Conference Agenda

This paper investigates high achieving racialized and minoritized female junior scholars’ negotiations of (in)visibility in academia – more specifically within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in Denmark. Women are generally underrepresentated in STEM and even more so when it comes to women with ethnic minoritized backgrounds.

Some bodies by their mere presence become a source of surprise and disruption in the settings and spaces of academia. This paper takes, as its point of departure, the question of what it means to become a surprise. Working from a conceptual framework of racialized differentiation as an affective, intersectional, and spatialized process (Deleuze 1990, Ahmed 2012, Manning 2023) and an empirical foundation of qualitative interviews with racialized minoritized female scholars in STEM, the analysis delves into the affective, spatial and embodied experiences of standing out or passing as a racialized and gendered Other in academia. Focus is specifically on how the experience of being a surprise element relates to structural and hegemonic orderings of the university as a space embodying some bodies and not others as naturally belonging (Puwar 2004). This entails a focus on the meritocracy of academia, the negotiation of visibility-invisibility and the right to stay opaque.

The analysis shows how the female scholars’ narratives, experiences and strategies can expand our knowledge on how processes of racialization, othering and opacity take form in higher education in ways that fixate them in a state of perpetual arrival and as a source of potential surprise. This has relevance to how it is possible to think about diversity and inclusion in higher education.c

Promotions criteria are often held to be neutral, objective descriptors of the standard tasks and levels required to achieve promotion. As such, they provide institutions with apparently transparent mechanisms for sorting out the deserving and the not yet deserving, and they offer those applying for promotion an apparently clear list of requirements and standards that must be demonstrated in order for promotion to be achieved. And yet, research indicates the continuation of gender pay gaps (HESA, 2023), research funding gaps (Weale and Barr, 2018), and an academic promotions success gap shaped by gender, race and class (Bailey, 2022). Despite many years of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives in institutions, promotions practices continue to act as gatekeepers for women academics, producing inequitable outcomes. The result is that in the UK women are highly underrepresented in senior management roles, particularly in SET subjects, but overrepresented in part time roles, lower salary bands and teaching only contracts (AdvanceUK, 2021). In 2019/20 fifty percent of academics were women but seventy-two percent of professors were men (AdvanceUK, 2021). These UK trends are mirrored across Europe.

In this context of these ongoing equities, this paper puts promotions criteria and promotions practices in the spotlight. It argues that the apparently ‘neutral’ promotions criteria are the vehicle for the enactment of deeply embedded and often hidden gendered political micropractices. Many women academics applying for promotion to professor have had the experience of being told they are ‘not ready’ for promotion by male peers but this notion of ‘readiness’ is itself deeply shaped by gendered factors that hide under the radar. Interpretations regarding who or how ‘professorship’ or research leadership should and can be demonstrated, or who possesses the required attributes for promotion, are shaped by gendered assumptions. The paper builds on work by Yamamoto’s (2019: 167) which indicates that women in research leadership positions are often there at the behest of a patriarchal powerbase built on ‘elite, academic, male, social and cultural capital’; on Thornton’s (2013: 3) exploration of the masculinist cultural practices of neoliberal universities; and on Morley’s (2016: 5) comments on the ‘virility culture’ of competitive individualism that thrives in contemporary HEIs.

This paper arises from a current UKRI/UK University funded project entitled WomenCAN: Breaking Promotion Barriers, Changing University Cultures, this paper develops a feminist theoretical approach which highlights, attends to, and seeks to address the demonstrative mangle of promotions practices in the performative university. The objectives of the project are to:

• Provide a robust evidence base for culture change initiatives to advance women’s research leadership skills and career progression;
• Build a flexible, distributed leadership structure of women change agents to embed practical systemic change across the university
• Pilot a coaching programme of targeted initiatives for women academics.

Based on empirical data, the paper explores how promotions criteria contribute to the invisibilisation and stigmatisation of women’s’ chosen career and promotion pathways. It illuminates how prevailing structures, cultures and identities (O’Connor, 2020) within HEIs construe women’s choices as lacking in legitimacy in academic authority structures which continue to privilege research over leadership, teaching, citizenship and engagement. The paper contributes a detailed understanding of how the specifics of promotions criteria and promotions practices gain micropolitical animacy, force and power in institutions, in ways which have significant and negative effects on women’s career progression and on perceptions of women’s institutional value. Project findings indicate that, while long-standing patterns of inequality are changing, they are doing so at a glacial pace, and that institutional EDI initiatives are insufficiently agile or targeted to prevent the continual re-entrenchment of power and the reproduction of inequitable gendered practices at the micro-level.