Theme 11-12: Gender Paradoxes in Changing Academic and Scientific Organisation(s)

By Katherine Harrison on 19 Aug | 0 comments

Gender paradoxes in how academic and scientific organizations are changing and being changed are the main focus in this research theme. Science is here understood in its wider meaning, as in the German term “Wissenschaft” or Swedish “vetenskap”, including all disciplinary areas, not only referring to natural sciences. Having said that, the research theme will give special attention to medicine, natural science and technology/engineering as these are generally key priority areas in research policy development and research funding in Europe and elsewhere.

Academic and scientific organizations are key sites of societal, academic and scientific knowledge production. These sites, as well as the nature of much academic and scientific work, have experienced rapid changes in recent decades. Such changes include:
globalization and internationalization of institutions, policies and academic/scientific work; new forms of governance and increased accountability; new stratifications of institutions and professions with increased emphasis on excellence, top performance and competition; and prioritizing technology and natural science in research policy. These changes are increasingly shaping the contexts of academic and scientific work and
knowledge production nationally, regionally and globally.

Both the changes that are constituted by long-term macro trends, on the one hand, and the more immediate changes aimed for, in terms of policy interventions, on the other, are of interest here. Many of these changes seemingly appear as non-gendered or are represented as such. This research theme interrogates the gender dimensions and gender impacts of both these sets of changes on academic and scientific organizations, on academic and scientific work, and knowledge production.

Paradoxically, along with these rapid changes, inertia rather than change characterizes the gender patterns in many, even most academic and scientific organizations and settings. Gender patterns have been shown to be highly persistent and resistant to change. Horizontal, vertical and even contractual gender segregations continue to characterize the academic and scientific labour force. Men continue to be over-represented among gatekeepers setting the academic and research agenda. Workplace cultures, networks and interactions in academic and scientific organizations continue to show highly gendered patterns. This remains so despite the fact that the recruitment pool to academia and research has been feminizing rather heavily in many fields, and despite a wide variety of different interventions aimed changing aca¬¬demia and science towards greater gender balance and awareness. The evidence accumulated on the dynamics of gender equality interventions in academia and scientific organizations, and the experiences of different change agents, witness significant organizational gender inertia and various forms of resistance, implicit and explicit, against changing the asymmetric gender order.

Preliminarily, the subthemes include

(a) The paradox of change: rapid “non-gendered” change and gender inertia in academic and scientific organizations.

(b) The paradox of excellence: gendering new and emerging stratifications of academic and scientific organizations, disciplines and professions.  

(c) The paradox of interventions: gender dynamics of gender equality promotion, resistance and change.