Making the Right Choice: Discourses of Individualised Responsibility in Higher Education

Abstract

With choice conceptualised as performative, this chapter examines neoliberal discourses of individualised responsibility in research and higher education, and the ways in which choice is used to mask the existence of structural gender inequalities; as such it is a form of resistance to gender equality. The chapter examines three countries that underwent regime change at the end of the twentieth century (the Czech Republic, South Africa and Turkey) and looks at two inter-related issues: The first is the way women academics internalise choice which results in acceptance of their alleged responsibility for career progression. The second is the use of “individual choice” as a way to explain away the dearth of women in leadership positions and to deflect responsibility for creating non-discriminatory working conditions. The chapter argues that the academic systems and their proponents in the three countries are similar in their reluctance to recognise structural gender inequality that exists in higher education and research, and in deflecting their responsibility for creating a non-discriminatory institutional culture.