Page 165 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

towards collaboration and academic service, which suggests that women candidates may score higher on the criterion of academic citizenship than men candidates. Committee members tend to make generalisations about men and women and they construct women and men as opposites. I have shown that the detrimental gender practices of constructing potential through the perceptions of an ideal, confident, committed, and international mobile early-career researcher are so ubiquitous that they can cause committee members to make gendered selection decisions, attributing more potential to men researchers.
The fourth way inequalities are (re)produced is through practicing gender in actual hiring processes for assistant professor positions. I studied multiple hiring processes of a STEM and an SSH department of a Dutch university. In chapter 5, I show that committee members practiced gender collectively by holding women candidates against higher standards than men and by raising (additional) doubts or amplifying doubts about women’s qualities. What I could uncover because of my observations is how committee members practice gender in interaction with each other and how they influence each other. I have observed how the course of the decision-making process and the outcomes are very much dependent on who gives what kind of arguments and about whom, as this prompts responses from other committee members. The results indicate that a positive or negative first response can make or break a candidate. My data show that committee members evaluate (and disqualify) women candidates more often than men candidates based on personal characteristics such as strength, ambition, role modelling and even truthful behaviour. I also show how women candidates have to walk a fine line between stereotypical feminine and masculine behaviours in job interviews. My analysis also shows how micro politics and individual agendas play an important role in collective committee decision-making and in collective practicing of gender. The committee members who held considerable power tended to dominate deliberations and they took on the role of champions and / or anti-champions for specific candidates.
Each chapter makes a specific contribution to understanding the (re) production of inequalities in recruitment and selection practices for early-career positions. I have shown that the macro-context influences recruitment and selection, for example through the projectification of academia and macro-discourses such as excellence and internationalisation. Also, recruitment policies at the meso-level influence recruitment and selection as they regulate what selection criteria should be applied. But mostly, this dissertation sheds light on how committee members, both as individuals and in groups, (re)produce inequalities on the micro-level through their practices. The practices of committee members are found to be particularly important
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