Page 101 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

of motherhood and a successful academic career. An Italian respondent explains:
A woman has an objective disadvantage, but not because we men are sexist... in our department there’s no-one like that... but because in any case, if you have a child, you can put it how you like, but you have to do it, and this is intrinsic. So there’s this disadvantage... that if there are no proactive policies, which in Italy are not made... in the end, simply because someone has a child and wants to be with that child.. it is clear that in the end she publishes less, travels less, because she has a two- or three-year old child... so the only real disadvantage is structural. (IT, STEM, M)
The respondent points towards an “intrinsic” issue - motherhood - that he calls an “objective disadvantage”. By doing so, he constructs a disadvantage for women. First he says “because someone has a child” and then continues by using the pronoun “she”. He takes for granted that women will take care of the child and expects them to renounce part of their academic activities, such as publishing and travelling, when they are mothers. This way, he constructs women as less suitable to deal with the competition in academia and as candidates for an assistant professor position. Furthermore, he emphasizes that men in his department are not “sexist”, and presents the “disadvantage” as an objective fact. Thus, the respondent puts the responsibility on the individual woman researcher to deal with this perceived “disadvantage”. Also, he blames the lack of proactive policies for this “disadvantage”. In contrast to Italian men research participants who perceived motherhood as a hindrance to women researchers’ careers, none of the Italian women research participants made reference to it, referring instead to the gendered professional culture that characterizes Italian academia as the main barrier to their advancement.
Committee members reproduced the stereotype of women as mothers who cannot dedicate sufficient time to their academic career regardless of whether or not the women in question actually had children. Since more than full time availability is expressed very often during interviews and focus groups across countries and disciplines, as something needed to build an academic career, women candidates suffer from the perceptions held by committee members about their dedication to the profession. They discursively construct women as researchers who do not have what it takes to make a career in academia. This might be even more pronounced for women at the early career stage as committee members might expect women are at a point in life where they possibly become mothers or have young children.
A committee member in Iceland argues that there is unequal distribution of
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