Being a Woman in Academia: Conceptual Metaphors in the Narratives of High-Performing Female Scientists in Chile

In Chile, women’s participation in scientific production accounts for less than a third of the total, placing them in a minority position within this field, facing unequal working conditions and a complex network that hinders the professional development of women in science (Fardella et al., 2021). While studies on science and gender have proliferated in recent years, they have mainly focused on describing and analyzing academic conditions and environments. In contrast, the qualitative experiences of women in this field, with all their nuances and complexities, have been scarcely explored. In this context, this study aims to examine how female scientists challenge the construction of academia as an androcentric space through their discursive practices in describing and inhabiting this space. For this purpose, 60 high-performing, well-established female academics in Chile were interviewed, and the conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) they used to define, represent, and validate their experiences within academia were analyzed (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016; van Leeuwen, 2008). Identifying metaphors as a central part of their narratives not only allows us to recognize the diversity of individual experiences but also to identify shared elements that arise from experiences that cut across differences in gender, class, age, discipline, race, ethnicity, among others. Finally, the analysis was assisted by corpus linguistics methods (CADS) (Partington et al., 2013). Preliminary results suggest that there are various conceptual semantic fields recurrently used in describing the experiences of women in academic spaces, among them BIRTH (in describing the difficulty of inhabiting this space) and WAR (to highlight defense/survival practices adopted by women to withstand the academic space). Consequently, this work proposes new conceptual tools for understanding science from women’s experiences, beyond merely describing the unequal social context they face.