Conference Agenda

Despite a more favourable initial representation of women in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, structural gender inequities manifest and unfold throughout the research academic life course (Silander et al. 2013). Such inequities are associated with unequal division of academic labour, with women performing significantly more academic service than men (Guarino & Borden, 2017); and disparate involvement in domestic and care work of male and female researchers (Cervia & Biancheri, 2017), leading to increased gender gaps in research production, leadership and collaboration, and, consequently, in academic promotion (Winslow & Davis, 2016).

Individual resources and characteristics, such as researchers’ seniority (position), field of study and gender, are among the strongest predictors of academic productivity and collaboration (Silander et al. 2013) there being a need to study all these factors in combination (Silander et al., 2013) from a longitudinal approach (Winslow and Davis, 2016).

In Latin America, the number of publications in the social sciences has been growing spectacularly over the last decade and especially in educational research, with the case of Chile being notorious (Guzmán-Valenzuela et al., 2022). However, with few exceptions, the role of researchers' gender on this trend has not received significant attention in Chile or was studied more than a decade ago (Bernasconi, 2010).

This study investigates gendered patterns of research dropout, output, leadership and collaboration across Chilean educational researchers’ careers, using life course and social network approaches. The research question of this study is as follows: How do the effects of gender on research dropout, article publication, leadership and collaboration patterns manifest across the career life course of Chilean education researchers?

Framework

Female participation in science and research is not equal to that of men (Poczatková & Křibíková, 2017). Several studies have shown that female scientists publish less (Winslow & Davis, 2016), are less cited and tend to be first authors less frequently (UNESCO, 2021).

In examining longitudinal trends in participation and productivity, it was found in the USA that the increase in participation of women in science over the past 60 years was accompanied by an increase of gender differences in both research productivity and impact (Huang et al., 2020). This imbalance increased during the COVID pandemic having a negative impact on the number of women scientific publications (Pinho-Gomes et al., 2020).

Regarding authorship, ‘globally, women account for fewer than 30% of fractionalised authorships, whereas men represent slightly more than 70%. (Larivière et al., 2013, p. 212). Further, articles with female key authors are less frequently cited than articles with male key authors, which is also explained by the fact that female scientists publish less (UNESCO, 2021). Gender also plays a role in patterns of academic collaboration (Mamtani et. al, 2020). Overall, women tend to build less homophilic and more egalitarian networks than men (Araújo et al., 2017; Díaz-Faes et al., 2020).

Furthermore, women academics tend to abandon academia at an early stage (Gasser & Shaffer, 2014) without necessarily following a progressive development through subsequent stages. This discontinuity across the academic life course has given way to what has been called ‘leaky pipeline’ in academia and in which personal and institutional factors work together so as to push women away from pursuing an academic career. Some studies have focused on the leak that takes place between the early academic years in women’s trajectories and the later years although it is recognised that more research is needed (Light, 2013).

Under the European Union framework program for research and innovation, Horizon Europe for the years 2021–2027, having the "Gender Equality Plan" becomes inevitable and necessary for a scientific institution to be able to apply for funds.
As part of the Horizon Europe Programme, all universities and scientific institutions applying for funding for research projects have been obliged to prepare and implement Gender Equality Plans (in short: GEP) by 2022. Having a GEP has become an eligibility criterion in all Horizon Europe calls. Such Plans have been developed in many Polish public Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), but the quality and methods of their implementation vary dramatically. The reality shows that there is often a discrepancy between the prepared strategic documents and the real level of changes in organizations that occur as a result of the implementation of the provisions of such documents. A special case is the GEP implementation process, due to the fact that this change is somehow "forced" by the conditions imposed by the European Commission.
The aim of the study is therefore to analyse and assess the possibility of introducing real changes in the organizational culture of Polish universities and scientific institutions in the field of gender equality on the basis of the quality of their GEPs. The main research problem is: Are real changes possible in the organizational culture of Polish public HEIs due to the introduction and systematic implementation of GEPs?
The most common problems of change leaders in organizations are: the incorrect assessment of possible disruptions in the implementation of change, unrealistic assessment of the ability to change among employees, and especially self-sustaining patterns of behaviour, thinking, feeling and work, including unconscious prejudices. In addition, there is always a natural resistance to change among staff, which results from specific elements of culture, and a certain scepticism resulting from previous (especially unsuccessful) attempts at change. Bearing in mind these "blind spots" of each organizational change, the following detailed research problems will be posed:
1) What is the quality of existing GEPs in Polish public HEIs?
2) How are goals and activities formulated? Are they possible to reach?
3) What potential barriers may occur in the process of implementing changes in the area of gender equality?

This paper presents the activities of the COST Action VOICES (CA21137, gendervoices.eu), a research network funded by the European Commission « to increase the visibility of inequalities faced by Young Researchers and Innovators (YRIs) from a gender perspective, and to promote a sustainable dialogue between YRIs and stakeholders in the research ecosystem at the systemic level (European & national policy-makers) and at the institutional level (senior researchers, academic managers) by creating a community of gender equality practitioners composed of various stakeholders (YRIs, independent researchers, academic managers, organizations) across Europe. » (MoU of VOICES). The Action is chaired by the presenter of the paper.

Besides more than 300 young researchers and senior researchers from all Europe, the network includes networks of stakeholders as EPWS (European Platform of Women Scientists) and Eurodoc (Platform of Young Researchers Associations across Europe) and is organised in six working groups. It organises an annual conference and an annual training school.

The paper will focus on the poor visibility of young researchers in institutional policies regarding equality and inclusion. If doctoral students are easy to track and benefit of specific policies at local and national level, post-doctoral students are more difficult to study because of the variety of status they have, the variety of career paths across disciplines and countries, and their high level of mobility. They are poorly represented in decision-making bodies and sometimes not even considered as full members of the staff because they are funded by another organisation, or not considered as researchers because they officially fill an administrative job in research support. The duration of this precarious status and the working conditions are also very variables from a case to the other. This can be summarised as a blind spot of gender equality policies. Nonetheless, many inequalities originate in early career stages and understanding how and why they develop would be crucial to design and implement effective policies to tackle them and to ensure more diversity in academic staff.

VOICES tries to document gender inequalities among young researchers, but also intersecting inequalities and existing policies to prevent them. It also gathers all stakeholders to promote new policies and will release a white book at the end of the Action in 2026.

A first conceptual framework was provided in the MoU of the Action, based on EU policy papers and recent literature (especially Murgia & Poggio 2019). This first draft is now challenged by the introduction of intersectionality including more dimensions than gender only. This new approach tends to challenge the institutional definition of "young researcher" and to promote new perspectives, notably a perspective from the experience of young researchers' lives telling their own stories instead of an institutional perspective based on the payroll. At the moment, VOICES framework is still in a process of co-creation across the deferent working groups under the coordination of Prof. Victoria Showunmi, leader of the intersectionality working group.