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
Inhalt: In der Pandemie spitzen sich gesellschaftliche Schieflagen und strukturelle Ungerechtigkeiten zu, so auch die berufliche Benachteiligung, die maßgeblich durch die Ungleichverteilung von Care-Arbeit begünstigt wird. Dieses Buch versammelt Erfahrungsberichte von Frauen*, die im Wissenschaftsbetrieb tätig sind und von ihren Erlebnissen während der Pandemie an deutschen Hochschulen berichten, und trägt somit zur Sichtbarkeit tabuisierter und individualisierter Erfahrungen bei. So werden die prekären Bedingungen, die sich während der Pandemie noch verstärkt haben, deutlich gemacht
CEWS Kategorie:Arbeitswelt und Arbeitsmarkt, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Wissenschaft als Beruf
Dokumenttyp:Monographie
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
Student violence towards teaching assistants in UK schools: a case of gender-based violence
Autor/in:
Holt, Amanda; Birchall, Jenny
Quelle: Gender and Education, (2022) , S 1–16
Inhalt: In recent years significant research attention has focused on the problem of student violence in schools and, to a lesser extent, on its relationship to gender-based violence. However, student violence towards teaching assistants has not been studied, despite evidence suggesting that teaching assistants are at significantly more risk from student violence than other staff members. In this article, we draw on data from 16 in-depth interviews with teaching assistants who have experienced student violence. We conclude that violence towards teaching assistants is ignored, in both research and in schools, precisely because of the feminized and under-valued nature of the role, and argue that the continual victimization of teaching assistants diminishes their status further. We highlight its parallels with gender-based violence and argue that applying such a framework is key to recognizing the personal and social harms that this violence causes and the organizational responses that leaves teaching assistants particularly vulnerable.
Der Gender Gap in der Wissenschaft: Ein Nachteil für Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft : Der Schatten des Gender Gap könnte bis ins nächste Jahrhundert reichen
Autor/in:
Lerchenmueller, Marc J.
Quelle: Wie groß ist der Gender Gap? ifo Institut (Hrsg.). 2022, S 24–27
CEWS Kategorie:Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
Dokumenttyp:Sammelwerksbeitrag
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
Quelle: Hochschulmanagement. Zeitschrift für die Leitung, Entwicklung und Selbstverwaltung von Hochschulen und Wissenschaftseinrichtungen, 17 (2022) 3+4, S 85–90
CEWS Kategorie:Wissenschaft als Beruf, Gleichstellungspolitik
Dokumenttyp:Zeitschriftenaufsatz
Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas
Autor/in:
Yang, Yang; Tian, Tanya Y.; Woodruff, Teresa K.; Jones, Benjamin F.; Uzzi, Brian
Quelle: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)), 119 (2022) 36
Inhalt: Science's changing demographics raise new questions about research team diversity and research outcomes. We study mixed-gender research teams, examining 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and establishing several core findings. First, the fraction of publications by mixed-gender teams has grown rapidly, yet mixed-gender teams continue to be underrepresented compared to the expectations of a null model. Second, despite their underrepresentation, the publications of mixed-gender teams are substantially more novel and impactful than the publications of same-gender teams of equivalent size. Third, the greater the gender balance on a team, the better the team scores on these performance measures. Fourth, these patterns generalize across medical subfields. Finally, the novelty and impact advantages seen with mixed-gender teams persist when considering numerous controls and potential related features, including fixed effects for the individual researchers, team structures, and network positioning, suggesting that a team's gender balance is an underrecognized yet powerful correlate of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.