Conference Agenda

Despite nearly half of all entry-level PhD candidates across the EU27 countries being women, women remain underrepresented at the highest levels of academic employment (e.g. full professorship or ‘grade A’ positions), holding less than a third of these positions; the largest gap remains in science and engineering, where women represent just 20% of the ‘grade A’ positions (European Commission, 2025). Amongst heads of EU27 academic institutions, roughly a quarter are women (European Commission, 2025). Such trends are visible worldwide, pointing to the prevalence of un/welcoming, sometimes overtly hostile, masculinised academic cultures that reward uninterrupted availability, informal sponsorship, competitiveness, and care-free career trajectories (Orupabo, 2025; Jones & Floyd, 2024).

Gender inequity in higher education is not a problem of numeric parity alone, but of how organisational cultures are made visible (or rendered invisible) through data practices. What institutions choose to measure, whose experiences/what experiences count as evidence, and how this information is read – each profoundly shape whether gender-based inequities, harassment and violence are understood as structural problems requiring recognition and cultural change, or as individualised issues of “pipeline leakage,” merit, choice, temperament, or mis/interpretation. When university data metrics on outcomes such as student experience and academic career progression are gathered and understood without interrogation of underlying gender norms in higher education, institutional inequities can appear as individual deficit; experiences of sexism and gender-related violence can be more easily explained away as either one-off incidents, perpetrated by ‘bad actors’ or, worse, exaggerated, fallacious and not worthy of institutional attention.

Gender-related harassment/violence and more everyday forms of sexism in university settings are enabled when academic organisational life normalises male-coded entitlement to space, attention, and gatekeeping power, while making the costs of resistance and reporting high. The UniSAFE prevalence report provides a concrete indicator of this dynamic through its reporting findings; when most targets do not report, and when uncertainty and non-recognition are common, the institution’s “official” data will systematically understate the problem – allowing sexist cultures to persist without organisational accountability (Lipinsky et al., 2022). Of course, such misrecognition is exacerbated by global political movements aimed at the destruction of equity and diversity as principles of inclusive governance (Butler, 2024) – sentiments that find their way into university spaces and complicate the pragmatics of higher education policy initiatives focused on gender equity and sexual harassment (Gray et al., forthcoming).

In this symposium, we grapple with the conference theme of ‘knowing and acting’ within the context of gender inequities and gender-related violence in higher education. Across the three included papers, offering national perspectives from Australia, England and Denmark, we consider the framing of institutional conditions and supports. From the Australian context, we present findings from a national survey of academics detailing significant differences in how incidents of ‘everyday sexisms’ are read by men, women and gender diverse academics, with implications for ‘knowing and acting’ to create safer and more inclusive workplace cultures. From England, we present university staff members’ perspectives on gender-related violence and contextual enablers, considering which institutions ‘act’ and in what ways. Lastly, from Denmark, we present the experiences of early-career academic women working in male-dominated STEM departments, where over-reliance on representation metrics obscures recognition of the everyday inequities and the emotional labour of women’s diversity work. As a group, these papers ask how the current conditions of a neoliberal, metric-driven academic landscape impact what institutional leaders (think they) know about the experiences of women and gender diverse people in the academy, what is seen or obscured, and the direction of institutional action towards gender equity.

Systemic gender inequities in academia are sustained via the interpersonal practice of ‘everyday sexisms’: incidents, circumstances or situations where the sensation of (hetero)sexism (and accompanying racism, ableism, etc.) is present but could be explained away, minimised or misrecognised (Savigny, 2014). Everyday sexisms are a by-product of ‘lad culture’ (Jackson & Sundaram, 2020) and a causal factor in Australia’s ‘leaky pipeline’, where qualified, capable women and gender diverse scholars exit academia prior to reaching the professoriate (Strachan et al., 2016). When institutions communicate their commitment to gender equity through repeated discourse, institutional leaders – and male institutional leaders most of all – believe that their organisational culture supports this (Cortis et al., 2021). These attitudes matter, since academic leaders – disproportionally men in Australia (Hamilton et al., 2022) – set the agenda for if/how gender equity is addressed. Our survey research with N = 1257 academics (67% women) across 12 public Australian universities included original, intersectional vignettes of everyday sexisms, developed from academics’ verbatim accounts (see Gray et al., 2025). Vignettes were followed by six closed-ended original items investigating perceived frequency, plausibility and follow-up responses for the individual(s) involved and for the university more broadly. We focus here on the four included vignettes particularly relevant to women’s leadership and promotion trajectories in academia. Findings illustrated substantial discrepancies in how academics view instances of everyday sexisms. On average, women and gender diverse academics felt that the incident or situation detailed was more problematic, happened more frequently, felt more realistic to them, and should be addressed by the university as compared to their male academic colleagues. Despite viewing these incidents or situations as less problematic or realistic, men academics were significantly more likely to agree that (1) these would be taken seriously and that (2) they knew where to find policy/information about these types of incidents/situations at their university. Findings highlight an unintended consequence of Australian universities’ public-facing commitments to gender equity assuring institutional awareness of, and attention to-, barriers to women and gender diverse academics’ career progression and leadership. Responses from participating men academics point to them taking this messaging at face value. Our data supports the need for university leaders to attune to the prevalence of everyday sexisms amongst academics and to prioritise access to quality data detailing its manifestations and continued impact on women and gender diverse academics’ visibility, voice and access to institutional leadership.

Cortis, N., Foley, M., & Williamson, S. (2021). Change agents for defending the status quo? How senior leaders frame workplace gender equality. Gender, Work and Organisations, 29(1), 205-221. Gray, E. M., Ullman, J., Blaise, M., & Pollitt, J. (2025). Masculinism, institutional violence and #MeToo: Understanding Australian university responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 57(2), 159–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2024.2317386 Hamilton, M., Williams, A., & Baird, M. (2022). Gender inclusive practices and work-life balance in Australian Universities. A Report for Universities Australia. University of Sydney. https://universitiesaustralia.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Gender-inclusive-practices-and-work-life-balance-in-Australian-universities_Dec-2022.pdf Jackson, C., & Sundaram, V. (2020). Lad Culture in Higher Education. Routledge. Savigny, H. (2014). Women, Know Your Limits: Cultural Sexism in Academia. Gender and Education, 26(7), 794–809. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2014.970977. Strachan, G., Peetz, D., Whitehouse, G., Bailey, J., Broadbent, K., May, R., Troup, C., & Nesic, M. (2016). Women, Careers and Universities: Where to from here? Griffith University Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing. https://staff.uq.edu.au/files/245/women-careers-university.pdf.

Universities are key sites of gender-related violence in the UK, including in digitalised forms. Crime survey data show that full-time students are more likely to have experienced sexual assault than people in any other occupational type (OfS, 2022), and Office for National Statistics data show that between March 2018 and March 2020 students in England and Wales were over three times more likely than the national average to have experienced sexual assault (Lewis, 2022). There are similar patterns in other countries, for example, Australia (Heywood et al., 2022), Columbia, Bangladesh and Nigeria (Miles, 2023). In the USA, where research on sexual harassment and violence in university settings has a much longer tradition, the National College Women Sexual Victimisation Survey in 1996/97 found that between 20% and 25% of women university students would experience sexual victimisation before they graduated (Fisher et al., 2000). The latest (large-scale) survey conducted by the Association of American Universities showed a prevalence rate among women undergraduates for nonconsensual sexual contact by force or inability to consent of 26% (Cantor et al., 2020). In this paper, we draw on our data from the first UK study of university staff perspectives on ‘lad culture’ to argue that universities are what Kelly refers to as ‘conducive contexts’ for gender-related violence. Our data were generated through in-depth interviews with 72 staff in a wide range of roles across six universities in England (Jackson & Sundaram, 2020). We build our analysis and argument drawing on Liz Kelly's concept of 'conducive contexts' and Raewyn Connell’s ‘gender regimes’. This integration of frameworks enables us not only to develop new understandings of what makes universities conducive contexts but, importantly, also to consider which types of higher education institutions, which particular contexts within institutions, and which institutional cultures are especially conducive for gender-related violence. In doing so, we offer a novel and nuanced, theoretically-informed understanding of how gender-related violence is enabled within universities, which has significant implications for how to address it.

Cantor, D. et al. (2020). Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct. Washington DC: Association of American Universities. Fisher, B.S., Cullen, F.T., & Turner, M.G. (2000). The Sexual Victimization of College Women. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Heywood, W., Myers, P., Powell, A., Meikle, G., & Nguyen, D. (2022). National Student Safety Survey: Report on the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault among university students in 2021. Melbourne: The Social Research Centre. Jackson, C., & Sundaram, V. (2020). Lad culture in higher education: Sexism, sexual harassment and violence. London: Routledge. Lewis, J. (2022). Sexual harassment and violence in further and higher education. London: House of Commons Library, UK Parliament. Miles, N. (2023). Sexual violence in UK Higher Education: Prevalence, Influencing Factors and Recommendations. Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network Working Paper: King’s College London. OfS (2022). Tackling sexual misconduct in universities and colleges. Insight brief. London: OfS.

This paper examines how early-career women scientists navigate and contest men-dominated academic cultures within STEM departments at Danish universities. While gendered stereotypes and inequalities shape academic work more broadly, research consistently shows that the gender gap in STEM widens at each level of the academic hierarchy, resulting in underrepresentation of women in senior positions (Mathura, 2024). Recent scholarship has shifted attention toward systemic conditions, highlighting how organizational structures, gender bias in hiring and promotion, unequal access to networks and mentoring, everyday sexism and intersectional inequalities collectively constrain women’s academic careers in STEM (Bendl & Schmidt, 2010; Blackwell et al., 2009; Khawaja, 2025; Salmon, 2022). Focusing on early-career women scientists in STEM, the paper examines what I conceptualize as everyday diversity work: the small, often informal practices through which women resist masculinized scientific norms, everyday sexism, and gender bias (Vertelyte, 2025). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on atmospheric work (2014), I approach diversity work as a form of mood work (Staunæs & Vertelyte, 2024) that intervenes in the affective life of organizations. In particular, the analysis foregrounds the role of noise making. Conceptualized as affective disturbance (Thompson, 2017), the paper analyses how noise associated with women doing diversity work interrupt dominant masculinized narratives, even as they are frequently dismissed as emotional, unprofessional or ‘too loud’. As an affective condition historically associated with women, unruliness, and disorder, noise draws attention to gendered inequalities by interrupting everyday academic practices that are otherwise treated as neutral, rational, or simply “how things are done.” Through such noisy interventions, early-career women do not simply react to exclusionary environments - they actively reconfigure organizational atmospheres, exposing the affective and gendered foundations of academic life in STEM. Drawing on 13 in-depth qualitative interviews with early-career women scientists conducted between 2022 and 2023, the analysis situates these experiences within a specifically Danish context, where gender is often framed as irrelevant due to a pervasive self-image of Denmark as a gender-equal society. Drawing on critiques of postfeminist gender regimes (Skewes, 2023; Utoft, 2021), the paper shows how this framing paradoxically coexists with the growing hyper-visibility of diversity action plans most of which remain narrowly focused on women’s representation, while paying little attention to improving women’s everyday working conditions in the here and now.

Ahmed, S. (2014). Not in the Mood. New Formations, 82, 13–28. Bendl, R., & Schmidt, A. (2010). From ‘Glass Ceilings’ to ‘Firewalls’—Different Metaphors for Describing Discrimination. Gender, Work & Organization, 17(5), 612–634. Mathura, S., Ed. (2024). Empowering Women in STEM: Working Together to Inspire the Future. 1st ed. CRC Press. Salmon, U. (2024). ‘It's Wicked Hard to Fight Covert Racism’: The Case of Microaggressions in Science Research Organizations. Gender, Work & Organization, 31(3), 727–748. Staunæs, D., & Vertelyte, M. (2024). Hopeful Things as Minor Interventions in Educational Atmospheres: A Diffractive Translation of Sara Ahmed’s ‘Happy Objects’ to Nordic Diversity Work. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (RERM), 15(1), 1-20. Thompson, M. (2017). Beyond unwanted sound: Noise, affect and aesthetic moralism. Bloomsbury Academic. Utoft, E. H. (2021). Maneuvering within Postfeminism: A Study of Gender Equality Practitioners in Danish Academia. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(1), 301–317. Vertelyte, M. (2025). The Minor Gestures of Diversity Work: Experiences of Women Scientists in Danish STEM Academia. Gender and Education, online pre-print, 1–16.