No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Introduction to the Special Issue. Gender and Science :Old Challenges, New Approaches
Abstract
This special issue on gender and science, brings together 10 articles that present some of the results of the study ‘Meta-analysis of gender and science research’ and its final conference ‘Beyond the leaky pipeline: Challenges for research on gender and science’, held in Brussels in October 2010. The ‘meta-analysis’ study was a project of the 7th RTD Framework Programme of the European Union, coordinated by Maria Caprile at the CIREM Foundation. Its main objective was to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the last thirty years of European research on horizontal and vertical gender segregation in science with a view to steering policy-making and to defining future research priorities in this field. For the purposes of the study, ‘science’ was understood in its broadest meaning, including social sciences and humanities as well as research and technological development. The study covered all research on gender and science produced between 1980 and 2008, in all European languages, in 33 countries: the 27 EU Member States as well as 6 Associated Countries to the 7th Framework Programme (Croatia, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey). A major output of the study was the creation of the Gender and Science Database (GSD), a unique online resource containing 4,500 European academic publications scanning three decades. This introductory article summarises the main conclusions of our research project and presents the 10 articles comprised in this special issue. In addition to our synthesis report (Caprile et al. 2011), further details about the study and the conference can be found on the website of the study, which gives access to the GSD, all the reports produced in the framework of the study and the proceedings of the final conference (www.genderandscience.org). It also acknowledges all the experts who contributed to this research project, as national experts, members of the coordination team, of the advisory groups, keynote speakers and participants at the conference. We wish to express our deepest gratitude to all of them.
... The factors explaining women's representation in higher education (HE) senior management and leadership positions have been described extensively (Bagilhole and White 2011;Bolton and Muzio 2008;Morley 2014). To understand the tension between progress and resistance, this needs to be looked at in the context of reform taking place within Europeanisation and globalisation processes (Carvalho and Machado 2011) and new public management (NPM) dynamics (Caprile et al. 2011)which have crystallised around the neoliberal prescriptions in which the Spanish academic world is currently immersedtogether with mercantilisation (Wilson et al. 2010) and the so-called academic capitalism (Ferree and Zippel 2015). However, in doing so, one cannot ignore the fact that the restructuring of universities has also been contested, and with complex histories and divergent manifestations and interpretations (Caprile and Vallès 2010;Gill 2010;Morley 1995). ...
... These changes have been inspired by NPM 3 and neoliberal principles. They have involved the structural transformation of HE institutions through the introduction of business strategies in the relatively independent and self-governing 'ivory towers' of the traditional collegial system (Caprile et al. 2011). The traditional mission of the university is being overhauled, as knowledge and HE are now seen as economic resources to promote business goals as well as social and economic development. ...
The reorganisation of higher education according to the marketplace logic – and framed within the process of Europeanisation and globalisation – has run parallel to a significant rise in the number of women in senior management positions at Spanish universities. This would seem to be a step to more gender equality. However, the analysis of the situation used thus far, based on conventional indicators, may be harbouring a not-so-egalitarian reality. Our approach studies the gender distribution of vice-rectors according to assigned functions in all forty-eight Spanish public universities offering both graduate and postgraduate studies. It does so by creating a typology to exemplify gendered divisions of labour within those positions. The results confirm an uneven gender distribution: women, although mostly in charge of caregiving and housekeeping functions, are underrepresented across the board in areas where strategic power resides and the future of university is decided and where, eventually, gender norms could be changed.
... Estado de arte: epistemología feminista en la investigación demostrado por sí solas insuficientes para producir un cambio [Caprile et al ., 2011], en parte porque se encuentran con múltiples resistencias [Mergaert y Lombardo, 2014], pero quizás, y sobre todo, porque sin un cambio de mentalidad en las relaciones de género es imposible incorporar la perspectiva de género en las investigaciones [Biglia y Velasco, 2012]. ...
El sector de la construcción es uno de los mayores detonantes de la economía
de los países desarrollados y subdesarrollados, sin embargo, no es una actividad
que se vea encaminada a beneficiar el empleo equitativo entre hombres y
mujeres, dado que se tiene la idea de que es necesario utilizar fuerza física en
la mayoría de las labores realizadas en la construcción, por lo que parecería
imposible que una mujer las pudiera ejercer; sin embargo, existen mujeres
profesionales de la construcción que tienen las capacidades físicas para desempeñar
actividades que anteriormente parecían imposibles para este género.
Así, en la actualidad ellas desempeñan el papel de mano de obra del
sector de la construcción de forma directa ocupando cargos tales como:
director responsable de obra (dro), cabos de oficios (mejor conocidos como
maistros de obra), supervisoras, albañiles y peones, esto sin mencionar los
oficios especializados a los que también se tiene acceso. Es por ello que esta
investigación se centra en el análisis de la participación de la mujer en la
construcción, específicamente de aquellas que se dedican a la contratación,
ejecución y puesta en marcha de la obra pública en México. Se toma como
base la literatura encontrada en bases de datos como Scopus y Elsevier para el soporte del estado del arte, así como la entrevista de expertos en el tema,
siendo estos las personas que se encargan de llevar a cabo los procesos de
contratación y construcción dentro de la obra pública en México.
Como parte del análisis se toma en cuenta aquellos perfiles que orienten
el empleo de la mujer dentro del sector de la construcción, tomando
en cuenta actividades que se consideraban no aptas para ejercerse por el
género femenino. Para ello se consultó a trabajadores y empleadores del
sector de la construcción.
... Additionally, educated workers are seen as key to economic growth in many countries (Cyranoski et al. 2011). However, extensive international research indicates challenges to gender equality among doctorate holders in research and innovation, which need to be studied further (Bergman & Rustad 2013;Caprile et al. 2011;Heijstra et al. 2017;Meulders et al. 2010). ...
The percentage of female doctorate holders has steadily increased in the Western world. Despite this trend, there is a scarcity of studies addressing gender disparities among doctorate holders, within and outside academia. We analyze the earnings of Icelandic doctorate holders either in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or social sciences and humanities (SSH) and are employed within and outside academia. We contend that achieving gender-wage equality is crucial for doctorate holders, given that education worldwide is considered a means to empower women and a significant factor in reducing gender inequality and narrowing the pay gap. Our findings reveal a continuous gender gap in total earnings between the fifth and tenth career years regardless of the field of study or the employment being within or outside aca-demia. Thus, our findings suggest that a Ph.D. does not improve women's earning power enough to close the gender pay gap. KEYWORDS Doctorate holders / gender / (in)equality / longitudinal data / register analysis / wage gap
... Measures to increase GE in universities have been criticized for not being based on gender theories (Heikkilä & Häyrén Weinestål, 2009) or for being based on liberal feminist approaches focused on individual women and ignoring gendered academic structures (Fältholm et al., 2010). Researchers have conducted a number of international studies and reports to investigate policy measures that universities apply to remedy women's underrepresentation (Caprile et al., 2011;Husu, 2015;Nielsen, 2017;Timmers et al., 2010). However, despite a few reports on GE activities at Swedish universities (Ministry of Education, 1994;Heikkilä & Häyrén-Weinestål, 2009;Swedish Agency of Higher Education, 2000, 2003, there is still a lack of comprehensive studies designed to draw general conclusions regarding the type of activities performed at the university level. ...
Gender inequalities persist among Swedish academic staff, and gender balance is especially skewed toward men in the most prestigious academic career positions, such as professorships. In this article, the measures used in Swedish universities to promote gender equality among academic staff are investigated and related to theories of gender. The study is based on interview survey data on gender and diversity policies from 14 Swedish universities with an actor–structure categorization of gender equality (GE) measures used in Sweden universities since 1990. This first comprehensive study of GE policy among Swedish universities provides unique data on what policies universities have in place and rejects the notion that individual measures are predominantly used to fight gender inequality. Universities mostly use structural measures to ‘fix’ the organization, but from this approach follows that those measures are often gender neutral and soft, indicating a strong belief in gender-neutral principles, and they might limit the effect of action.
... The theoretical approach employed in this study facilitates a sociological exposition and understanding of the complex situation of Ph.D. returnees' experience of entry into the DAJM. Studies have revealed that Chinese overseas degree holders usually have higher expectations concerning their status in domestic labor markets (Hao et al., 2016) and demonstrate genderrelated bias in academic job markets from the employers' perspectives in relation to screening and promotion criteria (Caprile et al., 2011;Silander et al., 2021). The data in this study revealed how expectational pressures from family and friends in the microsystem and the socially constructed gendered identity in the mesosystem generated a Ph.D. returnee's diasporic emotion and identity conflict. ...
In this study, Chinese female Ph.D. returnees’ diasporic experience when entering into the domestic academic job market (DAJM) was examined from an ecological environment perspective. This was realized through an autoethnographic narrative of the author’s lived experience of entering the DAJM during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a recollection of the narrative recorded through E-diaries, emails, and visual media, specifically WeChat, from April 2020 to May 2021, the findings revealed that such a diasporic experience comprised diasporic emotion because of expectational pressures in the microsystem, diasporic identity conflict that originated from gender stereotypes in the mesosystem, self-reflexive diasporic consciousness of both disadvantages and advantages related to Guanxi (social networks) in the exosystem, the diasporic feeling of being exiled in the DAJM given the academic culture in relation to degree origin bias and prioritizing publications in the macrosystem, and the self-constructed diasporic mindset that experienced uncertainties and anxieties associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in the chronosystem. This study facilitated a sociological exposition and understanding of the complex situation of Ph.D. returnees’ experience of entering the DAJM. It calls for a shifting of blaming the victims risk in relation to hard indicators regarding Ph.D. returnees’ competitiveness and employability in the DAJM. This has implications for both academic and recruiting practices in China. Furthermore, this study offers future overseas doctoral students and Ph.D. returnees a more practical sense of the potential mobility frictions embedded in transnational education mobility in relation to their job-seeking experience in homelands.
... A significant body of research on managerial and academic career-making has drawn attention to the reconciliation between career-making and family life (Caprile et al., 2011;Halrynjo & Lyng, 2009;Heijstra et al., 2013;Nakhaie, 2009; and the role of the spouse and the family in career development (Heikkinen et al., 2014;Mäkelä & Suutari, 2011;Ocampo et al., 2018;Schneer & Reitman, 2002). ...
At the international level, Iceland is faring well on gender assessments concerning economic status, political position, education, and health. However, these rankings fail to assess what is happening within the private sphere regarding gender equality. We argue that research on the interplay between the domestic and public spheres is important because these overlapping fields affect the lives of women and men differently. By focusing on the earnings of doctorate holders in Iceland, we aim to obtain a better understanding of the gendered meaning and implications of found earnings inequalities. Relying on longitudinal population register data, as well as 32 in-depth interviews with doctorate holders, we find that the men earn significantly more than the women. While the quantitative model only explains a small part of the inequality, the qualitative findings indicate that decisions made within the household, referred to as team play, negotiation, and choices, play a defining role in post-doctorate career development. We conclude that, despite the male breadwinner model being outdated in Icelandic society, some of its pillar thoughts still persist beneath the surface, keeping gender inequality within the household in place.
... The reasons for the lack of women at the top of scientific research and in universities are multiple. The EU and other organizations have commissioned large meta-studies of all that has been published about the lack of women in science and technology (Addis 2010, GenSET meta research, Caprile, et. Al, 2011. There is also substantial national level research, as in the case of Belgium. D. Meulders et al examined the position of women in francophone universities , while the Flemish VLIR presents regularly statistics and commentary about the situation of women in universities in Flanders (VLIR 2010) demonstrating a persistent lag in the top r ...
Three of my most talented female graduate students have not ended up in those academic appointments where they were predestined to be at the beginning of their graduate studies: stars of our profession. My daughter, your colleague and a wife of graduate student, who was much smarter than her husband, still he became a star and she is just a lecturer in a small liberal arts college” said very self-reflectively a
legendary senior professor evaluating his long career as a supervisor and promoter. This response was prompted by my question. I used the opportunity of meeting him to discuss one the issues I consider as a great challenge for senior academics: what do you do when you see more academic potential in a graduate student than the graduate herself? How can you stop yourself wanting her to realize her potential when that necessarily means a more difficult life for her? I think I dared to ask this question to him, who is only a couple of years older than my own mother because recently I started to think very critically about mentoring programs. Working as a professor in the more than twenty years I faced several times the dilemma how to make female graduates more ambitious and to armor them with all necessary skills to fight for their deserved (or at least I consider a deserved place for them) in the present structure of academia. In this article I am
describing how the mentoring programs were discovered as one of the remedies for the “leaky pipeline” for women in academia and how I see structural problems with these programs but still a possible solution to avoid disappointment of the senior academics looking back at the end of their academic career on wasted female scientific talents under their supervision.
... This renegotiation also exists at a more institutional level, which can be observed in the way gender inequality is no longer accepted in its overt forms. In this regard, national courts across the world as well the European Union (EU) court have worked toward eliminating it at the institutional level, but nevertheless, the covert forms of discrimination continue to prevail (Caprile et al., 2011). Covert forms have, in a way, been "negotiated" as gender-neutral conceptions rooted in the idea of the power of individual agency as well as the notion that equality has more or less been reached (Aiston, 2011). ...
This article investigates how doctorate holders in Iceland make sense of time and utilize their own time management as an instrument in their career development and whether gender is a defining factor in this context. The project is based on 32 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participants holding 5- to 20-year-old doctorate degrees in Iceland. These interviews were then analyzed using a phenomenological approach. The results indicate that the men generally felt a higher level of agency regarding their work–life balance and time management than did the women, who more often expressed difficulties finding a proper balance and expressed being more stressed about the often fragmented time they had to combine their career and family obligations successfully. The study provides a picture of how societal time norms among highly educated people are very gendered and how time is still inevitably linked to power. The contribution of this study to prior studies is that, even when comparing highly educated people among whom it is more likely to find a higher level of egalitarian attitudes, in a country where gender equality is assumed to be at a higher level than in many other countries, women still seem to experience time differently from men in terms of personal autonomy.
... Además, el hecho de que se subvencionen más investigaciones sobre temas generizados no ha redundado en una mayor inclusión de la perspectiva de género en la investigación y «los [...] Programas Marco [...] han fallado en el intento de implicar, beneficiar y promover a las mujeres en la misma medida que los hombres» (European Gender Summit, 2011). Así, las políticas que apuestan por la incorporación de la perspectiva de género en los contenidos de la investigación científica se han demostrado por sí solas insuficientes para producir un cambio (Caprile et al., 2011), en parte porque se encuentran con múltiples resistencias (Mergaert y Lombardo, 2014), pero quizás, y sobre todo, porque sin un cambio de mentalidad y de forma de vivir las relaciones de género es imposible incorporar la perspectiva de género en las investigaciones (Biglia y Velasco, 2012). Barbara Biglia y Núria Vergés-Bosch. ...
La promoció de la igualtat de gènere en la investigació i la innovació és un dels compromisos de la Comissió Europea que insta la integració explícita de la perspectiva de gènere en els projectes Horizon2020. No obstant això aquesta recomanació freqüentment s'entén i s'aplica de manera insuficient. Des del SIMReF, fa anys que estem treballant per evidenciar la necessitat i els avantatges d'incorporar una visió de gènere i feminista en tot el procés de recerca. A més, establim contínuament xarxes amb grups que tenen línies de metodologia i de gènere com Copolis. Convidades per la unitat de gènere de la Universitat de Barcelona a dissenyar i impartir el taller Per què i com dur a terme recerca en perspectiva de gènere? Ens hem vist en la necessitat de crear un nou material en forma de preguntes per començar a reflexionar sobre les nostres investigacions. En aquest breu article, després d'una introducció sobre les propostes de l'epistemologia i les necessitats, així com els avantatges de la inclusió de la perspectiva de gènere i feminista en la investigació, presentem les recomanacions legals sobre això i, finalment, compartim unes preguntes d'autoavaluació de la investigació elaborades per al curs.
Gender inequality manifests itself in academia as in every field. Although the number of female academics has increased quantitatively compared to previous years, there is not enough research on the state of gender inequality today. This study, which aims to reveal how the concept of gender equality (GE) is experienced by academics working in faculties of education in Türkiye, is designed as Q methodology. The participants of this study were selected using maximum variation and snowball sampling, and they were consisted of fifteen academicians working in faculties of education. In addition, it was aimed to ensure diversity by paying attention to the fact that some of the participants were working in public universities and some in foundation universities. The data were obtained because of the participants' evaluation of the items in the Q set. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted to determine the participants' views on extreme values. The PQMethod 2.35 statistical program was used to analyze the data in the Q items, and content analysis was used for the data obtained from semi-structured interviews. It was observed that the views of the participants were grouped under two factors; socioeconomic and cultural factors that form the basis of gender inequality (GI) in Türkiye were emphasized, and in this context, social change and legal regulations were suggested as the antidote to GI.
The objective of this article 2 is to reflect on the potential for creating subversive scientific discourses through the application of feminist research methodology and its posterior diffraction. We start out from our collective experiences within the framework of SIMReF, which includes our participation in various research projects, training and exchange. Based on these experiences, we reflect on distinct possibilities and limitations for the development of a feminist research agenda in the academic and institutional environment of the Spanish State, which has been reluctant to value and incorporate feminist epistemological and methodological viewpoints. Grounded in an understanding of feminist methodology as a practice that is political, processual and discursive, we conclude by presenting a series of concerns about how these limitations also constitute a condition of possibility for the collective construction of a feminist methodology from 'within' yet also 'against' academic 'normality'.
Este texto es una presentación del monográfico Experiencias de investigación feminista: propuestas y reflexiones metodológicas. En él damos cuenta de las consideraciones y motivaciones principales que nos han llevado a proponerlo, así como de la trayectoria y el proceso de trabajo con metodologías feministas del que formamos parte, el seminario SIMReF. De esta manera, exponemos algunas dificultades que se mantienen para producir conocimiento no androcéntrico en la academia, sostenemos el interés de trabajar sobre métodos con los que transversalizar el análisis de género en distintas áreas disciplinarias, planteamos la oportunidad de elaborar guías o referentes metodológicos para aplicar las epistemologías feministas en nuestras investigaciones y, especialmente, abogamos por la necesidad de dar cuenta de las decisiones prácticas tomadas en los procesos de investigación que realizamos, a fin de hacer visible así la “cocina” de los mismos. Para acabar, describimos con brevedad el contenido presente en el monográfico
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.