Full Description
This volume examines the criteria of excellence producing inequalities of gender in the daily working environment and evaluation of academics.
Policymakers have increasingly placed emphasis on gender equality as part of a strategy for achieving research excellence, and efforts to reduce gender bias have become mainstream. This book suggests that this goal has remained elusive in practice due to continuing under-representation of women across many academic and scientific fields. Questioning the old structures of male dominance still prevalent in national research policy, the book explores the effects of institutional values and practices on the careers of academics, particularly the academic identities of women and their career developments.
It focuses on case studies drawn from Europe while also highlighting the rise of new forms of public management and a neoliberal framing of the value of academic work, that have a much broader global reach. Using participatory research, the book analyses contemporary forms of "gendered excellence" in an intersectional and international perspective. It will be of interest to junior/senior researchers, teachers, and scholars in sociology, education, gender studies, history, political science and science and technology studies.
Contents
Introduction: Inequalities and the Paradigm of Excellence in Academia
Part I. "Inclusive Excellence": How are excellence and gender equality combined?
1. Are Equality and Excellence a Happy Marriage of Terms? How Gender Figures in the Business Case for Change
2. Implementing Gender Mainstreaming in a Discourse of Academic Excellence
3. What are the Real Attitudes of Professors Toward Gender Equality?
4. An Excellent Researcher?: Institutional Programmatics and Organisational Strategies in the Academic Field
Part II. Constructing Excellence: How does gender bias affect the evaluation of excellence?
5. Gendered Representations of Excellence in Science and Technology
6. Gender Bias in Peer Review Panels: - "The Elephant in the Room"
7. Gendered Excellence for Business Interests: A Critical Examination of the Construction of Centres of Excellence in the Estonian Research Policy Discourse
8. Excellence?: Gendered Micropolitics in an Irish and Spanish University Context
Part III. Reproducing Inequality: How does the discourse of 'excellence' impact women's careers?
9. Scientific Careers and Mobility Patterns of Top Researchers of European Excellence
10. The Bargaining of Excellence: Who's (Not) Appointed by Academics?
11. Gendered Excellence in Physics
12. Excellent and Care-less? Gendered Everyday Practices of Early Career Scholars in Germany and Austria
Is Excellence really so Excellent?: An Afterword
