Page 121 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

et al., 2012) with an identical CV.
In the evaluation and selection stage, academic excellence is often used as a
measurement of quality (Rees, 2011; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b). Despite the limited awareness of men and women evaluators about the gendered construction on excellence (O’Connor & O’Hagan, 2015), multiple studies have revealed that excellence is a social construct that is “inherently gendered” (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b, p. 507; Herschberg et al., 2018a; O’Connor & O’Hagan, 2015). Research finds that women applicants do get hired for academic positions, but they are held against different standards than men academics (Savigny, 2014; Thoraldsdottir, 2004). Van den Brink (2010) showed in an extensive study on recruitment and selection of full professorships that evaluators appointed men candidates who did not fulfil all excellence criteria, whereas women candidates were often rejected when not meeting some criteria of excellence. The ‘think professor, think male’ stereotype proved pervasive and influenced hiring decisions. As a result, women candidates are unconsciously perceived as different, unpredictable, and risky (Van den Brink, 2010). For instance, women academics are perceived as lacking strong leadership skills (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b) or lacking commitment to an academic career (Herschberg et al., 2018a). Also, hiring decisions can be influenced by women’s relationship status and their partners’ occupation, “hiring only those women perceived to have portable or movable spouses, if any” (Rivera, 2017, p. 1134). As a result of gender practices, “men are selected disproportionately to their number in the base recruitment pool” “whatever the discipline, whatever the country and whatever the rank” (from Osborn et al., 2000 as cited in Rees, 2011, p. 135). Consequently, women (have to) leave academic careers disproportionately, especially after the postdoc level (Rees, 2001). Therefore, there is a need to develop better insight into the selection of early-career researchers after the postdoc phase, such as assistant professors.
Earlier studies have provided useful insight into gender practices in academic hiring, but most of these studies did not study practicing gender in real time and space. Previous studies have thus looked at what had been “said and done” (Martin, 2003), risking to capture only “what people can reflect on and make explicit (things of which they are aware) and what they want to say (e.g., socially desirable answers)” (Berger et al., 2015, p. 557). They relied for example on interviews with evaluators after the actual selection had already taken place (e.g., Nielsen, 2016; O’Connor & O’Hagan, 2015). The reliance on interview (and also document) data might be due to the difficulty of getting access to secret and confidential processes like recruitment and selection (Van den Brink, 2010). According to Martin (2003), studies looking at practices “miss the immediacy, complexities, and subtleties of gendering dynamics” (p. 354).
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