Page 91 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

groups conducted with committee members. Two general gender practices stand out in our data: welcoming women and assessing potential for excellence. We will show how these two gender practices are conflated with multiple specific gender practices.
Welcoming women
The first general gender practice we derived from the data is discursively welcoming women in assistant professor positions. Most research participants throughout the various countries and disciplines expressed that they are in favour of a more equal representation of men and women in the department, which in most departments entails advocating an increase in women researchers. We identified two specific gender practices pertaining to the discourse of welcoming women that all relate to the aim for a gender balance among academic staff.
One key argument for welcoming women given by committee members is numerical: the number of women staff members lags behind the number of men and this breaches the ideal of gender balance. In all countries, except for Slovenia, recruitment and selection policies prescribe that in case of equal qualification of two candidates, women are preferred over men candidates for positions in which women are underrepresented. Research participants gave two reasons for why they would like to have a gender balance in their department, which both contain specific gender practices. The first reason is because an increase in women staff is expected to positively influence the working environment.
If there are two candidates that are pretty similar, and it is not clear from the selection committee point of view who is better, then we have to take [gender] into account. If there are more men in the faculty, it strengthens it if there are more women [hired]. (IS, SSH, M)
This respondent refers to the recruitment and selection policy in Iceland. However, he states that the assessment of quality comes first and only then “we have to take gender into account”. This practice is known in the literature as the “tie-break” selection (Noon, 2012) where the “under-representation of people with certain demographic characteristics” (such as gender) is taken into account “in order to make the final choice between equally qualified candidates when appointing or promoting” (pp. 77- 78, emphasis added). However, Swiss, Dutch, and Icelandic research participants argue that they have never seen this measure put in practice because they never consider two candidates equally qualified. We also learn from the quote that “it strengthens it if there are more women” in a faculty where men are in the majority. By saying this, he
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