Page 108 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

106 CHAPTER 4
important in selection decisions, even though this criterion often remains tacit and non-formalized. When committee members speak about situations where they will actually hire someone, they prefer a candidate who is a so-called ‘academic citizen’, someone who contributes to the ‘housework’ of the department (Heijstra et al., 2017). Thus, early-career researchers are expected to demonstrate loyalty to the department, but they seem to receive little guarantee for permanence in return. In our data we found that the value of collaboration is often ascribed to women candidates but not to men.
Outside of here I know a lot of people, men, who, when you ask them to collaborate, reply: “No, I don’t collaborate, I compete.” I’ve never heard a woman say that. [...] You could imagine science becoming more collaborative [when an interactive web tool is implemented in science] and women getting on much better in that, and men being pissed off because they find it hard to show off their egos.
(CH, STEM, M)
According to this committee member, men want to compete rather than collaborate. On the contrary, he portrays women as collaborative. He predicts that when science becomes “more collaborative” in the future, women will succeed “much better” than men. Yet, this also implies that science is not there yet, and that it is still is more competitive based. Most committee members throughout the countries and disciplines argue that women have better relational skills and are more prone towards collaboration. This suggests that women candidates may score higher on the criterion of academic citizenship than men candidates.
Overall, the concern of hiring a colleague with whom it will be possible or even pleasant to cooperate, rather than the scientific best candidate, was found throughout the countries. Because committee members perceive women candidates as more collaborative and relational, the academic citizenship criterion could benefit women during selection procedures. However, such stereotypical expectations can also work against women when they do not display the prescribed feminine behaviour (Rudman & Phelan, 2008), possibly invoking bias in the evaluation of women candidates.
In summary, in the assessment of potential for excellence, committee members base their judgements on limited track records of candidates for assistant professor positions and therefore they rely heavily on tacit criteria. They predict the future potential of candidates for surviving in the academic world, a gender practice that is conflated with multiple specific gender practices. Committee members perceive