Inequalities and the Paradigm of Excellence in Academia

Fiona Jenkins, Barbara Hoenig, Susanne Maria Weber, Andrea Wolffram, Fiona Jenkins, Barbara Hoenig, Susanne Maria Weber, Andrea Wolffram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780429581977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume examines the criteria of excellence producing inequalities of gender in the daily working environment and evaluation of academics.

Policymakers have increasingly placed emphasis on gender equality as part of a strategy for achieving research excellence, and efforts to reduce gender bias have become mainstream. This book suggests that this goal has remained elusive in practice due to continuing under-representation of women across many academic and scientific fields. Questioning the old structures of male dominance still prevalent in national research policy, the book explores the effects of institutional values and practices on the careers of academics, particularly the academic identities of women and their career developments.

It focuses on case studies drawn from Europe while also highlighting the rise of new forms of public management and a neoliberal framing of the value of academic work, that have a much broader global reach. Using participatory research, the book analyses contemporary forms of "gendered excellence" in an intersectional and international perspective. It will be of interest to junior/senior researchers, teachers, and scholars in sociology, education, gender studies, history, political science and science and technology studies.

Part I
“Inclusive excellence”How are excellence and gender equality combined?

Chapter 1 Are equality and excellence a happy marriage of terms?How gender figures in the business case for change

Fiona Jenkins

DOI: 10.4324/9780429198625-3

1.1 Introduction: Advancing women and excellence together

The slow pace of women’s advancement into the professional ranks of academia has long been a source of frustration to those seeking change. Despite legislation on equal opportunities that dates from the 1970s and 1980s in Europe and the Anglophone world, women’s presumed underperformance relative to men in science and the arts has proved a resilient rationale for leaving intact the many barriers to full participation in the academic world they faced. Meritocracy alone was assumed to be the operative means to establishing excellence, and if the results of the system it validated promoted men and discarded women, this was taken to simply reveal where talent, application, and hard work lay. Although unfortunately this view has hardly been laid to rest as an article of belief in many working contexts – as recent research continues to show (cf. Wolffram 2018) – it is currently being strongly challenged at an institutional level from two influential directions that attempt to show how achieving gender equality is in fact a condition for realising true excellence.

The first strand of gender equity advocacy aims to reveal the biases, implicit and unconscious, that structure allegedly meritocratic processes, as well as to identify features of systemic disadvantage to women, for instance arising from career breaks. Where such interferences with assessment of genuine talent can be identified, it is argued they can be corrected for by mechanisms designed to bracket them in assessing academic careers on equal terms. A vast literature exists on the role and impact of implicit biases in distorting outcomes for women.¹ Here the metrics of excellence, including citation and other reputational indices, are sometimes regarded as allies for women in demonstrating by objective measures the value of their research, which might otherwise be vulnerable to more subjective or less nuanced judgements. On the one hand, appeals can certainly be made to such metrics to reveal bias especially where these are specifically developed to allow us to assess contributions in ways that factor career disruptions (cf. Klocker and Drozdzewski 2012) for instance, or provide field-weighted impact measures (cf. Elsevier 2017). On the other hand, the evaluation of excellence, through esteem factors, journal rankings, citation rates, and so forth, has also been shown to have an impact on maintaining, not lessening, gender-based inequalities (van den Brink and Benschop 2012; van Arensbergen, van der Weijden, and van den Besselaar 2012; Lincoln et al. 2012). The question of how much the excellence metrics, as such, advantage or disadvantage women has thus far received a mixed answer.

The second angle, and the one which forms the primary focus of this chapter, tends to incorporate the insights about bias, but puts its emphasis firmly on the benefits – to research, to society, and to optimising human resources – of improving diversity. Here, diversity is considered as an indicator of progress calibrated to the inclusion of minority identities and groups in areas largely dominated by the white heterosexual male. Diversity, measurable by counting participation rates for identified outsiders, has thus become the marker of the achievement of equality not only across gender differences but also across racial, cultural, and occasionally class differences. Whereas the first approach of eliminating bias could be understood as aiming strictly at fairness and thus improving the meritocratic distribution of opportunity and reward, the second promotes a positive vision of the contribution of gender equality to the academic equivalent of the bottom line in business, namely excellence. Here excellence is indexed to the contribution research makes to innovation, social utility, and the public good. Gender equality is incorporated within broader diversity initiatives and deemed to introduce sources of fresh insight, new perspectives, and creativity.

Equality and excellence are thus brought together to form the happy marriage of my title in two somewhat different ways. In the first instance, greater equity in judgement of merit is the path to discerning true excellence and requires that we constantly re-evaluate the ways in which merit is being judged to ensure unfair biases are removed. In the second, epistemic and creative resources associated with demographic differences are mobilised and the relationship between researchers and society is stressed, implying both the value of plural perspectives and the importance of a representative function for researchers in maintaining that relationship as one of positive service to the public good. Moreover, as this is the academic version of the business case for gender equality, one which stresses the advantages of greater diversity for improving profitability, the public good is heavily inflected with a market and consumer-based understanding of what that is. For instance, innovative research will benefit us all in answering our needs as consumers of healthcare, as buyers of new products, and as users of complex systems. This promotes a vision of excellence that is neither mere curiosity-driven research nor politically or socially motivated, except in a technocratic sense. Rather, innovation through research promises to find business applications and contributes to the improvement of human life by such means. Indeed, the business case for gender equality has clearly been inserted into a neoliberal shift in the conception of academic institutions. Excellence is linked to an ideal of social utility; it is the rationale of an academic world that has bowed to the demand that it demonstrate the worth of its activities to the taxpayers who fund it, the innovators who capitalise its research, and the politicians and punters who suspect it of ivory-tower disconnection from real-world issues (cf. Readings 1997). In this respect, the aim of excellence signals a form of high performance answerable for its evaluation not simply to the intrinsic values of truth or academic integrity, but to the conceptions of worth derived from this powerful nexus of interests, forming a site of consensus over the importance of productivity, efficacy, and progress within marketised conceptions of public good.

It is in the context of this articulation of the value of research that the idea of diversity as mattering for providing a specific type of human resource linked to knowledge finds its home. Moreover, the language of innovation is at the foreground of the claims made for the creative energy introduced by diversity, and substantively shapes the interpretation of what research excellence is and why equality matters. To enfold the aim of improving gender equality within the advantages that increased diversity brings to innovation is thus a consequential move, with implications not only for regarding women’s inclusion as valuable but also simultaneously for normative conceptions of how research is oriented to particular ends or how knowledge is configured as useful. The efficacy of this second approach to promoting gender equality in academic institutions has not yet, to my knowledge, been empirically assessed in the same way as has been for the first. Although this chapter cannot take on that task, it offers some preliminary – hopefully provocative – considerations on how the business case functions as a discourse to specify the felicitous relation of excellence and equality, serving as a rhetorical intervention in the name of advancing women in academia in line with other patterns of gender mainstreaming in non-academic worlds. Advantageous as this coupling may seem, as with all happy marriages, it should not be wholly immune from critical scrutiny. Indeed, precisely its happiness as an effective union of fairness and profitability, within which differences are overcome to form a unity of purpose, carries a symbolic significance that repays examination.

For instance, at the symbolic level we can see that this is a site of consensus-building around recognising the importance of gender equality for the improvement of performance, and thus the prosperity it brings, and as such unites a range of sectors that join in promoting it, including government, business, gender equality advocates, research funding bodies, and universities. It may also be construed, however, as a site where differences between such sectors are overcome, and their distinct missions and publics are merged. The discourse of excellence, platitudinous as its invocation can so often seem,² in this way receives orientation and grounding, combining claims to promote justice and public good with business measures of success. In the reflections offered here on the merits of this happy marriage, I am broadly interested in the wide range of investments it bears, such that it functions to flesh out a contemporary, neoliberal version of the purpose and thus excellence of research, just as much as it serves the more obvious project of rationalising and justifying diversity initiatives. Although there initially seems much to appreciate in the reconfiguration of gender equality discourses as an effective business case for change – not least by creating a persuasive argument about the gains to knowledge that can be derived from women’s full participation in its production – this chapter nonetheless proposes the urgency of developing a more rounded picture of the presuppositions and values that are being advanced, thus extending existing feminist critiques of the neoliberal turn in approaches to advocating gender equality (cf. Fraser 2009; Ahmed 2012).

A happy marriage serves as an emblem of mutuality of interests both at the level of the couple and at the level of society taken as a whole. It signifies the beneficial harmonisation of elements in potential or actual conflict and the renewal of social contracts which claim to regulate life in the interests of all (men and women alike). As used here, with a feminist eye on how such reconciliation can harbour renewed subordination and division, the ideal of the happy marriage alerts us to the dangers in conjoining what are arguably still highly distinct, even oppositional sets of values within common schemas of their measurement or articulation. By speaking of the happy marriage of equality and excellence, then, I intend to signal the bundle of promises, regulatory norms, and idealised schemas that are bound up with this advocacy narrative. I will try to show how these symbolic dimensions complicate the appealing straightforwardness of the empirical evidence that allegedly underpins such claims, and suggest how this account, both of what gender equality means and of what excellence demands, may be questionable from a range of feminist perspectives. There are certainly plausible ways in which excellence and gender equality can be brought into alignment, yet when these are constructed as a “business case”, they may exclude other feminist paths and are not without their costs to alternate visions of gender equality in the academy.

The next section offers some examples of the business case in action before proposing some critical reflections on the ways in which gender, identity, and knowledge are envisaged and related within its terms. I go on to consider how more political conceptions of knowledge, reflecting interests that deserve to be articulated as challenges to prevailing hegemonies, are oddly unlikely to find a fit with this new regime. For instance, feminist standpoint theory which might in some ways be seen as a precursor to claims for the value of diversity, arguing as it does from the epistemic privilege afforded to marginalised viewpoints, also sees group interests as often fractured and opposed. It thus challenges both the idea that we might all share equally in a single vision of the marketised public good and that knowledge brings diverse perspectives harmoniously together. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of this shift in the value attributed to difference for an under-explored question – which women benefit from this happy marriage and which do not? What, for instance, will become of those feminists engaged in research who do not see eye to eye with the wider agenda of neoliberal academic values in this new era of gender equality?

1.2 Making the business case: Examples and critique

A critical reconstruction of the business case strategy for advancing gender equality, such as that offered here, must recognise its current importance for women’s progress in science, even while questioning some of its hidden assumptions and effects. On the positive side, the forceful approach that some countries and regions, including the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada, have taken to making improvements to women’s status and representation is particularly indebted to the arguments I will outline in this section. Influential advocates for the business case have played a considerable role in furthering the increasing willingness of universities and research institutes to take a root-and-branch approach to grappling with their persistent gender imbalances. For instance, requirements have been imposed by research funding bodies to ensure consideration of gender balance in departments and on research teams as in the United Kingdom’s Athena SWAN initiative (cf. Advance HE’s Equality Charters 2019), as well as taking up sex and gender analysis as a requisite aspect of basic research, as in the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Promoting Gender Equality in Research and Innovation policy (cf. European Commission 2019). Adding a business case for promoting gender equality in research institutions proves a more effective argument than claims to equal rights or justice at winning over our vice-chancellors and university presidents to the cause of supporting women’s careers. Importantly, it both appeals to core values of the neoliberal university and lends itself to the capacity for promoting regulation of diversity, insofar as it effectively bypasses objections to affirmative action or group preferences by embedding the necessity of action in considerations of optimising human resources to promote academic excellence.

Within this space, examples abound of what has become a highly ubiquitous approach to advocating the benefits of gender equality via harvesting the dividends of diversity. Borrowing directly from parallel arguments in the business world, multiple documents promoting gender equality in academic research environments place a strong emphasis on the importance of diversity in research teams as a means to greater creativity and innovation, more rounded and accurate insight into societal variation by gender, race, and other demographic categories, and thus a particular kind of research excellence. The Gender Equality in Academia and Research (GEAR) document produced b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Inequalities and the paradigm of excellence in academia
• PART I “Inclusive excellence”: How are excellence and gender equality combined?
• PART II Constructing excellence: How does gender bias affect the evaluation of excellence?
• PART III Reproducing inequality: How does the discourse of ‘excellence’ impact women’s careers?
• Index