Page 110 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

108 CHAPTER 4
seem to take up an active role in increasing the number of women researchers, they do give arguments for why they think science or their departments would benefit from more women colleagues. Reflexively most committee members express this wish for hiring more women. However, welcoming women seems more a general principle than an actual practice because in committee members’ construction of tacit criteria they unreflexively portray women as less competent for what they call the competitive academic world. Committee members discursively construct women academics as lacking necessary survival skills such as confidence, commitment, and international mobility, which can render women candidates as unsuitable for academia. Committee members reproduce the image of an ideal candidate that resembles a traditional masculine profile. In line with Van den Brink and Stobbe (2014) and Bleijenbergh and colleagues (2013) we found that although our research participants say they value (some) feminine qualities, the image of the ideal early- career researcher fits men and masculinity more.
In their accounts, committee members predominantly depict their ideal candidate for assistant professorships as an excellent researcher who has the potential to survive in the competitive academic world by being productive, confident, committed to the profession, and internationally mobile. This profile resembles the Olympus model that “situates the scientists [...] at the top of the pyramid, far removed from the concerns of everyday life” (Brouns, 2004, p. 151). However, we also found that when committee members talk about their recruitment and selection practices, they state that hiring excellent academics can disadvantage team dynamics, as they tend to construct excellence as incompatible with and the opposite of collaborative. A second discrepancy is thus constructed between the criteria of excellence and academic citizenship. Several research participants argue that they consider teamwork of such importance that they rather hire an early-career researcher who is somewhat less excellent but a good, collaborative colleague. This implies that there are committee members who prefer the Agora model of science, which is not focused exclusively on the production of knowledge for the scientific community but also aims at creating an inspiring intellectual work climate based on other principles such as exchange (Benschop & Brouns, 2003; Brouns, 2001). The Agora model is supposed to fit a traditional feminine behavioural repertoire more (Benschop & Brouns, 2003). We showed how being a collaborator and a good colleague seems to indeed fit the (stereotypical) image of women researchers better, according to our research participants. Yet, our findings imply that overall the individual competition criteria that fit the neoliberal Olympus model seem to prevail over the exchange criteria of the Agora model.