Glass Elevator Versus Sticky Floor: Tackling Gender (In-)Equality in Academia

Women’s under-representation in science and technology has been a major concern for the European Commission since nearly two decades (c.f. ETAN Report 2000, ENWISE Report 2004, Gender and Excellence in the Making 2004, WIRDEM Report 2008, Benchmarking Policy Measures for Gender Equality in Science 2008, She Figures 2013). While first the attention was brought the women themselves, the research during the years emphasized more and more the importance of structural change for achieving gender equality in research organisations or institutions of higher education. Supported by Joan Acker’s work in 1990, this led to the common recognition of organisations as ‘gendered organisations’. Organisations and institutions cannot proclaim gender neutrality as gender as social category is deeply embedded in all organisational processes.

The European project ‘GenderTime’ wants to tackle this challenge by initializing organizational structural change through identifying the best systematic approaches in the participating institutions with the help of tailor-made gender action plans. The plans involve activities in the fields of careers development & networking, institutional culture, management & policy making, recruitment, staff development & support, and work-life balance. But even though these individual measures benefiting career progression of academic staff can be considered as a crucial factor, it is important to focus on the prevalent organizational structure itself for achieving gender equal workplace conditions (Castaño et al 2010).

In our presentation we want to discuss how the female academic staff, who is mainly the target group of those implemented gender measures perceives their organizational work culture.  Are the activities considered as helpful and/or career supporting? Or are informal support mechanisms much more efficient in term of achieving a scientific career? Our deliberations will be based on the results of a quantitative survey on ‘working culture’ carried out at the participating institutions supplemented by qualitative focus groups.