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Abstract
While witnessing a feminization of its workforce, the academic profession has experienced a process of market-based regulation that has contributed to the precarization of early career phases and introduced a managerial culture based on competition, hyper-productivity, and entrepreneurship. This paper aims to investigate the implications of these changes for female academics. A mixed model research design was used based on administrative data on the Italian academic population and qualitative interviews with life scientists within a specific academic institution. Results show that the implications of university transformations in terms of gender heterogeneity are complex. On the one hand, the increased precarization of early career stages has increased gender inequalities by reducing female access to tenured positions. On the other, the adoption of performance-based practices has mixed consequences for women, entailing both risks and opportunities, including spaces of agency which may even disrupt male-dominated hierarchies.
Highlights
In recent years, the academic profession across the world has gone through a process of marketization, favouring cost-efficiency, accountability, and performance (Krüger, Parellada, Samoilovich & Sursock, 2018)
The focus of this paper is to investigate these changes by taking inspiration from different strands of literature: the sociology of professions, critical university studies, and the study of gender inequalities in academia
The female proportion of assistant professors has deteriorated, and this deterioration is stronger among RTDb assistant professors, who are considered to hold a quasi-tenured position, than among the RTDa, who hold the more precarious contracts. These findings suggest that the reduction in access to tenured positions and the parallel restructuring of early career stages have had the overall effect of “anticipating” the adverse selection of women along the career ladder: from the transition to associate professor level—where it occurred in 2008 - to the transition to assistant professor level — where it occurs
Summary
The academic profession across the world has gone through a process of marketization, favouring cost-efficiency, accountability, and performance (Krüger, Parellada, Samoilovich & Sursock, 2018) These large-scale changes have occurred in parallel with the progressive differentiation of faculty members, their increasing precarization and their diversification, especially in terms of gender. Rooted in institutions (universities) and organizations (departments), the academic profession has for a long time shared certain features with the traditional professionalism of the last century: high status, relatively good economic return, public engagement, freedom from market-based principles, and intellectual autonomy (Gorman & Sandefur, 2011) These characteristics have recently been challenged, by the cuts to public funding of higher education across many Western countries which have fostered a university model based on performance evaluation. While witnessing an increase in the academic population as a whole, and in its female component the profession has gone through a process of market-based regulation led by at least four main drivers: the reshaping of the academic career ladder and the precarization of its early stages, the block on turnover within the tenured workforce, the adoption of evaluation systems for the productivity, and cuts to national, publicly financed research funds
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