Page 166 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

164 CHAPTER 6
as they make the actual selection decisions on who are included and excluded from early academic careers.
In the next section, I will elaborate on the overarching contributions to the literature of this dissertation, combining the insights and contributions of all chapters.
6.2 Contributions to the literature
Many studies on gendered recruitment and selection tend to focus on cognitive bias in the evaluation of men and women. These studies have shown, for example, that male candidates are evaluated as more competent for a position (Moss-Racusin, Dovidio, Brescoll, Graham, & Handelsman, 2012), that high-achieving women are penalized in hiring procedures (Quadlin, 2018), and that men are generally favoured in hiring decisions (Biernat & Fuegen, 2001). Also, the majority of research on ECRs, - for instance on postdocs - focuses on their individual lived experiences, such as identity work and work motivation (Hakala, 2009), their experiences of relocation (McAlpine, 2012), their career satisfaction (Van der Weijden, Teelken, De Boer, & Drost, 2016), and their perception of career prospects (Teelken & Van der Weijden, 2018). Such (psychological) approaches take an individualist stance that explains social phenomena by the “properties of individual people” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 466), and offer valuable insight into the micro-level of analysis. In this dissertation, I use a social constructionist perspective and a practice lens, which conceives and studies (in)equality differently: as a relationally constituted social phenomenon (Janssens & Steyaert, 2018). With this approach I was able to conduct a more systemic analysis on how postdoctoral researchers and assistant professors land in their positions. I took into consideration the situated practicing of recruitment and selection, “zooming out” to trace the wider site to which this practicing is tied (Janssens & Steyaert, 2018, p. 20). Therefore, I could show how recruitment and selection practices are not constructed in a vacuum but embedded in academic, national and global contexts.
Practice studies have entered the field of diversity studies only to a limited extent (Janssens & Steyaert, 2018). The few studies on gender inequality in academic recruitment and selection that (explicitly) adopt a practice lens have mainly focused on professorial positions (Van den Brink, 2010; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b, 2014). These studies provide valuable insight into gender practices in the evaluation of professional qualifications (such as research output), individual qualities (such as leadership) and networking practices, that set the bar higher for women professorial candidates than for men. To date, a practice approach has not been used to study