Page 153 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

championed Laura during the evaluation process or even actively tried to disqualify her. Their positioning regarding Laura could have influenced the dean’s evaluation.
Jeff’s message also shows how the women committee members are once more side-lined. They are confronted with the dean’s decision without having had any influence and, moreover, with an additional criterion that supposedly should have played a role in the evaluation of candidates (being an applied researcher).
Following this e-mail of Jeff, Anna had contacted Jessie by e-mail to discuss the matter.
What do you make of this? To me, it seems very strange that a candidate is ruled out before the hiring committee has reported. And a very disrespectful way for an institution to treat external members. I don’t know what they will propose to do now...
By this time, the committee seemed to have been split among gender lines. The women (external) committee members consulted each other to deliberate what to do about the “disrespectful” course of affairs. In the meantime, Jessie had called Stephen, the chair of the committee, to discuss some of her concerns, but Jessie stated in her reply to Anna that she found it “rather difficult to get him to understand the problems I am having with the procedure”. In that same message, she wrote to Anna: “I decided to give up. I hope you are not too upset about this.” The exchanges between Jessie and Anna (where I was included as recipient) show their experiences as external members and their feelings of frustration about the procedure and the politics. The data show that they had been excluded from the decisions to change the ranking and to have an informal meeting with the dean. In the end, the appointment report was rewritten, and did not include a ranking of the candidates but only suggested Nicholas as their first choice.
In this section I have shown how committee members in the STEM3 case practiced gender in the aftermath of the hiring procedure. The STEM3 case was the only case in my study in which committee members discussed the outcome of the procedure via email to such length after the deliberations had ended. The other procedures were settled when the advice of the committee had been sent to the dean.
The STEM3 case thus allowed for an analysis on the gender practicing in the aftermath. I observed that multiple gender practicing was done alternatingly. First, men committee members informally decided amongst each other to change the ranking of the candidates, without consulting the women committee members. Second, men committee members used their power to lower the ranking of a woman candidate, as
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