“The ethos expected from a management professor forces us to act straight”: Heterosexist harassment against gay professors in Brazil
Autor/in:
Freitas Oleto, Alice de; Palhares, José Vitor
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: This study aims to analyze how gay Brazilian professors experience heterosexist harassment and the implications of this type of violence for the interpersonal relationships of these professors and for the teaching-learning process in the academic environment. To this end, we conducted an exploratory study with a qualitative approach. The data were collected through an online survey using the Google Forms platform based on cases reported by 13 gay Brazilian professors working in a technological or higher education institution at the time of the harassment. Our data suggest that most respondents suffered heterosexist harassment in the workplace with violence being more explicit when the professor is more effeminate. Furthermore, we found that the naturalization of games considered harmless and homophobic jokes in the workplace can compromise the fight against heterosexist harassment in organizations. As a result, respondents report behavioral and workplace changes to fit into social norms and to be socially accepted, physical and psychological problems, professional and interpersonal relationships, adversely affecting educational experiences.
“Flying under the radar”: Postfeminism and teaching in academic science
Autor/in:
Doerr, Katherine
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: Neoliberal academia is marked by vertical and horizontal gender segregation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a particularly concerning case. Women with PhDs are underrepresented, and when they do participate, they are more likely than men to be in teaching-intensive roles. Beyond equality concerns, this is problematic because when women are interpreters rather than producers of disciplinary knowledge, the STEM enterprise remains gender-biased. Using data from a 2-year ethnography with physical science faculty in teaching-intensive roles, this paper argues that gender inequity is reproduced through postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. Participants who are mothers say they are flying under the radar at work. They self-surveille as they engage in both paid labor as university educators and unpaid carework at home. Importantly, when participants challenge hegemonic gender norms, they attract the radar's attention and are sanctioned. This study contributes to a growing understanding of how and why women are marginalized in STEM careers. Women with science PhDs fulfill their university's teaching mission with minimal support for the implied compensation of work-life balance, leaving the institutional structures which privilege men's participation in STEM research intact.
COVID-19 and the Gender Gap in University Student Performance
Autor/in:
Bratti, Massimiliano; Lippo, Enrico
Quelle: IZA Discussion Paper, (2022)
Inhalt: The gendered impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been observed in many domains, such as labor market outcomes and mental health. One sector that was particularly disrupted by the pandemic was education, owing to the need to close educational institutions and move all learning activities online. In this paper, we investigate the gender gap in university student performance, focusing on a large public university located in one of the European regions most affected by the first pandemic wave (Lombardy, in Northern Italy). Despite concerns that the pandemic might have had a heavier toll on the educational performance of female students, our empirical analysis shows that the gender gap in student progression (number of credits earned) was not affected by the pandemic and that in some college majors (social sciences and humanities) women even improved their GPA relative to men
Schlagwörter:Benotung; gender gap; Leistungsdifferenzen; Leistungsfähigkeit; public universities and colleges; student; Student*in; Universität
CEWS Kategorie:Hochschulen, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Studium und Studierende, Geschlechterverhältnis
Gender and innovation through an intersectional lens: Re‐imagining academic entrepreneurship in the United States
Autor/in:
Mickey, Ethel L.; Smith‐Doerr, Laurel
Quelle: Sociology Compass, 16 (2022) 3
Inhalt: How to study inequality in innovation? Often, the focus has been gender gaps in patenting. Yet much is missing from our understanding of gendered inequality in innovation with this focus. This review discusses how gender and innovation are intertwined in durable academic inequalities and have implications for who is served by innovation. It summarizes research on gender and race gaps in academic entrepreneurship (including patenting), reasons for those longstanding inequities, and concludes with discussing why innovation gaps matter, including the need to think critically about academic commercialization. And while literature exists on gender gaps in academic entrepreneurship and race gaps in patenting, intersectional analyses of innovation are missing. Black feminist theorists have taught us that gender and race are overlapping and inseparable systems of oppression. We cannot accurately understand inequality in innovation without intersectionality, so this is a serious gap in current research. Intersectional research on gender and innovation is needed across epistemic approaches and methods. From understanding discrimination in academic entrepreneurship to bringing together critical analyses of racial capitalism and academic capitalism, there is much work to do.
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.
Sexism in the silences at Australian Universities: Parental leave in name, but not in practice
Autor/in:
Duffy, Sarah; O’Shea, Michelle; Bowyer, Dorothea; van Esch, Patrick
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: Unequal distribution of child rearing and domestic responsibilities between parents contributes to gender inequity, a wicked problem in Australia. Inequitable parental leave policies at Australian public Universities place the burden of care squarely on the mother, diminishing or absenting the father. We examine how the gendered nature of the existing policies are constructed in ways that create inequities and discourage their uptake. A post-structural feminist lens provides us with a theoretical vantage point from which this wicked problem can be problematized. We present three recommendations for enabling more equitable outcomes for parents. The first is to eradicate the punitive approach and support flexibility; second, the policies must be parental leave in name, provision and practice; and finally we recommend a minimum parental leave standard for Australian universities nationally. These findings have policy-level significance for redressing parental leave inequity within the Australian university context. The paper concludes with theoretical contributions, practical implications, and suggestions for future research.
A typology of sexism in contemporary business schools: Belligerent, benevolent, ambivalent, and oblivious sexism
Autor/in:
Yarrow, Emily; Davies, Julie
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: The legitimacy of business schools is based on rankings, revenues, branding, and opportunities to support staff and students “to make a difference in the world”. Yet sexism in business schools is endemic. Drawing on Acker's inequality regimes framework and a thematic analysis of reports in Poets&Quants, EFMD's Global Focus and AACSB International's BizEd/AACSB Insights over a decade, this study explores how business schools are dealing (or not) with sexism. We propose a typology of four categories of sexism in business schools: belligerent, benevolent, ambivalent, and oblivious sexism. Our findings contribute to understandings of institutional theory and the institutional development of business schools as important sites of (sexist and gendered) knowledge production and dissemination and entrenched inequalities. We posit that media constructions of sexism may better inform individual decisions, organizational development, and governance about the imperative to eliminate sexist behaviors and discrimination. We argue that business schools need to gain substantive legitimacy as effective role models by reforming themselves. They must actively tackle institutional and cultural sexism from within. Implications for practice include the effective inclusion of mandatory sexism reporting in international business school accreditation standards and rankings criteria as well as requirements for research funding.
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
“That's bang out of order, mate!” : Gendered and racialized micro‐practices of disadvantage and privilege in UK business schools
Autor/in:
Śliwa, Martyna; Gordon, Lisi; Mason, Katy; Beech, Nic
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: The existence of gendered and racialized inequalities in academia has been well documented. To date, research has primarily addressed the intersectional disadvantages faced by members of minority groups with much less attention paid to the privileges experienced by dominant group members. This paper draws on 21 interviews and 36 audio-diary entries completed by a diverse group of senior higher education leaders who have successfully navigated the career ladder in UK business schools. By juxtaposing minority with dominant group members' narratives, the study advances intersectionality research, offering a contextualized analysis of the micro-practices of both disadvantage and privilege in academia. Through a focus on how micro-practices perform differently for members of different groups, it foregrounds “obvious” as well as nuanced differences that contribute to the accumulation of disadvantage and privilege throughout an individual's career and emphasizes simultaneity as crucial to understanding the workings of gendered and racialized disadvantage and privilege.
Athena SWAN: “Institutional peacocking” in the neoliberal university
Autor/in:
Yarrow, Emily; Johnston, Karen
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2022)
Inhalt: This paper contributes to understandings of how Athena SWAN (AS) is shaping contemporary equality work in the context of the neoliberal university, and whether it is contributing to performative ways of doing equality work. We center our research on the exploration of the question of how the gender-agenda is being captured by the neoliberal agenda, drawing on 35 in-depth qualitative interviews with AS champions across the UK and Republic of Ireland. The core aim of the study is to explore how AS has been co-opted and mobilized as a vehicle for contemporary (neoliberal) equality work. We argue that rather than contributing to transformational change, AS serves as an effective tool for institutional reputation gains and (extended) virtue signaling, conceptualized and coined here as “institutional peacocking.” This in turn, functions and is implemented in diverse institutional settings, with primarily institutional benefit, at the cost of AS champions who carry out gender equality work. We contribute empirically and conceptually to theorizations and current understandings of gender equality work in higher education, especially through AS champions' experience and the institutional benefits that present opportunity costs for some individuals, potentially serving to further entrench stereotyped perceptions of who should be doing equality work in universities, and critically, how institutions benefit.