Page 17 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

as inherently gendered (Acker, 1990; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b), as places where “advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine” (Acker, 1990, p. 146).
To study gender inequalities in academic organizing, I will use the concept of gender practices. Poggio (2006) argues that using a practice lens is particularly fruitful for studying gender in organisations. It enables to focus on “the everyday activity of organizing in both its routine and improvised forms” (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1240) and thus on “how gender is constantly redefined and negotiated in the everyday practices through which individuals interact” (Poggio, 2006, p. 225). Studying gender as a socially constructed practice thus focuses on dynamic processes and the sayings and doings of people (Martin, 2003). Martin (2003, 2006) introduced a two-sided dynamic of gender practices and practicing gender for understanding gendering processes in organisations. She makes a distinction between practices, “a class of activities that are available—culturally, socially, narratively, discursively, physically, and so forth—for people to enact in an encounter or situation in accord with (or in violation of) the gender institution”, and practicing of gender, “the literal activities of gender, physical and narrative—the doing, displaying, asserting, narrating, performing, mobilizing, maneuvering” (Martin, 2003, p. 354). I will look at both gender practices (chapter 4) and practicing gender (chapter 5), which will give insight into the well-known, institutionalized practices as well as how gender works in action and interaction (Martin, 2006) in recruitment and selection processes.
Universities are ‘gendered organisations’ with masculine norms for academic success and gendered work practices that shape gender inequalities in academia. Even though there is a more equal gender balance among early-career staff than among professors we do see that the numbers of women drop at the level of postdoc and assistant professor3 (EU 2016). Increasingly so, studies in the field of academic evaluation focus on gender inequality practices in academic recruitment and selection (Nielsen, 2016; O’Connor & O’Hagan, 2015; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b, 2014). These studies found that recruitment and selection are interwoven with gender practices in multiple ways. For example, in the evaluation of men and women’s professional qualifications and individual qualities (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012b), through relationship status discrimination (Rivera, 2017), and the accessibility of social networks (Nielsen, 2016; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2014). Rivera (2017) argues that “the process of hiring for tenure-track jobs”, for example,
3 “The first post into which a newly qualified PhD graduate would normally be recruited” (EU, 2016, p. 192).
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 15
1