggest that there are tensions between organizational policies, such as maternity leave and flexible work, and the contemporary demands of academic labour. New managerial discourses which individualize and make use of moral systems are particularly effectual in driving women to take up marketized research activity and compromise leave entitlements.
Quelle: CJPE (Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation), 33 (2019)
Inhalt: Gender equality has made its way to the forefront of discussions across various sectors in the Canadian context. Yet the intentional inclusion of gender and other intersectional identity dimensions is just beginning to permeate the realities of performance measurement and evaluation practitioners, particularly those using program theory. There is a vast body of knowledge regarding the measurement of women’s empowerment, gradually declining availability of resources targeting the inclusion of gender in theory, and even less guidance on integrating gender in theory in the context of gendered programming. Similarly, coordinated efforts from multiple sectors have resulted in an abundance of theory regarding girls and women’s representation, recruitment, retention, and promotion within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) but less guidance on the measurement and evaluation in these areas. This article shares recent efforts to bridge the divide using theory knitting to develop a performance measurement framework addressing the decreasing representation of girls and women across the STEM “leaky pipeline” using the COM-B theory of change model.
Schlagwörter:gender equality; Geschlechterverhältnis; Gleichstellungsmaßnahmen; Gleichstellungspolitik; Ingenieurwissenschaft; MINT; Programmevaluation; Programmtheorie; STEM; theory of change
CEWS Kategorie:Europa und Internationales, Gleichstellungspolitik, Naturwissenschaft und Technik