Page 109 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

a lack of confidence and commitment as well as limited international mobility opportunities for women early-career researchers and by doing so render women less suitable for assistant professor positions. This makes the position of women early- career researchers more precarious than that of their male counterparts. We found that only the criterion of academic citizenship could work to the advantage of women candidates. But, being evaluated as an academic citizen depends on the department at hand and thus might not help in securing a permanent position on the long run.
4.6 Discussion and conclusion
Despite a “veneer of equality” (Teelken & Deem 2013, p. 520) our critical comparative analysis revealed two general and six specific gender practices in the recruitment and selection of temporary assistant professors throughout six European countries and both STEM and SSH disciplines. The gender practices are subtle yet omnipresent in the constructions of recruitment and selection practices of men and women committee members. We found that gender practices are rather similarly over the various countries and disciplines. Our study sheds light on the gender practices present in selection criteria that affect aspiring young researchers’ entrance to precarious assistant professor positions. Even though non-tenured assistant professorships are precarious in nature because of their temporality and insecurity, we found that committee members assess candidates’ potential to succeed in academia in the long run. Therefore, temporary assistant professorships, which could possibly lead to a more permanent position, are distinct from casual or hourly paid academic positions that often do not create chances for leaving precarious employment. We contribute to theories of gender in academic organisations by uncovering the complex interconnections of gender practices and recruitment and selection practices for early-career researchers where judgements are based on potential. We have illustrated multiple gender practices, some beneficial and others detrimental for women academics. Furthermore, we identified three discrepancies in the various criteria and their application that we will elaborate on in this section.
We showed how gender practices relating to welcoming women might work to the benefit of women candidates for assistant professor positions. Yet, we found a first discrepancy when analysing the tacit selection criteria used in the assessment of early-career researchers. In their discourses and reflections on women in academia, committee members argue that they want to have more women in their department in order to get a more balanced staff composition. Even though most of them do not
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