Surviving Sexism in Academia


Book Description

This edited collection contends that if women are to enter into leadership positions at equal levels with their male colleagues, then sexism in all its forms must be acknowledged, attended to, and actively addressed. This interdisciplinary collection—Surviving Sexism in Academia: Strategies for Feminist Leadership—is part storytelling, part autoethnography, part action plan. The chapters document and analyze everyday sexism in the academy and offer up strategies for survival, ultimately 'lifting the veil" from the good old boys/business-as-usual culture that continues to pervade academia in both visible and less-visible forms, forms that can stifle even the most ambitious women in their careers.







The Gender-Sensitive University


Book Description

The Gender-Sensitive University explores the prevailing forces that pose obstacles to driving a gender-sensitive university, which include the emergence of far-right movements that seek to subvert advances towards gender equality and managerialism that promotes creeping corporatism. This book demonstrates that awareness of gender equality and gender sensitivity are essential for pulling contemporary academia back from the brink. New forms of leadership are fundamental to reforming our institutions. The concept of a gender-sensitive university requires re-envisioning academia to meet these challenges, as does a different engagement of men and a shift towards fluidity in how gender is formulated and performed. Academia can only be truly gender sensitive if, learning from the past, it can avoid repeating the same mistakes and addressing existing and new biases. The book chapters analyse these challenges and advocate the possibilities to ‘fix it forward’ in all areas. Representing ten EU countries and multiple disciplines, contributors to this volume highlight the evidence of persistent gender inequalities in academia, while advocating a blueprint for addressing them. The book will be of interest to a global readership of students, academics, researchers, practitioners, academic and political leaders and policymakers who share an interest in what it takes to establish gender-sensitive universities. This book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license




Gender Inequalities in Tech-driven Research and Innovation


Book Description

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The Nordic countries are regarded as frontrunners in promoting equality, yet women’s experiences on the ground are in many ways at odds with this rhetoric. Putting the spotlight on the lived experiences of women working in tech-driven research and innovation areas in the Nordic countries, this volume explores why, despite numerous programmes, women continue to constitute a minority in these sectors. Contributors flesh out the differences and similarities across different Nordic countries and explore how the shifts in labour market conditions have impacted on women in research and innovation. This is an invaluable contribution to global debates around the mechanisms that maintain gendered structures in research and innovation, from academia to biotechnology and IT.




Prestige in Academia - A Glance at the Gender Distribution


Book Description

Christian Poulsen examines the matter of prestige in academia. He sets out to disprove the widely accepted notion that universities are based on a pure meritocratic system. The study compounds extensive survey studies of Swedish professors as well as focus group interviews with male and female professors. It was investigated whether female professors are discriminated against in the transferring of merit to prestige. The acquiring of prestige is essential for succeeding at a career in academia. The distribution of prestige between women and men may help explain the low representation of women in full professor positions. The book helps to bridge the gap between various existing explanatory models. The findings were compared with other studies on prestige and status in which Spain served as a reference country.It was found that women were not discriminated against on the basis of the merits they had in relation to prestige. Additionally it was revealed that professors feel the status of the profession has decreased, but on the other hand female professors were more satisfied with the current status of professors. Not surprisingly it was also found that the prestige of Swedish professors is not based alone on merit. Instead relational factors play a role in the assignment of prestige. Christian Poulsen introduces the term 'consecrating moments' to explain the relational nature of assigning prestige. The concept refutes the widely accepted idea that a career in academia is made up of a long and continual flow of good performance. In doing so, it discusses sociology of education, feminist theory of women in academia and the theory developed by Robert K. Merton and his followers.The book is the PhD dissertation of Christian Poulsen, adhered to the Sociology department at the Lund University.




Gendered academia


Book Description

[Italiano]: Negli ultimi decenni, profonde trasformazioni hanno ridisegnato il mondo accademico e l’ambiente della ricerca. Le riforme delle strutture di finanziamento, della valutazione della ricerca e delle procedure di responsabilità stanno ancora ridisegnando le pratiche del lavoro accademico, ridefinendo i programmi di ricerca e determinando effetti rilevanti sui percorsi di carriera scientifica. Nonostante gli sforzi delle politiche europee verso lo sviluppo di una ricerca più responsabile ed inclusiva, i processi che emergono da queste trasformazioni dei contesti accademici stanno producendo nuove disuguaglianze e rafforzando quelle vecchie. Le nuove regole nel reclutamento e nella progressione di carriera dei ricercatori riducono, in alcuni casi, e intensificano, in altri, i divari di genere preesistenti, con un impatto variabile sui ricercatori, a seconda della loro appartenenza a diverse coorti, al genere o a gruppi minoritari, e sulle università, a seconda delle dimensioni e dei contesti regionali. Adottando una prospettiva intersezionale, i contributi di questo volume si concentrano sui processi di gendering nel mondo accademico italiano. Complessivamente, essi riescono a conseguire un duplice risultato: svelare il carattere di genere delle pratiche accademiche e di ricerca e tracciare i percorsi emergenti verso la loro rimodellazione in senso più equo e inclusivo./[English]: • In recent decades, deep transformations have been reshaping academia and the research environment. Reforms in funding structures, research assessment, and accountability procedures are still redesigning the practices in academic work, redefining research schedules, and determining relevant effects on scientific career paths. Despite European policies efforts towards the development of more responsible and inclusive research, the processes emerging from these transformations of academic contexts are producing new inequalities and strengthening old ones. New rules in the recruitment and career progression of researchers reduce, in some instances, and intensify, in others the pre-existing gender gaps, with varying impact on researchers, according to their belonging to different cohorts, gender or minority groups, and on universities, according to size and regional contexts. Adopting an intersectional perspective, contributions in this volume focus on gendering processes in Italian academia. Altogether, they succeed in accomplishing a double result: to unveil the gendered character of academic and research practices and to trace emergent paths towards their reshaping into more equitable and inclusive ones.




Gendered Success in Higher Education


Book Description

This book examines higher education institutions that exemplify gendered success whether in terms of the presence of women in senior positions or attempts to change a gendered organisational culture. It reflects a global perspective, drawing on case studies from eleven countries: Australia, Austria, Ireland, India, New Zealand , Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In each country an organisation has been selected that demonstrate best practice in terms of gendered outcomes or processes. Gendered Success in Higher Education highlights both the importance and the limitations of indicators such as the proportion of women in senior positions. It proposes a new gender agenda, identifies the factors that need to be included in a model of gendered change, and provides important insights into the nature of gendered change globally and how it can be achieved.




Race Critical Public Scholarship


Book Description

Karim Murji is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University, UK. He writes on cultural and policy studies of ethnicity and racism, and criminology. With John Solomos, he is the editor of Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (2005) and Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations. He is an Editor of the journal Sociology. Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, UK. She has written on issues of racism and sexuality, global cultures of racism and the war on terror. Her recent work includes Dangerous Brown Men: Exploiting Sex, Violence and Feminism in the War on Terror (2008) and the edited collection Ethnicities and Values in a Changing World (2009).




Doing Women's Studies


Book Description

With the expansion of the EU in 2004 and its inclusion now of 25 European countries, the movement of workers across the Continent will affect the employment opportunities of women. But as this up-to-date investigation across nine countries shows, there remain significant differences amongst specific European countries regarding women's education and employment opportunities. Taking 1945 as its historical starting point, this sociological study, based on some 900 questionnaire responses and more than 300 in-depth interviews, explores the complex inter-relationship between women's employment, the institutionalization of equal opportunities, and Women's Studies training. This volume is the first to explore what happens to women who have undertaken Women's Studies training in the labour market. Factors influencing their actual employment experiences include employment opportunities for women in each country, their expectations of the labour market and gender norms informing those expectations, how far equal opportunities are actually enforced and the strength of local women's movements. Doing Women's Studies provides unique information about, and insightful analyses of, the changing patterns of women's employment in Europe; equal opportunities in a cross-European perspective; educational migration; gender, race, ethnicity and nationality; and the uneven prevalence and impact of Women's Studies on the lifestyles and everyday practices of those women who have experienced it. The contributors are prominent feminist researchers from nine European countries. Their findings will be of interest to sociologists and gender studies experts working in the areas of gender, employment, equal opportunities and the impact of education on employment.




Obsessed with the Doctoral Theses


Book Description

After having supervised the 30th doctoral thesis at the University of Lapland, Finland, Professor Kaarina Määttä invited the doctoral graduates and their circle of acquaintances to talk about their experiences of the process of writing a doctoral thesis and their opinions on good supervision and support. What did the dissertation process give and demand? Those who can answer this question are the ones who have defended their doctoral theses as well as the candidates’ spouses and professionals in the scientific community. This book introduces explicitly all the phases of graduating as a doctor, reveals the personal matters concerning doctoral theses, and concretizes the pedagogy of supervising doctoral theses. This book is aimed at doctoral students and their professors as well as everyone who is somehow connected to the dissertation process. The aim of this anthology is to support prospective doctoral students and their supervisors in their dissertation processes.