Work

Women Professors across STEMM and Non-STEMM Disciplines: Navigating Gendered Spaces and Playing the Academic Game

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: Women remain poorly represented in the highest positions in academia, despite their increasing participation. This article seeks to understand how women who have reached senior occupational positions in Higher Education Institutions have navigated their organisational and disciplinary settings. In the process we explore how experiences compare across male and female-dominated spaces, integrating field theory with Acker’s work on ‘gendered organisations’ to develop the idea of academic disciplines as ‘gendered spaces’. Empirically we draw upon a qualitative study of women professors working across science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) and non-STEMM disciplines in a large research-intensive university in the UK. Utilising Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the game’, we show how they navigate the academic game within the context of differing ‘gendered spaces’; complicit in the game yet recognising it as unfair, and thus (inadvertently) reproducing gendered structures and practices.

Source: Work Employment and Society

DOI: 10.1177/0950017020916182

Authors: Colette Fagan, Nina Teasdale

Institutions: University of Manchester, Glasgow Caledonian University

Language: English

Topic: Gender Diversity and Inequality

Subfield: Gender Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Gender equality, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,000