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Universités : les politiques d’égalité entre femmes et hommes à l’heure de l’excellenceUniversities: equality politics between women and men in the age of excellence. File’s introduction: Introduction du Dossier
Depuis une quinzaine d’années, la notion controversée de « décolonisation » occupe l’espace médiatique et académique des Nords comme des Suds. Elle donne lieu à des débats parfois paroxystiques et suscite des mobilisations diverses dans des contextes fort différents. Aujourd’hui, cette notion cristallise et galvanise un « renouveau de la révolte » ancré dans un mouvement épistémique, politique, éthique et intellectuel ancien. Les xxe et xxie siècles voient ainsi une montée en puissance de la prise de conscience et d’efforts collectifs pour comprendre la décolonisation ou la décolonialité comme un projet inachevé et toujours d’actualité, notamment dans l’espace universitaire. Cet article examine la question du tournant décolonial, en interrogeant par la même occasion les possibilités pour l’Association pour l’anthropologie du développement et du changement social (APAD) de prolonger cette réflexion afin d’éclairer les affinités, les résonances et les échos des arguments décoloniaux avec son projet fondateur, et d’identifier quelques enjeux et chantiers.
Introduction to the report Educational reforms as indicators and amplifiers of teaching divisions
In a context characterised by austerity policies, the search for efficiency, the avoidance of exclusion and the integration of diversity, education and training systems are becoming increasingly diverse and complex, encouraging reforms inspired by New Public Management (NPM). Having noted this new guidance, the report shall examine the ways in which these reforms have transformed the conditions of those working in educational professions. It shall highlight the hybridity of these processes, insist on the need to take into account specific situations to understand which NPM principles are contributing to the divisions of professionals in the field of education in the French-speaking space (France, Belgium, Quebec and French-speaking Switzerland). Not everyone has emerged a winner when adopting these reforms, their appropriation is also based on the social characteristics of the diverse divisions which make up the teaching profession. By offering elements which shed light on the reasons by which professionals adhere, accept or refuse the reforms which have shaken up prior definitions of the professionality of teachers and by analysing the use that they make of these reforms; we can map out professional territories. These shrink or expand when there is a need to justify and accept responsibility for achieving the objectives set by public policies as an integral part of the professional activity.
Throughout the world, women leave their academic careers to a far greater extent than their male colleagues. (1) In Sweden, for example, women are awarded 44 per cent of biomedical PhDs but hold a mere 25 per cent of the postdoctoral positions and only 7 per cent of professorial positions. It used to be thought that once there were enough entry-level female scientists, the male domination of the upper echelons of academic research would automatically diminish. But this has not happened in the biomedical field, where disproportionate numbers of men still hold higher academic positions, despite the significant numbers of women who have entered this research field since the 1970s.
La course effrénée à la publication, «publish or perish », participe au renforcement d’une (nouvelle) norme scientifique : la compétitivité. Celle-ci s’est institutionnalisée lors de réformes néolibérales, tant au niveau des systèmes nationaux de recherche et d’enseignement que des instances européennes et internationales. En partant de ce contexte poli- tique, nous avons problématisé la « fabrique » d’un sujet néolibéral, celle du chercheur-entrepreneur, sous l’angle des techniques de gouvernement à distance (benchmarking, systèmes de classement, grilles d’évaluation, etc.) compris comme des «techniques de soi» pouvant amener les ensei- gnants-chercheurs à s’identifier et à agir comme des chercheurs-entrepreneurs. De cette perspec- tive foucaldienne de la « fabrique » du chercheur- entrepreneur, nous distinguons, in fine, une double posture herméneutique possible: un «souci de soi » a-critique, d’ordre gestionnaire, confiant dans les règles méritocratiques et un «souci de soi» critique, d’ordre intellectuel, inquiet de voir s’ins- taller la compétitivité comme norme dominante du champ scientifique.
University reforms in Europe
It is surprising to see how convergent are the objectives of the current university reforms led in France with the orientations followed by the higher education and research polices led in other European countries for some decades. The same goals and the same repertories of solutions can be observed from one reform to another over the last thirty years. Nevertheless this apparent homogeneity vanishes if one looks, as will be done for the French case, to the concrete transposition of these general orientations into concrete, and finally still very national, measures.
Purpose
– In recent years, several countries and/or higher education institutions have adopted equal opportunity policies to promote women's access to the upper levels of the academic career structure. The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is no universal solution to the glass ceiling that women face within academia. Insofar as the feminisation process evolves according to a variety of models, according to national and occupational context, the solutions adopted in one context may prove to be ineffective elsewhere.
Design/methodology/approach
– Analysis of the different models of occupational feminisation is based on a secondary analysis of the sociological literature on the subject, combined with recent data on women's access to academic positions in France and Germany.
Findings
– Although there are similarities in the structure of the academic labour market across countries and in the rate of feminisation of the most prestigious academic positions, the precise mechanisms through which women gain access to an academic career vary significantly from one national context to another. This cross‐national variation would tend to suggest that there will also be variation when it comes to defining the most effective policy measures for increasing women's access to the upper echelons of the academic hierarchy. Indeed, different models of gender equality in academia may lead to very different results with regard to existing gender relations.
Originality/value
– The paper uses the available sociological literature on the feminisation process to examine how different measures adopted to promote women's access to the highest echelons of the academic career structure may have different effects on the reproduction and/or transformation of the dominant sex/gender system.
Academic excellence is allegedly a universal and gender neutral standard of merit. This article examines exactly what is constructed as academic excellence at the micro-level, how evaluators operationalize this construct in the criteria they apply in academic evaluation, and how gender inequalities are imbued in the construction and evaluation of excellence. We challenge the view that the academic world is governed by the normative principle of meritocracy in its allocation of rewards and resources. Based on an empirical study of professorial appointments in the Netherlands, we argue that academic excellence is an evasive social construct that is inherently gendered. We show how gender is practiced in the evaluation of professorial candidates, resulting in disadvantages for women and privileges for men that accumulate to produce substantial inequalities in the construction of excellence.
Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.).
Soyez en tête de la compétition mondiale mais coordonnez-vous à l'échelon territorial ! Telle est l'injonction contradictoire adressée aux universités françaises depuis les deux grandes réformes du système d’enseignement supérieur et de recherche initiées en 2000.D’un côté, l’État organise une compétition généralisée entre enseignants- chercheurs et entre universités. Les financements sur projet de la recherche, la publicisation des évaluations et leur utilisation pour allouer les budgets à la performance, comme les très sélectifs appels à projets qui se sont succédé sans relâche depuis le Grand Emprunt de Nicolas Sarkozy, ont accru les écarts entre établissements et fait voler en éclat le principe sur lequel reposait jusqu’alors, en théorie, le système français : des universités équivalentes sur l’ensemble du territoire.De l’autre, un remodelage du paysage universitaire est à l’oeuvre. Il impose que les grandes écoles, les organismes de recherche et les universités d’une même région coordonnent leurs actions dans le but de rationaliser les coûts et de grimper dans les classements mondiaux.De nouvelles structures sont ainsi créées à marche forcée, sans qu’il soit possible de savoir si ces changements majeurs atteindront leurs objectifs et assureront un avenir radieux à l’enseignement supérieur français. (résumé de l'éditeur)
Purpose
– Discussing the Swiss case, the purpose of this paper is to examine how gender equality policies deal with the present requirements for scholars to be considered “excellent”. It aims to pinpoint the lines of tension or coherence between excellence, meritocracy and gender politics.
Design/methodology/approach
– In order to specify the norms of academic careers and their different renditions, the author draws on two studies (at local and national levels) to illustrate where the changes and resistances are taking place.
Findings
– The translations of a number of demands of feminist movements into the policies set up to favour equality between the sexes may combine to challenge the norms of academia as a gendered realm. Nevertheless, without strong pressure from feminists at local level and the conduct of research pursuing the enterprise of deconstructing norms, top-down policies may prove less “corrective” than affirmative action. This pressure is not only useful to build gender equality in science but also to broaden the spectrum of knowledge that can become a common good.
Research limitations/implications
– As neither the names nor the positions of the experts who select the candidates at national level are made public, we had to opt for other, less satisfactory means.
Originality/value
– The originality of the paper lies in the link made between the enhancements brought by Equalities policies and the changes they bring. It attempts to bring to light the extent to which gender equality policies conform to the neo-managerial order or challenge its norms to build a world that is more just.
Dans cet article, l’auteur traite de la signification et de l’usage du concept d’ethos. Dans la sociologie classique, ce dernier a été utilisé pour comprendre et qualifier la rationalité socialement et éthiquement encastrée des conduites sociales. Exprimant l’intériorisation d’un principe organisateur de pratiques, dessinant une matrice globale des comportements, il est porteur d’une vision qui paraît datée à l’heure du “brouillage des classes sociales”, de la “modernité liquide” et de “l’homme pluriel”. Néanmoins, si l’on reconnaît l’existence d’un univers social non entièrement liquéfié, c’est-à-dire où continuent à exister des milieux sociaux sédimentés qui imprègnent avec plus ou moins de profondeur le système de personnalité de celui qui s’y insère durablement, l’ethos reste un concept heuristique pour saisir et interpréter les récurrences de comportements qui peuvent s’y observer. Permettant de comprendre ce que les espaces d’insertion “font aux individus” ainsi que la façon dont les principes organisateurs de pratiques entrent en transaction (en consonance, en dissonance ou en concurrence), il garde toute sa pertinence dans la boîte à outils théoriques du sociologue et de l’anthropologue d’aujourd’hui.
The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation.
The Swiss National Science Foundation Professorships Programme is presented as a programme that aims to promote outstanding young scholars to professorial positions. Academic excellence is presented as the main selection criterion. The emphasis put on the research portfolio and on the age of the candidates means that the beneficiaries of these professorships put forward an image of excellence that is more embedded in data-based sciences, than in the humanities and social sciences, thus strengthening the domination of a sector of scientific activity essentially occupied by men over the sector that has opened up more widely to women. This paper aims to deconstruct the criteria of academic excellence as they appear in this programme, and to show that what seem to be quality criteria are inspired by a specific model. These biases tend to undermine the gender equality aims of the programme.
This book introduces an approach to policy analysis called 'what's the problem represented to be?' It argues that policies contain implicit representations of the 'problems' they purport to address and that these 'problem representations' need to be subjected to critical scrutiny. The book targets the way in which 'women's inequality' is represented as a 'problem' by examining key policy initiatives in the areas of education, pay equity, abortion, sexual harassment, domestic violence and equality policy.
More and more reforms in public administrations are being conducted that are based on the principles and instruments of “new public management”. They have set off protest and collective actions by several professional groups in various sectors (health, education, justice, social work, research…), whence questions about the future of professional groups in public services, in particular about their autonomy, which these reforms threaten. The opposition between this new public management and certain professional groups, is not the final explanation to draw from an analysis of this situation. Should these changes be seen as the decline of professional groups and of their autonomy, as a mutation of professional models, an overhaul of professionalism, etc.? These questions, which current events in France and Europe have raised, are a matter for ongoing sociological thought. They are approached empirically, from the field, using varied scales of analysis and research. Forms of tension between this new public management and professional groups are explored.
The academic world does not escape the glass ceiling nor the leaden sky that weighs upon women's careers: in all fields, their share declines as one escalates the hierarchy of ranks and honors. On the basis of statistical data and interviews, this article offers possible explanations to these gendered inequalities in the academic world by exploring part of the leaden sky that weighs upon female researchers in natural sciences in France. It focuses on the subjective dimension, i.e. on pleasure and sufferance inherent to the profession of researcher, as well as on the contradictions between the schedule of an ideal researcher and that of a mother. What is the meaning of recognizing the time spent educating one's children in retirement benefits when the status of housewife is that of fewer and fewer women among the generations that will retire in the years to come? The question of equal rights between mothers and f athers in the French public service emerged since the Griesmar case. It had to be dealt with when the retirement system was reformed. However, the fundamental question of equal rights to retirement between men and women still need to be dealt with. Beyond the strict question of genders, that of family rights is still unanswered.
Recent work has brought to light so many cases, historical and contemporary, of women scientists who have been ignored, denied credit or otherwise dropped from sight that a sex-linked phenomenon seems to exist, as has been documented to be the case in other fields, such as medicine, art history and literary criticism. Since this systematic bias in scientific information and recognition practices fits the second half of Matthew 13:12 in the Bible, which refers to the under-recognition accorded to those who have little to start with, it is suggested that sociologists of science and knowledge can add to the 'Matthew Effect', made famous by Robert K. Merton in 1968, the 'Matilda Effect', named for the American suffragist and feminist critic Matilda J. Gage of New York, who in the late nineteenth century both experienced and articulated this phenomenon. Calling attention to her and this age-old tendency may prod future scholars to include other such 'Matildas' and thus to write a better, because more comprehensive, history and sociology of science.
“Doing Gender,” West and Zimmerman's (1987) landmark article, highlighted the importance of social interaction, thus revealing the weaknesses of socialization and structural approaches. However, despite its revolutionary potential for illuminating how to dismantle the gender system, doing gender has become a theory of gender persistence and the inevitability of inequality. In this article, the author argues that we need to reframe the questions to ask how we can undo gender. Research should focus on (1) when and how social interactions become less gendered, (2) whether gender can be irrelevant in interaction, (3) whether gendered interactions always underwrite inequality, (4) how the institutional and interactional levels work together to produce change, and (5) interaction as the site of change.
In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs.
The paper uses a gendered and feminist perspective to explore some dimensions of the debate about excellence and diversity in relation to the leadership and management of UK universities. The paper considers the extent to which notions about excellence and diversity are in tension in UK higher education and how understandings, underpinning values and the practical consequences of excellence and diversity connect or are at odds with the equally pervasive idea of a university as a meritocracy. The paper draws on two recent research projects, one which examined the experiences and management of equal opportunities policies for university staff in six UK universities and the other which has analysed public service leadership, leadership development and change agency in schools, health services and universities in England.Higher Education Policy (2009) 22, 3-17. doi:10.1057/hep.2008.32
Organized groups are always faced with the problem of how best to harness human energies to their purposes. They must concern themselves with mechanisms which insure that people are sufficiently motivated to be loyal to them even in the face of competing appeals from other sources within the wider social structure.
Gender discriminations are close but different across European countries. In order to understand how they are built up, it is necessary to appeal to a multidisciplinary approach: economic, social, politic and institutional. At first, inequalities are linked to the social environment: school and family, then the share of domestic tasks creates the gender division of social roles and influences the female behaviour. The professional area reproduces those inequalities, and produces some new ones. Women are alternately a stake for economics growth to compensate the decrease of the labour force, and then they become a mean to introduce more flexibility and precariousness on the labour market. In order to find a way to promote gender equality, it is required to understand the discrimination mechanism. The consistency of public policies and the efficiency of incentives actions have to be studied.
This account of the Matthew effect is another small exercise in the psychosociological analysis of the workings of science as a social institution. The initial problem is transformed by a shift in theoretical perspective. As originally identified, the Matthew effect was construed in terms of enhancement of the position of already eminent scientists who are given disproportionate credit in cases of collaboration or of independent multiple discoveries. Its significance was thus confined to its implications for the reward system of science. By shifting the angle of vision, we note other possible kinds of consequences, this time for the communication system of science. The Matthew effect may serve to heighten the visibility of contributions to science by scientists of acknowledged standing and to reduce the visibility of contributions by authors who are less well known. We examine the psychosocial conditions and mechanisms underlying this effect and find a correlation between the redundancy function of multiple discoveries and the focalizing function of eminent men of science-a function which is reinforced by the great value these men place upon finding basic problems and by their self-assurance. This self-assurance, which is partly inherent, partly the result of experiences and associations in creative scientific environments, and partly a result of later social validation of their position, encourages them to search out risky but important problems and to highlight the results of their inquiry. A macrosocial version of the Matthew principle is apparently involved in those processes of social selection that currently lead to the concentration of scientific resources and talent (50).
Ordres et désordres de l'esprit gestionnaire : où vont les métiers de la recherche, du social et de la santé
- M Benninghoff
Structural Change in Research Institutions : Enhancing Excellence, Gender Equality and Efficiency in Research and Innovation
- Ec - European Commission
Esquisse d'un état des », lieux dans la sociologie », dans Réflexions sur l'accès, la promotion et les responsabilités des hommes et des femmes
- C Marry
Women and Higher Education Leadership: Absences and Aspirations - Stimulus paper, London, Leadership Foundation for Higher Education
- L Morley
Wissenschaftskultur und Geschlechterordnung. Über die verborgenen Mechanismen männlicher Dominanz in der akademischen Welt
- B Krais
« Les Pôles nationaux de recherche - accélérateurs d'excellence scientifique ? », Bulletin de la société suisse de sociologie « Les meilleurs. L'excellence au sommet
- R Levy
« L'étoffe du chercheur : une construction genrée
- I Stengers