Page 156 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

154 CHAPTER 5
women candidates shows how damaging such adverse stance can be. I have observed how some committee members went at length to make sure women candidates were not ranked the top candidate.
Most studies on practicing gender argue that practicing gender happens unreflexively and with liminal awareness (i.e., without full awareness) (e.g., Martin, 2001; Van den Brink et al., 2016) of both the person who practices gender and the people who are there when it happens. Most examples I have shown in this study confirm this view, but I found a few situations in which gender practicing was notified and addressed. For example, in the STEM 3 case, women committee members made men committee members aware of the practicing of gender regarding the non-acknowledgement of the quality of candidate Laura. Yet, men committee members disregarded the women members’ arguments and they did not adjust their interpretation and evaluation of Laura. Ironically, the women committee members had been made responsible, before the start of the committee deliberations, for hiring new women members of staff. This, again, shows the importance of the interplay between committee members for the decision-making process. Contrary to the suggestion of Martin (2003), naming and making visible harmful practices was not sufficient in my cases to dismantle gender practicing.
Practicing gender and power
I argue that this is where power comes in. My data shows that power plays a role in practicing gender in two different ways. The first way is related to the composition of hiring committees and the second to individual interests.
Firstly, when looking at the role of men and women researchers in committees I observed that in most cases, women committee members had unequal positional power compared to men. Full professors who were department heads or a member of the department, mostly men, often played a dominant role in committee deliberations. In most cases the influence of women in the deliberations was limited. This was the result of women not being invited to the committee at all, the lower positional power of women committee members (for example due to rank), or because women committee members were from outside the case university. Women committee members from outside the university had more of an external advisor position, which put them in a different seat than the men committee members, who were the natural insiders. As such, the power position of the women in the committee might have played a role in for example the non-response of men committee members when the women made practicing gender visible. The committee composition sets the arena for the power laden practicing of gender. The positional power of committee members influences