Women and foreigners: Understanding the importance of mobility in science careers

Araujo, Emilia

The aim of this presentation is to debate the experience of academic women who have periods of international mobility along their careers. Women are still experiencing diverse forms of social interdictions, which affect their social promotion and their self-concept and which may be considered as forms of inequality objectively and subjectively experienced. In the case of migratory or mobility trajectory, women are still socially restrained from the point of view of dominant male culture, which tends to conceive international mobility as a men’s competence, connoting women with lower emotional skills to support mobility, unless they are accompanied by a man[1]. Indicators continue to signal an increasing number of women researchers in mobility[2]. Nevertheless, the most striking conclusion is that women are experiencing these embargos in the crescent of a globalized world, allegedly much more transnational and free from traditional patterns. So, the questions we pose in this text are the following: what does it means to be (academic) women in mobility? To what extent do the categories of women and academia reinforce each other? What is their self-concept and how do they see and represent themselves?This presentation is based in a research project made in Portugal about the trajectories of portuguese researchers using interviews and content analysis.

[1] Transnational feminism has been fundamental in this regard.

[2] We considered in the study the Frascati manual definition of researcher. Literature on leisure and travelling shows the historical persistence of the categorization of women from the point of view of the steadiness and with home and nation safeguarding.

[3] This idea has been the object of several analyses in social theory.

[4] Independently from the diverse socio-cultural and political contexts of action, there is a notable similitude between patterns at different scales and levels of analysis.

484.6 Women and foreigners: Understanding the importance of mobility in science careers