Academic careers and gender. Case studies from France - Germany - Austria

This research project investigates the impact of the implementation of new public management structures in universities and research institutions on the relation between scientific careers and gender. The project will analyse institutions in France, Germany and Austria since 2000, focusing on the gender-differenciating negotiation and appropriation processes evoked by the establishment of quantitative performance indicators and control regimes. Evolving conditions for academics from post-doc on will be explored. The research project assumes the interplaying of structural and organisational parameters and their adoption by individuals (subjectification). Through this process, new forms of gender arrangements are negotiated. Career and gender relations are not regarded as separate concepts; this research project instead aims at identifying the mutual constitutional processes that restructure the academic habitus, the conception of gender and the forms of capital required for an academic career. There are both similarities and differences concerning the university organization of the Entrepreneurial University in the three selected countries. This allows for a good comparison of the co-constitution of academic careers and gender relations. These comparative case studies promise new insights into career related processes of subjectification in the transforming academic field in selected European countries.

Against the background of European umbrella processes such as the Bologna Process, the introduction of non-academic criteria in the management of universities better known as New Public Management (NPM) have shaped academic careers for over a decade. Our research project has analyzed, how the political debate clustered around the reforms, the implementation of NPM as well as the new tenure track system has impacted equal opportunity policies at different universities. Moreover, we were interested in the reforms effects on the gendered conditions of employment, work and promotion for junior academics. The main results are: - Following the political debates around the reforms, Austrian universities are supposed to produce scientific knowledge and provide enough creative space for academic staff. The debate is framed in a way whereby this is made possible by a modern management style, working on budget-conscious terms while still making universities fit for the global competition on excellence.- The focus on the competition between academics is contradictory to the universities goal of gender equality. University leadership and decision-making bodies bypass equal opportunity goals with competition arguments and therefore hinder career chances for women. - We were able to point out massive differences between the investigated universities. These can be explained by the fact that neither equal opportunity legislation nor the demand for transparent decision-making are efficient guiding principles for the relevant actors. In universities, that were committed to gender equality and already had equal opportunity structures before the reforms, instruments of NPM are now used in order to enhance gender equality. However, in universities who lack both theses structures as well as gender knowledge in general, there are now crucial impulses for the improvement of female career chances. - The interviewed junior academics deal with the requirements of the managerial university in a variety of ways. They find themselves confronted with the partly contradictory - demand to be entrepreneurial and skillful in order to enhance their careers and the need to fulfill the image of the genius scientist. Although we were not able to find general differences between the interviewed women and men, there are gendered effects of the need to be a player in a competitive and entrepreneurial academic system, encouraging male designs of the academic personality. Overall, the relevance of managerial higher education reforms for gender differentiations and gender equality efforts in academic careers can only be described based on holistic analysis and with regard to relevant contextual conditions.