Page 129 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

praising ambition; and 5) Addressing the practicing of gender.
I continued with an in-depth analysis of these patterns. I made within-case
and cross-case analyses to look for subtle similarities and differences in and between cases, which forced me to go beyond initial impressions (Eisenhardt, 1989). This ensured that I could uncover how committee members evaluate women candidates differently than men candidates but also how they evaluate men and women candidates similarly.
5.6 Findings
In this section, I first explore how gender is practiced before committee deliberations start, followed by the findings of practicing gender during committee meetings, and finally after the committee had parted. The emphasis will be on the findings of practicing gender during committee meetings and final decision-making, where two or three candidates were seriously considered as a top candidate for the position.
Setting the stage: practicing gender before committee deliberations
The e-mail conversations between committee members revealed that before the actual deliberations took place, gender was practiced when discussing, composing or documenting committee compositions. In this section, I show that this stage of the process is relevant when studying practicing gender, as this is where the hiring ‘arena’ is created. The committee composition creates the conditions in which gender can be practiced. Furthermore, I will show how micro politics come to the fore in the composing of a hiring committee.
The case university had installed a recruitment policy that prescribes that a hiring committee has to include a woman employee of at least the same positional level as the particular vacancy. I found that various committees addressed this policy in different ways and that not all committees abided by the policy. Looking at committee compositions, in all but one of the six cases, women were a minority in the committees. The only exception was the SSH3 committee, which consisted of an equal number of men and women scientific staff members. This was also the only case where the committee chair was a woman.
In the SSH1 procedure, William, the committee member who was in charge of the administrative issues during the procedure, was not aware of the university policy, and did not include a woman member of ‘at least the same positional level’ in the committee. After the committee was already installed, William was made aware
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