Improving Female Researchers’ Careers through Gender Equality Plan actions: Experiences from a Slovenian Research Institution

Tanja Petrovic

doi:10.5755/j01.ppaa.20.1.28310

Abstract

This article draws on experiences in implementing the Gender Equality Plan adopted at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in early 2019. It discusses the careers of female researchers, their prospects for career advancement, and how their excellence is construed, negotiated, and promoted in the Slovenian academic sphere. The article proposes a contextualised understanding of female academic careers and excellence. This understanding is sensitive to the structural variables that define researchers’ academic prospects, as these prospects result from the intersection of various personal and structural factors. It argues that in order to plan appropriate strategies for improving career prospects for female researchers in a Gender Equality Plan, it is necessary not only to consider the national context, the legislation and demographic and other “objective data”, but also to take seriously the institutional culture and the fact that individual researchers are affected by neoliberal academia in different ways that depend on their structural position within the institution.

Highlights

Research excellence as a gender-biased and neoliberal constructWidely seen as an academic ideal, excellence occupies an important place in national and European policies and strategies for research and innovation, and it is perceived as the most important condition for the advancement of academic careers1
The analysis presented in this article demonstrates that in order to understand the obstacles to the advancement of women’s academic careers in a specific context and to plan appropriate strategies for removing these obstacles, it is necessary to consider the national context, i.e. the legislation, the demographics and other “objective data”, but to take seriously the institutional culture and structural positioning of researchers, which is conditioned by their gender and by other personal traits, and is governed by the logic of neoliberal academia (Ivancheva et al 2019; Kinman 2014)
While the consequences of neoliberal regimes of academic work and prevalent organisational cultures remain gendered (Currie et al 2000), it is both women and men who bear the consequences. Both their career prospects and perceptions of gender equality largely depend on their position within the hierarchical structure

Summary

Introduction

Seen as an academic ideal, excellence occupies an important place in national and European policies and strategies for research and innovation, and it is perceived as the most important condition for the advancement of academic careers. Other researchers point to the fact that the system of evaluation of research excellence has been increasingly subjected to the neoliberal logic of “the commodification of academia through profit-oriented policies” (Hofman 2021: 84; see Barry, Chandler, & Clark 2001; Fakin Bajec & Sitar 2017) These two factors are highly relevant to academic careers in the Slovenian context as well. It presents strategies to improve female researchers’ careers that were implemented at a Slovenian research institution (the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, ZRC SAZU) in the framework of the Gender Equality Plan (GEP). This article argues that in order to devise appropriate strategies to improve female researchers’ careers, it is necessary to consider the mechanisms of neoliberal academia that still make inequalities gendered, and seriously affect researchers across gender lines. They work on multiple projects simultaneously and frequently switch their research priorities depending on the available financing

Perceptions of gender equality at ZRC SAZU

Conclusions

Findings

Tanja Petrović