33. Gender and Education
Paper
Pioneering Paths: Understanding the Professional Growth of Female Academicians in the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering
Qing Wang, Ziyin Xiong
Shanghai Jiaotong Univers, China, People's Republic of
Presenting Author: Wang, Qing
Globally, female participation in academia has witnessed a great increase. At both European and country level, women published a similar number of publications at early stages of their career as male counterparts between 2015 and 2019 (She Figures 2021,2021). Yet, evidence across countries reveals that women are still underrepresented in academic leadership positions, and the phenomenon of “pipeline leakage” (Sonnert&Holton,1996) exists in the career development of female researchers.
One way to better increase representation of women in both tenured and administrative academic positions is to focus on the career development pattern of female scientists who have established themselves in positions of academic leadership. By exploring their career development regularity, it will provide reference for the relevant institutions to develop policies that better meet the career development needs of female academics and support their career development.
Guided by Bernardi’s conceptualization of the life course cube (2019), the purpose of this mixed study is to trace the career development experiences of female academicians in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, aiming to understand how they have pursued their professional careers. Specifically, this study will attempt to answer the following research questions: What are the common factors that contribute to the career development of Chinese female academicians?
The theory of the life course cube stems from the paradigm of life course research. Elder defined the life course as "the life path manifested through age differentiation over the course of a person's life"(Elder,1994), and it focuses on the development and changes of individuals throughout their entire life course, which aligns with the analysis of the career development experiences of female academicians in this study, especially the opportunities and challenges they face at different stages of their career development.
Particularly, the life course cube identifies a system of complex interdependencies. At the most basic level are three ‘first-order" interdependencies related to time, domains, and levels. These represent the core axes of the cube: (1) The time-related interdependence of the life course between the history of a life course, current life circumstances, and the future life course. (2) The interdependence between life domains, meaning that individuals’ goals, resources, and behaviors in one domain (such as work, family, education, or leisure) are interrelated with other domains. (3) The multilevel interdependence of the life course, which connects individual action and behavior over the life course (‘individual-action levels’) with the life courses of other people, social networks, and the ‘external’ societal opportunity structure (‘supra-individual levels’) and the ‘internal’ dispositions and psycho-physiological functioning (‘inner-individual levels’) (Bernardi et al.,2019).
Building on life course theory and by reviewing existing research on factors related to the career development of female researchers, this study explores the factors and their dynamic relationships that contribute to the career advancement of Chinese female academicians at three levels: supra-individual levels, individual action level, and inner-individual levels. (1) Supra-individual levels variables include the female researchers' social relationship (family relationship, mentorship relationship and collaborative relationship), organizational culture (gender equality policies, compensation systems and flexible arrangements, etc.), and the broader socio-cultural context (economic conditions, political environment and cultural customs, etc.). (2) Individual-action levels variables include educational background (institutions), mobility experiences (domestic and international mobility) and research ability (publications and patents). (3) Inner-individual levels factors refer to personal traits, including talent, interests, and willpower, etc.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis study adopts an explanatory sequential design. In the quantitative research, the Curriculum Vitae analysis method was used to collect data on birthplaces, alma maters, mobility experiences, research competence (h-index, citation counts the number of publications and the number of patents), and the years of receiving the academician title of female academicians in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. The data sources include official websites of their affiliated institutions, the Scopus and the incoPat.
The growing cycle of career of female academicians is defined as the time period starting from their undergraduate education to the point of obtaining the title of academician. Using Stata/SE 14.1 to carry out descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA and correlation analyses, this study hypothesized the following relationships between various variables and the growing cycle: (1) H1: There is a correlation between the reputations of the graduate institutions and the growing cycle; (2) H2: There are differences in the growing cycle among female academicians who studied at a single institution, two institutions, and three institutions; (3) H3: There are differences in the growing cycle between female academicians with domestic work mobility experiences and those without; (4) H4: There are differences in the growing cycle between female academicians with international work mobility experiences and those without; (5) H5: There is a correlation between the h-index and the growing cycle of female academicians; (6) H6: There is a correlation between citation counts and the growing cycle of female academicians; (7) H7: There is a correlation between the number of publications and the growing cycle of female academicians; (8) H8: There is a correlation between the number of patents and the growing cycle of female academicians.
For the qualitative data, the researcher employed convenience sampling to select female academicians for semi-structured interviews until theoretical saturation was reached. Considering the difficulty of accessing academicians, interviews and documentaries from mainstream media serve as supplementary materials. The interview outline was designed around the theoretical framework of this study. Applying thematic analysis, the interview transcripts were processed in the following sequence: familiarization with the data, initial coding, identifying themes, adjusting and refining themes, defining and naming themes, and writing the report (Braun&Clarke,2006). Through the constant comparison between new data and exiting categories, the researcher was able to identify the theoretical relationship among the themes.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsResults show that there are currently 115 female academicians in China. Their growing cycle averages 36.1 years. (1) At the supra-individual levels, female academicians are more likely to originate from economically developed regions. 67% of female academicians were born in economically developed areas in eastern China, while only 13% come from underdeveloped regions in the western part of the country. Family support is another supra-individual factor in the career development of women academicians, some of whom mentioned that their success was due in part to the fact that family members took on their responsibilities and duties as mothers, daughters and wives. (2) At the individual-action levels, outstanding research competence and good institutional reputations are important factors in obtaining the title of academician. Among them, a correlation analysis was conducted between the h-index and the growing cycle of academicians, resulting in a correlation coefficient of -0.3529 (P < 0.01), indicating that the higher the h-index of female academicians, the shorter their growing cycle. Similar patterns were observed in the correlation between citation, publication, patent invention, institutional reputations and the growing cycle. However, the effect of mobility experiences, and the plurality of graduating institutions on the growing cycle of women academicians was not significant. (3) At the inner-individual levels, almost all reports on female academicians mention that they have shown a passion for science, exceptional learning abilities, and strong determination from a young age, which have played a crucial role in their success in the field of science. The above findings are preliminary exploratory results. Further analysis and explanation will be conducted in future research to explore more related factors and the interdependencies among the three levels of factors, as well as summarize the whole pattern of career development of female academicians.
ReferencesEuropean Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. (2021). She
figures 2021: gender in research and innovation: statistics and indicators,
Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/06090.
Sonnert, G., & Holton, G. (1996). Career patterns of women and men in the sciences.
American Scientist, 84(1), 63-71. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-
journals/career-patterns-women-men-sciences/docview/215266071/se-2.
Bernardi, L., Huinink, J., & Settersten, R. A., Jr (2019). The life course cube: A tool for
studying lives. Advances in life course research, 41, 100258.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2018.11.004.
Elder, G. (1994). Time, Human Agency, and Social Change: Perspectives on the Life
Course. Social Psychology Quarterly, 57(1), 4-15.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2786971.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative
Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa.
33. Gender and Education
Paper
Gender Bias: The History of Discovery (and Neglect) of a Pedagogical Problem
Esther Berner
Helmut Schmidt University, Germany
Presenting Author: Berner, Esther
The contribution follows on from two problem perspectives mentioned centrally in the Network 33 call, namely “genders and their intersections” and the role of “biases in the form, content, access and opportunities of education”. The approach is historiographical, focusing on the phase in which educational science was established as a university discipline at the beginning of the 20th century in Germany. The focus is on the question of what findings existed at that time - even beyond educational science - regarding the meaning of sex and gender, but also other categories of difference, and what influence these have had on educational theory formation, but also on disciplinary practices of inclusion and exclusion. The work of the educational scientist and sociologist Mathilde Vaerting (1884-1977) and its (contemporary) (non-)reception will be discussed as an example.
Appointed to the University of Jena in 1923, Mathilde Vaerting was the first female professor of educational science at a German university. Her career was marked by marginalization and disavowal and ended when the National Socialists came to power. Even after the Second World War, she was unable to find a place in academia (Kraul 1999, 1987; Wobbe 1994, 1991). Her example, i.e. the openly aggressive and sometimes sexist hostility that permeated objective scientific criticism in the context of her (failed) habilitation project and as a professor in Jena (Plate 1930), represent the vehemence of the defense. The extent to which her biography and career confirmed her theory on sex and power is an irony of fate. This is one of the reasons why her name is hardly known in educational science today.
However, there is the assumption (which needs to be examined further) that her repression also has something to do with her scientific theses (Berner/Hofbauer 1923). Her focus was on analyzes of power and domination as well as the resulting conditions of oppression. In this context, at the beginning of the 1920s she had already pointed out in a paradigmatic way the importance of gender (later also of origin, race, etc.) as factor(s) in processes of inclusion and exclusion, findings that she judged to bo particularly relevant to the fields of educational science and praxis and scientific research in general (Berner 2024a forthcoming). Her social constructivist approach, with which she fundamentally questioned traditional assumptions and explanatory models of sex differences, can be viewed as quite unique in the academic context of her time, which was dominated by the so called “Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik”. In particular, the methodological consequences that she drew from this with regard to empirical psychological and educational research can be read as an attack against established educational research and theory development (ibid.).
Vaerting's criticism was not only directed at pedagogy, but also at the new empirical-differential psychology and the developments in aptitude testing (Vaerting 1923, 1931). She accused them of reproducing the preconceptions concerning gender differences (e.g. with regard to intellectual strengths and weaknesses, personality traits, preferences and inclinations). She also criticized contemporary (child) psychology of suggesting the inferiority of the young generations compared to the old (Vaerting 1928). This would result in oppression of the adolescents by the adults, which manifests itself in extensive incapacitation and the denial of property and participation rights. Analogous to the gender bias in sex psychology, Vaerting speaks of a “major source of error” in previous youth psychology, because it believes it can "identify peculiarities that are specific to adolescence as such. But this is a mistake. [...] The psychology of youth today is not the psychology of youth as such, but the psychology of youth as it is characteristic of its current power situation" (Vaerting, 1929, p. 240).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe researchis based on extensive source material, including Vaerting's writings, which have hardly been analyzed to date, as well as sources and documents that document the "hegemonic" theoretical discourse. In her work, Vaerting dealt in many ways with the renowned representatives of academic pedagogy and progresive education. She also reconstructs gender theories and debates on the basis of relevant medical, psychological, sexological and anthropological literature.
The analyses are guided by an approach from the history and sociology of science that is based on Ludwik Fleck's (2017) theory of "Denkstile" and "Denkkollektive". The rejection of Vaerting's theoretical and methodological positions and the findings derived from them with regard to constructions of difference will be examined as a conflict between competing "Denkstile". In addition, it is important to contextualize Vaerting's criticism of contemporary gender relations within the framework of the virulent gender debates. The matriarchy discourse of the time is of primary importance here - Vaerting (1921) herself referred to matriarchy theories, which were much discussed at the time (Berner 2024b forthcoming).
Various concepts and terms from Fleck's work can be fruitfully applied and tested.
The methodological errors and problems of interpretation cited by Vaerting can be interpreted in terms of Fleck's constraints of thought ("Denkzwänge") and the harmony of deception ("Harmonie der Täuschung") that is effective in the process.
There are various indications, for example from the field of comparative anatomy and physiology, that gender research at Vaerting's time was guided by strong mental constraints. Results that did not conform to the prevailing stereotypes were repeatedly reinterpreted - subject to the harmony of deception - and contradictory results were marginalized. The fact that the conclusions drawn from the results were sometimes diametrically opposed had already led contemporaries to make ironic comments (Thompson 1903). The relevant writings of the American psychologist Helen Bradford Thompson were known to Vaerting and were quoted by her (Vaerting 1923). Where, for example, comparisons with the animals in evolutionary theories spoke in favor of the superiority of the female sex, the argument was simply reversed (Voß 2010); and outstanding achievements of girls and women in school or science were often interpreted as the result of typical female diligence and imitative instinct, which were then contrasted with male intellect and originality.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsWith her writings, Mathilde Vaerting took a critical approach to the oppression of women in their diverse lives, which means that she can be classified as part of the contemporary emancipation movement. By focusing on the reproduction of gender stereotypes in science, her analyzes also went beyond the gender debate that was common at the time. In fact, the gender of knowledge, problematized by Mathilde Vaerting, has been one of the key questions in gender research since the 1970s until today (Jähnert 2010). If Vaerting´s work had been received appropriately, it could have played a pioneering role in the discovery of gender bias and specially its role in educational research.
In several ways, her style of thinking was not compatible with the academic pedagogy. It was focused on (social) difference rather than the universality of ideas and problematized power and oppression beyond a teleological harmony of ends. Her approach and knowledge base were interdisciplinary, sometimes eclectic, but open to empirical sciences and internationally informed. It should be noted that Vaerting formulated her theses and theories at a time when women's access to academic science was highly contested and open or latent resistance was widespread among male colleagues. Vaerting's analyzes were intended to shake the foundations of male hegemony in science. The fact that there was an awareness of this threat in those circles can be seen in the many 'findings' based on so called hard facts (from medicine, anatomy, physiology, anthropology etc.) that were published to serve the millennia-old prae-idea (“Prä-Idee”) (Fleck 2017) of congenital female deficiencies (e.g. Möbius 1900; Runge 1900; Krafft-Ebing 1902; Matthias 1929). Where no strategic calculation was at work, it were perhaps unconscious compulsions in thinking ("Denkzwänge) in the sense of Fleck.
ReferencesBerner, E. (2024a forthcoming). „Gender Bias“: M. Vaertings Beitrag zur Entdeckung eines pädagogischen Problems.
Berner, E. (2024b forthcoming). Männerherrschaft - Frauenherrschaft: Zur Einordnung M. Vaertings in den zeitgenössischen Matriarchatsdiskurs
Berner, E./Hofbauer, S. (2023). Mathilde Vaerting (1884–1977) und ihr (unzeitgemäßer) Beitrag zu Pädagogik und Macht. Historica Scholastica 9, no. 1, 99-122.
Fleck, Ludwig: Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache : Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt a.M. Suhrkamp.
Jähnert, G. (2010). Geschlechterstudien / Gender Studies. In: Tenorth, H.-E. (ed.): Geschichte der Universität unter den Linden 1810-2010. Praxis ihrer Disziplinen. Bd. 6. Berlin: Akademie, 313-329.
Krafft-Ebing von, R. (1902). Psychosis Menstrualis. Eine klinisch-forensische Studie. Stuttgart: Enke.
Kraul, M. (1987). Geschlechtscharakter und Pädagogik: Mathilde Vaerting (1884–1977). In: Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, no. 22, 475–489.
Kraul, M. (1999). Jenas erste Professorin: Mathilde Vaerting. Leben und Werk im Kreuzfeuer der Geschlechterproblematik. In: Horn, G. (ed.): Die Töchter der Alma mater Jenensis. Neunzig Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität von Jena. Rudolstadt, Jena: Hain, 91–112.
Matthias, E. (1929). Die Frau, ihr Körper und dessen Pflege durch die Gymnastik. Berlin: Eigenbrödler.
Möbius, P.J. (1900). Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes. Halle: Marhold.
Plate, L. (1930). Feminismus unter dem Deckmantel der Wissenschaft. In: Eberhard, E.F.W. (ed): Geschlechtscharakter und Volkskraft. Grundprobleme des Feminismus. Darmstadt/Leipzig, 196–215.
Runge, M. (1900). Das Weib in seiner geschlechtlichen Eigenart. 4. Aufl. Berlin: Springer.
Thompson, H.B. (1903). The mental traits of sex. An experimental investigation of the normal mind in men and women. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Vaerting, M. (1921). Die weibliche Eigenart im Männerstaat und die männliche Eigenart im Frauenstaat. Karlsruhe i.B.: G. Braunsche Hofbuchdruckerei und Verlag.
Vaerting, M. (1923). Wahrheit und Irrtum in der Geschlechterpsychologie. Karlsruhe i.B.: G. Braunsche Hofbuchdruckerei und Verlag.
Vaerting, M. (1928). Die Macht der Massen. Berlin: Pfeiffer.
Vaerting, M. (1929). Die Macht der Massen in der Erziehung. Berlin: Pfeiffer.
Vaerting, M. (1931). Lehrer und Schüler. Ihr gegenseitiges Verhalten als Grundlage der Charaktererziehung. Leipzig: Barth.
Voß, H.-J. (2015). Making Sex Revisited. Dekonstruktion des Geschlechts aus biologisch-medizinischer Perspektive. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Wobbe, Th. (1991). Ein Streit um die akademische Gelehrsamkeit: Die Berufung Mathilde Vaertings im politischen Konfliktfeld der Weimarer Republik. In: Zentraleinrichtung zur Förderung von Frauenstudien und Frauenforschung an der Freien Universität Berlin (ed.). Berliner Wissenschaftlerinnen stellen sich vor, no. 8.
Wobbe, Th. (1994). Mathilde Vaerting (1884–1977). “Es kommt alles auf den Unterschied an (…) der Unterschied ist Grundelement der Macht“. In: Hahn, B. (ed.): Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Von Lou Andreas-Salomé bis Hannah Arendt. München: Beck, 123–135.
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