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Implementing gender quotas in academia: a practice lens
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the practices utilized by university actors when implementing gender quotas, and study how these practices affect gender equality in academic decision-making bodies.
Design/methodology/approach
The study applies a practice theory lens to the case study of a Belgian university implementing a gender quota by performing 26 semi-structured interviews with actors, and collecting and analyzing relevant organizational documents.
Findings
This study shows that university actors implement gender quotas through three practices: gender-specific calls, scouting and “playing around”. Identifying this variation in practices helps to understand both actors’ sense-making of compliance with gender quotas and women’s decision-making power in academic bodies.
Research limitations/implications
This study explores how practices interact with the organization’s broader context and its power dynamics. In future studies, adding ethnographic observations would strengthen the practice approach.
Practical implications
The study indicates that implementing gender quotas can foster women’s representation in decision-making, but that a strictly procedural sense-making of gender quotas could also undermine this. Universities should continue implementing gender quotas, further analyze their implementation practices and comprehensively adapt their organizational policies and practices to comply with gender equality goals substantively.
Originality/value
Through a practice theory approach, this paper offers original insight into how actors comply with gender quotas. Uncovering the implementation process in particular, the paper reveals how gender quotas could foster gender equality in academic decision-making.
... 2. Literature review 2.1 Women in academic contexts Authors such as Peterson (2015), Zhenter (2012) and Voorspoels and Bleijenbergh (2019) describe the topic of gender equality in academia as a black box, which has resisted being opened by researchers until the last two decades. This is one reason behind the underrepresentation of women at both junior and senior academic levels (Ahmed, 2007;Zippel, 2003). ...
... Universities, like other complex organizations, are continuously subject to planned and sudden changes (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011;Mousa, 2020a, b). Voorspoels and Bleijenbergh (2019) indicate that even the inclusion of some women faculty in academic committees for assessment and promotion did not contribute to the fair representation of women at professoriate level in Spanish and Italian universities. Currently, women faculty hold one-quarter of the positions in research and development institutions, including universities. ...
Purpose
By studying four public universities in Egypt, the author of this paper aims to identify how male faculty perceive the representation and status of their female colleagues.
Design/methodology/approach
The author employed a qualitative research method via semi-structured interviews with 40 male academics in addition to five focus group discussions with an additional 20 male academics. The author subsequently used thematic analysis to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.
Findings
The findings confirmed that women faculty are not under-represented at professorial levels, but they are denied administrative academic positions, such as rectors and deans in universities. The author also discovered that the social norms shaping both national and organizational culture in Egypt create a cultural bias against women faculty.
Originality/value
To the best of the author's knowledge, this study is the first of its kind in the context of a developing nation to focus on the status and representation of women faculty from the perspective of male colleagues, and subsequently, it is the first to address the higher education sector in one of the leading developing nations in Africa and the Middle East. This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management and higher education, in which empirical studies that address male faculty to identify their perceptions of the status and representation of their female colleagues have been limited so far.
... Many institutions are aware that women are underrepresented in leading positions and thus prefer hiring qualified women to fill a vacancy (e.g., Voorspoels & Bleijenbergh, 2019). ...
... Accordingly, universities have increasingly adopted gender quotas aimed at hiring more women in higher positions (e.g., Voorspoels & Bleijenbergh, 2019). The female scholars also described gender-related disadvantages. ...
Previous studies have investigated the characteristics, influencing factors, and working strategies of highly successful educational psychologists. These studies, however, have focused mainly on male scholars. Consequently, little is known about how successful female educational psychologists go about their work and are so productive. In the present study, we addressed this gap by interviewing five leading female educational psychologists (Patricia Alexander, Carol Dweck, Jacquelynne Eccles, Mareike Kunter, and Tamara van Gog) about factors that have aided their success and about their gender-related experiences. The five female scholars revealed their trademark characteristics, the important people and places that influenced their careers, and their time- and research-management strategies. They also provided unique insights about their experiences and perspectives as women in the field of educational psychology. Findings offer guidance for budding scholars, particularly women.
... The relationship between gender policies and legitimacy has been previously analyzed in the academic literature . Recently, some governments have designed laws to regulate and increase female access and participation in companies' executive boards through the establishment of quota (Voorspoels & Bleijenbergh, 2019). However, the results that have been achieved cast doubt on the usefulness of legislation to promote gender equality in companies (Kyaw et al., 2015;Strøm, 2019). ...
The academic literature has shown some positive effects of gender equality policies’ development on the companies’ performance. However, often companies are not promoting this type of policies. This research analyzes the effect of corporate gender equality policies from an institutional perspective. Using a structural equation model, based on 150 questionnaires, the results have empirically demonstrated that gender equality policies positively influence four dimensions of organizational legitimacy: pragmatic, moral, regulatory, and cognitive. These results extend our knowledge of the effect of corporate social responsibility policies on organizational legitimacy, underlying that gender equality strategies are very useful for improving organizational legitimacy. Furthermore, these results provide new strategic arguments for managers to manage the organizational change and to develop gender equality policies and foster the decrease of the gender gap.
... Other authors highlighted that there is the risk that women elected on a quota basis may tend to be considered "token" or "proxy women" (Dahlerup & Freidenvall, 2010), or have just a symbolic value (Burke, 1994). Moreover, in implementing gender quotas, opportunistic behaviors may emerge: the participantes might utilize practices that undermine the intention of a more equal balance of men and women (Voorspoels & Bleijenbergh, 2019). ...
This study analyses the gender equality policies on the national sports federation (NSFs)
boards in five European countries: Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
It aims to identify the nature of gender relations inside the NSFs and the gender policies
adopted by the governing sports boards related to gender diversity. Therefore, an online
questionnaire, including 41 questions some of which were inspired by the four gender
di-mensions according to the model of Connell (2002) -production relations, power
relations, emotional relations, and symbolic dimensions -were applied to the members of
all sports boards in the NSFs between May 2021 and Mars 2022. The questionnaire
comprised a set of questions about gender policies adopted by the NSF and a final
question about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on gender discrimination. The
descriptive analysis of data showed an increased awareness of gender issues among the
directors of the NSFs. Most of them recognized the relevance of gender and diversity
policies and the need to implement in their organizations. Namely in what concerns to
bring women to the sports boards. However, most of them also considered that women
directors continue to be less influential than their male colleagues in all management
sectors of the board, which continue to be perceived as segregated by gender.
... Thus, they may easily feel under pressure from the dominant group of men, and their performances are often affected by the sexist culture (Kanter, 1977;Simpson, 1997). Moreover, in implementing gender diversity, actors may utilize their practices that undermine the intention of an equal balance of men and women (Voorspoels & Bleijenbergh, 2019). ...
A Crosscountry analysis of the impacts of gender targets on the boards' diversity of the national sports federations Abstract There is an increasing need for policies to support gender diversity in sports organizations. Drawing on the national sports federations in Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Spain, and the United Kingdom, in 2018, this study investigates whether board size, age, and country have played any role in the poor level of achievement of the gender target, set in 2000 by the International Olympic Committee of having by 2005 at least the 20% of women on the sports boards. The study confirms the low level of compliance in these five countries, and by using a binomial logistic regression, we have found that, while the federation's age is not relevant, the board size, or being from Italy, Portugal, Turkey, is negatively related to the likelihood of compliance with the gender target. These three countries have had no experience with gender quotas nor other forms of incentive concerning the gender diversity of the federations' boards in the examined period. The study's originality is conducting a crosscountry analysis of gender diversity on boards of sports federations in five European countries regarding board size and age. Moreover, it offers new insights into the debate about quotas-versus-targets and brings it into the under-researched scenario of sports governance. Specifically, the main contribution relies on questioning the quotas-versus-targets debate and promoting a perspective of complementary use of the two forms of regulatory intervention to increase women's percentage on sports federations' boards.
Purpose
This paper argues that universities can facilitate women graduates' employability by supporting gender equity within their institutions. It presents a rationale and strategy for addressing the gendered nature of career confidence which negatively impacts women graduates' entry into the workplace – a phenomenon that influences women graduates' career and life trajectories, and all industries' capacity to serve women stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors consider existing literature as “words to think with” (Kinsella and Shepherd, 2020), as a feminist methodology to contribute fresh ideas into the discourse arena of graduate employability and as a means to make social change possible (Phelan, 1994).
Findings
The paper presents the feminist viewpoint that a reconfiguration of gender relations in the academy, through deploying gender equity quotas, and professional development activities designed to expose and help mitigate implicit gender bias are required to support women graduates' career confidence and employability.
Research limitations/implications
The paper offers a viewpoint rather than an empirical evidence because of the difficulty in directly assessing a causal relationship between gendered education experience and graduates' self-efficacy and transition from college to work, “due to its longitudinal nature … [and] because cultural beliefs are … difficult to manipulate experimentally” (Sterling et al. , 2020, p. 30,306). Also, while gender equity quotas have had some success, they can be disrupted by gendered bias within the workplace. Although the authors recommend a combination intervention of gender equity quotas and professional development to address gender bias, they acknowledge that the intervention is yet to be evaluated.
Practical implications
Universities are tasked with supporting graduate employability, an inherent quality of which is graduate identity. The study offers a practical solution to increasing the number of women leaders within the academy by recommending the introduction of gender equity quotas, supported by professional development designed to develop leaders' gender insight and change agency, and combat all university workers' gender bias. This approach provides more equitable work structures within universities and increases the number and nature of women role models to support women's graduate identity development. Gender equity principles are presented as the key to facilitating women graduates' self-efficacy and work readiness.
Social implications
Strategy designed to enhance women graduates' career confidence is critical because women's lower career confidence tends to inform their lower-level starting positions with lower-level pay, resulting in role and pay gaps that are sustained and magnified throughout the life cycle of their careers. Additionally, interventions to address gender bias in the academy are significant because providing gender equity quotas alongside facilitating women in leadership positions to be/come change agents move beyond what Cockburn (1989, p. 218) defines as supporting a short-term agenda of “equality for individual women … [to supporting a] project of transformation for organizations”.
Originality/value
The novel contribution of this paper is the feminist conceptualisation that gender equity practices, most notably a composite of gender equity quotas and professional development, are located within universities' remit to support graduate employability.
Gender quotas have proliferated worldwide as a major tool of gender equality policies, first in the electoral arena and then expanding to other socioeconomic spheres, notably corporate boards. The ensuing rich body of scientific literature on gender quotas so far remains split across disciplines, with a main partition between political science and economics. This scoping review aims at fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue between research on gender quotas conducted from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. To this effect, we compiled an original bibliographical database of 379 peer-reviewed articles, which we coded according to a series of variables including discipline, geographical area, quota domain, methodology and research question. Drawing on this database, this scoping review presents an overview of the main research questions and findings regarding the genesis and the impact of this policy tool, and offers ideas for the further development of interdisciplinary quota research.
The global proliferation of quotas for women over the past 30 years is both remarkable and consequential. Targeting decision-making positions historically resistant to women’s equal inclusion, the adoption of electoral and corporate board quotas has at times been controversial. After adoption, quotas have influenced women’s numbers, the performance and outcomes of decision-making bodies, and broader public attitudes. In this review, we distinguish among types of electoral and corporate quotas, trace arguments for and against the adoption of quotas, and review research on factors that influence quota adoption across time and space. After outlining the methodological difficulties in demonstrating an impact of gender quotas, we review research that is able to isolate an impact of quotas in politics and business. We conclude by providing several suggestions to ensure that future research continues to advance our understanding of the form, spread, and impact of gender quotas. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology Volume 43 is July 30, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This article proposes an analytical construct, based on feminist and non-feminist policy studies, to be eventually used in the systematic study of feminist policy in practice in postindustrial democracies. The measurement allows for the analysis of democracy, representation, and symbolic reform in terms of the array of policy actors who come forward during the crucial implementation and evaluation stages, the policy instruments that are used in these phases, and policy outcomes. As the article argues, developing this analytical measurement constitutes the essential first step in the emerging research cycle on feminist policy postadoption in a comparative perspective.
Purpose
– Interventions to support gender equality in organisations are often unsuccessful. Stakeholders disagree about the causes and problem definition of gender equality or pay lip service to the principle of gender equality, but fail to implement gender equality in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine participatory modelling as an intervention method to support stakeholders in: reaching a shared problem definition and analysis of gender inequality; and identifying and implementing policies to tackle gender inequality.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors apply participatory modelling in case studies on impediments to women’s careers in two Dutch universities.
Findings
– This study shows that participatory modelling supported stakeholders’ identification of the self-reinforcing feedback processes of masculinity of norms, visibility of women and networking of women and the interrelatedness between these processes. Causal loop diagrams visualise how the feedback processes are interrelated and can stabilise or reinforce themselves. Moreover, they allow for the identification of possible interventions.
Research limitations/implications
– Further testing of the causal loop diagrams by quantifying the stocks and the flows would validate the feedback processes and the estimated effects of possible interventions.
Practical implications
– The integration of the knowledge of researchers and stakeholders in a causal loop diagram supported learning about the issue of gender inequality, hereby contributing to transformative change on gender equality.
Originality/value
– The originality of the paper lies in the application of participatory modelling in interventions to support gender equality.
Similar to other European countries, the introduction of non-academic, especially managerial, criteria in higher education has shaped and altered Austrian universities since over a decade. This paper presents the results of a frame analysis of Austrian higher education debates from 1993 until 2010. It outlines how reforms in higher education were prepared and enhanced by a new policy discourse, with a special focus on the way gender equality is framed in reform debates. Our article describes three core frames: ‘from local to global’, ‘from ivory tower to business’ and ‘from civil servant to excellence’. We cluster these three frames around imaginations of space that are embedded in the normative foundations of academia, and discuss how this links up with arguments for gender equality. We furthermore propose to analytically separate two conceptions of the university: the ‘entrepreneurial’ and the ‘managerial’ university.
We explore healthcare scientists’ accounts of men in healthcare science laboratories. By focussing on subtle masculinist actions that women find disadvantageous to them, we seek to extend knowledge about women’s under-representation in senior positions in healthcare science – despite women being in the majority at junior levels. We maintain that healthcare science continues to be dominated by taken-for-granted masculinities that marginalize women, keeping them in their ‘place’. Our aim is to make visible the subtle practices that are normally invisible by showing masculinities in action. Principally using feminist analyses, our findings show that both women and men are often unaware of taken-for-granted masculinist actions, and even when women do notice, they rarely challenge the subtle sexist behaviour.
Gender equality in academia is often perceived as receiving more emphasis in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. But how do the public research institutions in the three countries approach issues of gender equality differently? This study investigates how activities related to gender equality are articulated and justified in the policy statements of six Scandinavian universities. The analysis reveals some interesting disparities between the countries. In short, the Danish universities seem to be reluctant to deal with gender equality on the basis of rights-based assumptions. While the Norwegian and Swedish universities juxtapose arguments of utility, innovation, justice, and anti-discrimination, the Danish universities primarily refer to aspects of competitiveness, utility, and innovation when justifying activities on gender equality. The article suggests that the lack of justice-oriented perspectives in the Danish statements is an illustrative example of how neo-liberal managerial ideas about work-place productivity and creativity entail new and more instrumental approaches to gender equality issues in academia.
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 semi-structured interviews with 22 women in senior academic management positions (vice-chancellors, pro vice-chancellors, deans and pro deans) in ten Swedish HE institutions.
Findings
– The paper highlights how these women situated themselves in an academic context where gender relations were changing. They supported equal representation policies in their everyday managerial practice and also by accepting management positions that they were nominated and elected to on the basis of such policies. However, they also resisted these policies when they experienced a need to “protect” women from being exploited “in the name of gender equality”.
Research limitations/implications
– The paper addresses the call for research on the role of women managers in promoting, or preventing, change towards more gender balanced organizations. The paper builds on a small qualitative study with women only interviews. The study is therefore to be considered as explorative.
Practical implications
– The paper makes a contribution to the research literature in the area of gender and change in academic organizations. The findings highlight how policies have different consequences in different settings and that people use their own (different) experiences when interpreting the effects of these policies. The findings thus show the varying impacts equal representation policies can have on women.
Originality/value
– The discussion in the paper is situated in a unique empirical context characterized by demographic feminization and organizational restructuring. Most international literature on women in HE and in HE management is based on US or UK contexts. Swedish HE therefore provides an interesting setting. The analysis also addresses the call for more research that takes into account the multifaceted character of HE and that discusses disciplinary differences.
This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro-politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom-up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual.
In this article we propose a multi‐level distinction between gender inequality practices and gender equality practices to come to better understanding of the slow pace of gender change in academia. Gender inequality resembles an unbeatable seven‐headed dragon that has a multitude of faces in different social contexts. Based on an empirical study on the recruitment and selection of full professors in three academic fields in The Netherlands we discuss practices that should bring about gender equality and show how these interact with gender inequality practices. We argue that the multitude of gender inequality practices are ineffectively countered by gender equality practices because the latter lack teeth, especially in traditional masculine academic environments.
Recent research shows that women faculty members in academia continue to face systemic barriers to opportunity and advancement and that these barriers are particularly strong in science and engineering, and in university administration. University administrators and faculty members, however, have been slow to recognize that systemically gendered barriers will have to be reduced or eliminated in order for women faculty to advance in their careers. One key problem is that many, if not most, leaders in powerful decision-making roles in universities continue to embrace women-centred explanations for gender disparities in advancement through the academic ranks. University leaders' lack of recognition of institutionalized gender barriers suggests the need for greater dissemination of research findings (and training) about how systemic barriers operate and why these barriers disproportionately disadvantage women. In this article I first theorize universities as incongruous, gendered bureaucratic structures. I then outline an intervention strategy for enabling university faculty members and administrators to see incongruous, gendered bureaucratic structures and to then use this knowledge to develop strategies for addressing the problem of women's underrepresentation among science and engineering faculty. The strategy described is a case-study approach recently implemented at a mid-sized research-intensive university in the US Midwest. The workshop was part of a broader university programme aimed at transforming the university's cultures, practices and structures in ways that help to enhance the recruitment, retention and promotion of women scientists. I conclude by discussing the benefits and limitations of the case-study approach as a method for unsettling accepted knowledge about the gendered structures and normative practices of the university.
Incl. bibl., abstract Are policies to increase women's share among university professors effective? The importance of gender equality on the labor market has been well established, but our understanding of what kind of policy is effective to increase the share of women is still unclear. Three sets of factors explain women's low shares at higher job levels, notably individual, cultural, and structural or institutional perspectives, and policies to increase the proportion of women therefore should address these factors. This paper aims to investigate if they do so and if they are effective. We investigated the efficacy of gender equality policy measures in all 14 universities in the Netherlands, implemented between 2000 and 2007. Based on documents and interviews, 19 measures were identified that could be classified according to the three perspectives. The university with the most measures applied four times more measures than the one with the least measures. The more measures a university applied in the cultural perspective, the more likely it also applied measures in the other two perspectives. Whereas the HR managers and policy makers at universities reported skepticism and lack of evaluations, our study reveals a positive relationship between policy measures and the reduction of the glass ceiling and between policies in the cultural perspective and the increase of the proportion of women among professors.
The paper explores gender relations in academia and discusses how gender is constructed within academic institutions. It is based upon the study of a business school, part of a British university. The construction of gender relations within this institution was of special interest because the majority of managerial roles were occupied by women. All female academic managers (dean, associate deans and heads of department) and a random selection of female and male academics were interviewed. The process of construction of gender relations is investigated through the analysis of the discrepancy between the ‘masculine culture’ of high education institutions and the dominance of women managers within this organization. It is suggested that the numerical dominance of women managers may create tensions between their individual identities as women and their managerial identities, due to the predominance of masculine practices and values within the organization. Additionally, it emerged that the maintenance of masculine ideals and practices is also associated with downplaying women’s achievements.
In my PhD research I studied the networking practices of particiants of university-industry collaboration projects in the Dutch technological sector. Using a critical management lens, I looked in-depth at how the relationship building between these participants were both power-laden and gendered practices, influencing the collaborative and social processes of these projects.
We present a qualitative study that examines the role of headhunters as actors in a broader institutional change process aiming to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We draw on institutional and diversity management theories to conceptualise their change agency in the broader field of women on boards. We describe their role as ‘accidental activists’ and theorise two micro-processes that define their change agency in this field: voluntaristic framing of intentionality and role redefinition by drawing on competing logics. This conceptualisation does not match the heroic image of the institutional entrepreneur driving institutional change, or that of the tempered radical championing diversity, but rather casts light into a marginal and previously neglected change role. We demonstrate the opportunistic and precarious nature of this role with regard to both institutional change and diversity management and discuss its possibilities and perils.
Nowadays, we can distinguish gender quotas targeting the political, the social and the economic spheres of society. Taking the Belgian case as an example, this article examines to what extent these different generations or groups of gender quotas differ intrinsically from each other. To this end, it analyses five generic gender quota laws adopted in the period 1990-2011 and the rationales underlying them. The analysis shows that the rules and underlying rationales do not differ fundamentally across the different spheres of society and that existing differences can mainly be explained by a factor of time.
This paper analyzes whether the presence of women in academic committees benefits female candidates. We exploit evidence from Italy, where candidates to Full and Associate Professor positions are required to qualify in a nation-wide evaluation known as Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale. In 2012, these evaluations involved around 66,000 applications in all academic disciplines and around 900 (randomly chosen) evaluators. We estimate the causal effect of committees' gender composition exploiting the procedure of random assignment of evaluators to committees. Each additional female evaluator decreases by 2 percentage points the success rate of female candidates. The effect is similar in magnitude in evaluations for Full and Associate Professor positions, but it is only statistically significant in the later case. Information from 260,000 individual evaluations suggests that the presence of women in the committee affects the voting behavior of men. Overall, our results cast doubts on the convenience of introducing gender quotas in academia.
This paper describes the emerging field of practice theory as it is practiced in relation to organizational phenomena. We identify three approaches— empirical, theoretical, and philosophical— that relate to the what, the how, and the why of using a practice lens. We discuss three principles of the theoretical approach to practice and offer examples of how practice theory has been used in the organizational literature and in our own research. We end with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that practice theory affords organizational scholarship.
Purpose
– In this paper the authors aim to examine the forms in which feminist activism is played out at contemporary managerial universities and pose the following question: what notions of feminist activism and feminist theory have to be revisited in order to sustain the target of gender equality and support its move further into the centre and the mainstream of managerial universities?
Design/methodology/approach
– Based on action research the authors document a workshop which they organised for different constituencies (administrators, researchers and feminist activists) working towards gender equality at an Austrian university and discuss its results in the context of feminist theory.
Findings
– The five voices collected at the workshop show that feminist theories are still the underlying guiding principles for feminist activism towards gender equality at managerial universities. As this is the first time that different generations of feminist activists have been present at managerial universities and are working in a top‐down environment supported by administrators responsible for gender equality, common practices that have been successful to implement gender equality in the past have to be refined and new spaces for collaboration established.
Originality/value
– This is the first paper that explores the multiple voices amongst those engaged in the process of transformation towards gender equality at contemporary managerial universities. It shows that an open discussion of complementary and conflicting ways in which the representatives can construct their selves, their strategies and their actions is required in order to start “managing the management” anew – from a higher level than the feminist grassroots activists in the 1980s and 1990s.
Equal employment opportunity and affirmative action mandates, like many other laws regulating organizations, do not clearly define what constitutes compliance. Thus compliance depends largely on the initiative and agenda of those persons within organizations who are charged with managing the compliance effort: in the case of civil rights, “affirmative action officers.” This paper draws on case studies of affirmative action officers to suggest that the political climate within which affirmative action officers work, together with the officers' interpretations of the law, their role conceptions, and their professional aspirations have important implications for the nature and extent of organizational compliance with law. We conclude that compliance should be understood as a process that evolves over time rather than as a discrete event or non-event.
The article explores gendered management in UK universities in the context of moves to introduce new managerialism to higher education. Qualitative data are drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council funded project (R00023 7661) in which interviews were conducted with 137 male and female manager-academics, from Heads of Department to Vice Chancellors, in 16 universities. The career trajectories of female and male manager-academics are analysed to see if gender power relations, expectations and discrimination have affected their careers and organizational experiences. Also examined are whether and how gender relations and cultures are perceived to be relevant to management, the practices of women and men manager-academics and the extent to which the differential value and status attached to teaching, research and management are gender-related. It is suggested that women's participation in management roles, their perceptions of their practices and the expectations others hold of them are still marked by gender, even though some women have benefited, through promotion, from the greater emphasis on management now evident in UK universities.
Education as a field of policy, research and practice has been reconfigured over four decades by economic, social and cultural globalization in conjuncture with neoliberal policies premised upon markets and new managerialism. One effect has been shifting boundaries between, and understandings of what constitutes the public and the private with regard to the role of the state vis-á-vis the formation of gendered subjectivities and civil society and the gendering of public– private relations in and between family and work. Drawing on feminist readings of Bourdieu and critical policy sociology, I consider the implications of a move from bureaucratic educational governance framed by state welfarism to corporate or market governance framed by the post-welfare state, and consider whether particular constructions of globalization and corporate/market governance lead to network governance. Network governance, it is argued, is premised on new forms of sociality and institutional reconfigurations of knowledge-based economies and a spatialized state that coordinates rather than regulates multiple public– private providers. The question is how each mode of governance frames various possibilities and problems for gender equity in education.
The under-representation of women at the top of the academy is a persistent and fascinating issue, mostly analysed as a result of women's choices or as an issue of personnel management. In this article, the focus is on the functioning of universities as social institutions, where gender is ‘done’ in a specific way. We analyse how the structural, cultural and procedural arrangements of academic organizing constitute gender relations and are specifically interested in the social construction of scientific quality. The ‘normal’ standards for scientific quality reflect the traditions of the natural sciences, with the Olympus as dominant image: the excellent scientist as lonely hero at the top, far distanced from everyday practices. This conception reflects a hegemonic position privileging masculinity. Alternatively, in an Agora model, science is not an autonomous institution, but becomes a societal practice tightly bound with other societal practices concerning the production, transmission, translation and exchange of knowledge. The scientific ideal of the Agora entails greater public accountability, social responsibility and transparency. This model reflects to a certain extent the scientific activities and achievements of female scientists, and we expect that gender will be done differently in it. In our view, the integration and mainstreaming of gender issues within the academy will serve as a strong impetus to the necessary modernization of academia and academic organizing. But this implies a critical reflection on the social constructed nature of any conception of ‘quality’.
Durante el período 2002-2006 las promociones a profesor titular y a catedrático de universidad se decidieron a través del llamado sistema de habilitación. En total se celebraron cerca de mil pruebas de habilitación en las que fueron evaluados unos treinta mil candidatos. Este artículo analiza si las decisiones de promoción se vieron afectadas por el género de candidatos y evaluadores. El análisis utiliza el sistema de asignación aleatoria con el que se seleccionaron los miembros de los tribunales para identificar el efecto del género. La evidencia empírica revela que el género de los evaluadores afecta a las posibilidades de éxito de los candidatos y candidatas, pero la dirección de este efecto depende del tipo de plaza. En las pruebas de habilitación a profesor titular se observa que tienen relativamente menos posibilidades de éxito aquellas candidatas que, por azar, son asignadas a un tribunal con un mayor número de evaluadoras. En términos cuantitativos, en un tribunal de siete miembros una evaluadora más en el tribunal reduce en un 5% el número de candidatas habilitadas. En cambio, en las pruebas de habilitación a catedrático, las candidatas tienen relativamente menos posibilidades de éxito si son asignadas a un tribunal con un mayor número de evaluadores varones. En este caso, un varón más en el tribunal reduce el número de mujeres que son habilitadas en un 14%. La información acerca de la producción científica sugiere que estos efectos se deben a que las candidatas están siendo discriminadas por las evaluadoras en las pruebas de habilitación a profesor titular y por los evaluadores varones en las pruebas de habilitación a catedrático.
Including abstract, bibl. This article examines the views of staff employed in UK higher education institutions (HEIs) about how those institutions are dealing with the impact of recent UK equality legislation and related European employment directives. Assumptions underlying current approaches to equality in UK HEIs are examined, particularly the notion of meritocracy, which advocates job selection and promotion based on normatively and culturally neutral measures of merit. The article is based on a project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, using qualitative case studies of six English, Welsh and Scottish HEIs. The project data suggest that equality policies for staff and students are in tension with each other, that staff policies may clash with other institutional policies, for example on research excellence or enhancing the student experience, and that the rhetoric of equality policies is not always matched by the day-to-day experience of staff. The article suggests that the case study UK HEIs, with their continued focus on meritocracy and excellence, have not yet adapted to the new climate of employee equality legislation and perhaps need to consider a different approach than the meritocratic one.
This article examines how the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) has shaped a new politics of documentation, which takes diversity and equality as measures of institutional performance. Writing documents that express a commitment to promoting race equality is now a central part of equality work. Rather than assuming such documents do what they say, this article suggests we need to follow such documents around, examining how they get taken up. This article will interrogate the politics of documentation, by drawing on interviews with diversity and equal opportunities officers from ten universities in the UK. It focuses on how documents are taken up as signs of good performance, as expressions of commitment and as descriptions of organizations as “being” diverse. It concludes that such documents work to conceal forms of racism when they get taken up in this way. And yet, by allowing practitioners to expose the gaps between words and deeds, these documents can be used strategically within organizations.
Om retten til forskellighed og forskelle som retfaerdighed
- D Andersen
Andersen, D. (2010), "Om retten til forskellighed og forskelle som retfaerdighed", in Wien, C. (ed.),
Hverken strigle, superkvinde eller professorens pige, Syddansk Universitetsforlag, Odense, pp.
115-127.
Gender Equality Policies in Public Research. Based on a survey among Members of the Helsinki Group on Gender in Research and Innovation
European Commission. (2013). Gender Equality Policies in Public Research. Based on a survey among
Members of the Helsinki Group on Gender in Research and Innovation. European
Commission. Luxemburg.
Strong 'Second Level' Quotas in Action: Lessons from the Finnish case
- A M Holli
Holli, A. M. (2016), "Strong 'Second Level' Quotas in Action: Lessons from the Finnish case", paper
presented at the ECPR General Conference, Prague, Czech Republic.
Proceedings from GEXcel Themes 11-12: Gender Paradoxes in Changing Academic and Scientific Organisation(s), GEXcel Work in Progress Report XVII
- A Wroblewski
Strong ‘second level’ quotas in action: lessons from the Finnish case”, paper presented at the ECPR General Conference
- A M Holli
Practices of implementation of sexual harassment policies: individual versus collective strategies