Page 102 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg
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100 CHAPTER 4
unpaid work within the homes of his men and women colleagues which complicates women researchers’ entry into an academic position:
I see that family conditions are enormously important when it comes to how [academics] perform [the first years in academia]. I see it is really tough for women with children to enter a competitive academic position. I see that they are under a lot more pressure than the men [...] overall I see that [the women] have to leave at four to pick up the kids, I see the difference how [women] have more responsibilities than the guys and this can be very difficult. (IS, STEM, M)
This respondent argues that women researchers who are mothers “have more responsibilities” than men researchers who are fathers. Like many other committee members, he also argues that academic work is “competitive” and states that “it is really tough for women with children” to perform the job. The committee member thus argues that mothers have difficulties dealing with competition. The expected difficulties for mothers but not for fathers are pervasive, despite the Icelandic legislation that each parent gets three months of maternity/paternity leave and three months to share among the two parents. Parenthood is only problematized for women and not for men, contributing to the precariousness of women early-career researchers and not men. Committee members expect mothers to not be “100 per cent active in writing up research” (IS, SSH, F) and imply that therefore women do less well in the competition. Overall, committee members assume that motherhood will create difficulties for women assistant professors and by doing so construct women as less excellent candidates.
Furthermore, motherhood assumptions not only influence perceptions of committee members of women’s devotion to the job but also of women’s contract hours. For example, Swiss committee members in both departments expect most women to work part time. Some respondents problematized part time work, which the following excerpt illustrates:
I know well that her [a young mother who requested to work a four-day week] productivity rate will be reduced by at least 50%. In a competitive international research context, that’s not a very good thing. I don’t really like this idea of a percentage reduction, because it just doesn’t fit in with the way work is organised. [...] I mean, people are here, they organise their experiments, and the kind of experiments we do here, they last three days, three or four days. Something like that. Once you’ve started, you just have to see it through. So that means that if we have





























































































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