Helen Peterson

• Professor
• Professor at Örebro University

Sweden is among the countries with the highest per cent of women university Vice Chancellors in Europe. In She Figures 2012 the average proportion of female Vice Chancellors in the 27 European Union countries is estimated to be 10 per cent. In Sweden the number is much higher: 43 per cent. Swedish higher education management has witnessed a demogra...

Purpose – The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to explore if and how management ideals are gendered within the context of Swedish higher education management and second, to investigate if and how the gendered character of these ideals has been challenged by new managerialism. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on qualitative semi-...

This article explores voluntarily childless women’s experiences and understandings of human-animal interactions and their attitudes towards companion animals. It draws on interviews with 15 Swedish women who expressed a lack of “maternal” feelings and therefore had remained voluntarily childless, or childfree (used here as two interchangeable conce...

This article explores a national women-only leadership development program in Swedish higher education, the so-called IDAS program (an acronym for Identity, Development, Advancement, Support). IDAS encouraged and supported women academics to pursue leadership/administrative careers in higher education and was a unique intervention, aiming to increa...

This article reports on reflection-based monitoring tools developed and used in an action research project to improve gender equality in science and research institutions. Several of these tools were developed to facilitate individual and joint reflection from the perspective of the co-researchers involved. The aim of the article is to make the cas...

Previous studies have highlighted how the academic peer review system has been marked by gender bias and nepotism. Panel meetings arranged by research funding organisations (RFOs), where reviewers must explain and account for their assessment and scoring of grant applications, can potentially mitigate and disrupt patterns of inequality. They can ho...

Boken analyserar de lokala förutsättningarna för att arbeta med det politiska uppdraget att jämställdhetsintegrera svenska universitet och högskolor. Uppdraget presenterades första gången 2016 och omfattade perioden 2017–2019 och det är denna period som boken fokuserar på genom att analysera tolkningar av jämställdhet/jämställdhetsintegrering, orga...

This article investigates how Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs) conceptualized and organized the 2016 Swedish government directive to gender mainstream their operations. The directive provided the general guidelines for the programme Gender Mainstreaming in Academia (GMA), which was to be implemented by HEIs between 2017 and 2019. This a...

This article explores the experiences of micro change agents for gender equality in seven European Research Performing Organizations in seven different countries. The micro change agents were all participants of an international collaborative project consortium, implementing gender equality plans (GEPs), and funded by the European Commission during...

This chapter explores institutionalised resistance to gender equality initiatives reported by 15 gender equality change agents (GECAs) in Swedish and Portuguese Higher Education (HE). Drawing on qualitative interviews with the GECAs, the study highlights similarities within the two national HE contexts, but also contextual nuances and variations. F...

This paper focuses on monitoring as a key component of successful structural change projects. Project monitoring is usually defined as an ongoing collection of project data in order to assess whether a project is going in the right direction and follows the pace and stages set beforehand. This paper elaborates on the how, what and when of successfu...

Gender Mainstreaming in Swedish Higher Education: the political directive reflected in institutional plans. The Swedish government’s latest reform of gender inequality in higher education set out to strengthen gender mainstreaming. Following this reform, the Swedish higher education institutions established gender mainstreaming plans for 2017-2019...

In this paper we elaborate on the most significant changes reported on at the end of a four-year long European gender equality change project. During these four years more than 20 change agents actively worked to implement gender equality action plans in seven different research institutions. During the final months of the project, monitoring data...

Applying a critical gendered lens, this article examines academic leadership ideals. It draws on a content analysis of job advertisements for Vice-Chancellors at Swedish higher education institutions from 1990 until 2018. The aim of the article is to investigate to what extent masculine or feminine wordings have been used to describe the ideal Vice...

This Monitoring Handbook offers guidelines and recommendations concerning monitoring which were developed and applied during four years of monitoring activities in the GenderTime project. It also includes detailed information about the specific monitoring tools that were designed and implemented within the GenderTime project. As a Handbook, it thus...

In this chapter, Joan Acker’s concept of gendered work ideals is used to understand the cultural clashes in transnational collaboration between Swedish and Indian firms. Interviews in two firms show that Indian employees collaborating with Sweden meet with conflicting ideals which they find difficult to realize, because of the differences between t...

This chapter reports on a case study of a Swedish University, appointed the most gender equal university in Sweden. With the highest percentage of women professors in Swedish academia (35%) and a gender balance in senior academic management positions, it has received recognition for its achievements when it comes to quantitative gender equality. Dr...

On a coutume d’expliquer la decision que prennent certaines femmes de ne pas avoir d’enfant par les inegalites existantes entre les hommes et les femmes dans le partage des tâches domestiques et parentales, et par des considerations liees a la carriere professionnelle des femmes. Cet article cherche a comprendre si la perception des inegalites de g...

The Monitoring Handbook outlines the guidelines and recommendations concerning monitoring which were developed and applied during 4 years in the GenderTime project. It also includes detailed information about the specific monitoring tools that were designed and implemented within the GenderTime project. By providing this type of practical informati...

This is he first edited book on gender issues in transnational business cooperation concerning knowledge work. This area has so far been researched mainly by organizational theorists, with their background in business studies, finance, communication or sociology, and gender has seldom been taken into account in these studies. This book shows how fr...

This article draws on interviews with Swedish voluntarily childless women and men in order to discuss their understandings of living in a so-called “child-friendly” welfare society where social policies subsidize families with children. Previous research from Anglo-Saxon countries implies that the social, political and economical interests of the v...

Sweden is among the countries with the highest per cent of women university Vice Chancellors in Europe. In She Figures 2012 the average proportion of female Vice Chancellors in the 27 European Union countries is estimated to be 10 per cent. In Sweden the number is much higher: 43 per cent. Swedish higher education management has witnessed a demogra...

This article investigates the experiences of employees and managers in Swedish companies that offshore IT services to India, focusing on how implementation of offshoring is changing the work organization and working conditions for software developers onsite. Our analysis highlights the fact that the working conditions have been significantly redesi...

This article highlights the multifaceted character of the Swedish higher education sector and investigates senior academic management positions from a gender perspective using theories about an academic prestige economy and academic capitalism. The focus is on an aspect often overseen in research on Swedish academia: the distinction between univers...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight how women managers in Swedish higher education (HE) both support and resist policies about equal representation, and to discuss which factors influenced if, and how, these managers took on the role as change agents for gender equality. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on qualitative...

PurposeThe intent of this chapter is to discuss women managers as change agents in higher education. It focuses women’s increased access to senior academic management positions in Swedish higher education and investigates to what extent this increase is accompanied by changes to a masculine management norm. Methodology/approachThe chapter draws on...

Sweden has the highest percentage of female university Vice Chancellors in Europe. Some of the factors that have promoted women's representation in senior management in Swedish academia are: political pressure in the form of goals and policies, quantitative target agreements concerning women's representation, top level commitment to gender equality...

This article reports from the first studies on voluntary childlessness in Sweden and addresses a so far neglected issue – the embodied experiences of childfree women. These childfree women reject and resist pronatalist understandings that conflate being a woman with being a mother. However, instead of explaining their childlessness by external fact...

Even if higher education institutions (HEIs) have been subject to important changes in the last few decades, it is undeniable that today, as in the emergence of the modern higher education (HE) systems enhanced by the Humboldtian revolution, producing and disseminating knowledge is one of their main missions (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff 2000; Olssen &...

This article applies a media frame analysis in order to highlight representations of voluntary childlessness in Swedish newspapers. The analysis identifies how childfree couples are framed as carefree, fulfilled and content. Childfree women on the other hand are framed as struggling with problems, stereotypes and doubts. Childfree men are absent an...

GEXcel Work in Progress Report Volume X Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 11–12: Gender Paradoxes in Changing Academic and Scientific Organisation(s) Centre of Gendering Excellence – GEXcel Towards a European Centre of Excellence in Transnational and Transdisciplinary Studies of @BULLET Changing Gender Relations

Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, this article highlights the increasing proportion of women in senior academic management positions in Swedish higher education between 1990 and 2010. The article uncovers some of the factors that account for women's successful entrance into these positions. According to 22 interviewed female senior acad...

Childfree: a stigmatized positionInternational research has addressed the subject but in Sweden voluntary childlessness has until now been overlooked. This article draws on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 21 Swedish childfree women. The interviews focused their decision not to have children and attitudes they faced due to their rejecti...

It is a commonly held belief among sociologists that the Western world, at least, develops in the direction of increasing individualisation. According to this individualisation thesis, processes of individualisation have profound effects on gender relations and family life, e.g. they supposedly undermine gender inequality and traditional gender arr...

”Barnen är framtiden!” Svensk politik strävar efter ett ”barnvänligt samhälle” där yrkesliv och föräldraskap ska kunna kombineras. Hur upplevs detta av den som väljer att vara barnfri? Om barn ses som ett bidrag till framtidens nation vad tillför då barnfria samhället?

International research has addressed the subject but in Sweden voluntary childlessness has until now been overlooked. This article draws on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 21 Swedish childfree women. The interviews focused their decision not to have children and attitudes they faced due to their rejection of motherhood. They all had en...

Barn eller inte barn? Det är en fråga som de flesta någon gång tar ställning till. I de nordiska länderna bestämmer sig många för att skaffa barn. Några vill ha barn, men blir inte gravida. Andra bestämmer sig för att inte skaffa barn - de väljer frivillig barnlöshet. Det är om de barnfria som denna antologi handlar. Frivillig barnlöshet handlar o...

This article reports on the results from the two first studies on voluntary childlessness in Sweden and draws on interviews with 30 childfree women and 6 men. The article explores how they managed to create a legitimate childfree position in a soci-ety permeated by pronatalistic norms proclaiming parenthood to be self-evident in an adult normal lif...

Studies show that in order to become a successful, respected and trusted,technical expert it is essential to display technical self-confidence, competitiveness and ambition. However, women in technical work settings often find it difficult to adjust to this work ideal. Rather than promoting themselves they choose to understate their technical compe...

The analysis in this article draws on interviews with managers and employees in the Swedish IT consultant sector, a sector characterized by widespread redundancies in the first three years of the 21st century. The article suggests that the interviewees' distinction between and assessment of workers of value and workers without value to justify and...

This thesis deals with work environments defined as post-bureaucratic, and which are characterised by individualisation and a decrease in the employer's formal control. The study shows how the employees in such work contexts are both empowered and disciplined. The main questions concern to what extent power shifts in relations between the employer...

New ways of organising work and family - new ways of constructing gender in organizations. How is the individualization in the post-modern society influencing the gender construction at work and in the family? In this paper I discuss the individualization that characterize the "post-modern" society from a critical feminist standpoint. In my researc...