Page 174 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

172 CHAPTER 6
into selection situations how the committee defines the criteria that are considered important for the job. This might help to avoid assessing candidates based on other (non-relevant) criteria, in particular gender sensitive personal characteristics like modesty and ambition. Also, discussing the meaning of criteria at the start can help aligning committee members and avoiding the assessment of different attributes of the supposed same criterion.
Additionally, I want to stress the importance of the role of gatekeepers and committee members in creating fair recruitment and selection practices. I observed in my studies that committee members generally construct selection criteria as if they are etched in stone or imposed by higher management. Most committee members are unreflexive about their own position within the system as someone involved in the construction of selection criteria and thus someone who can apply criteria less rigidly and / or more fair. Also, committee members tend to have no or limited awareness of the gendered construction of selection criteria and the consequences, nor do they reflect on their gendered assumptions about the qualities of women (and men) candidates. Such non-reflexivity might prevent them from (taking) responsibility. They often tend to put the responsibility of solving gender inequalities on women researchers; either by demanding women early-career researchers to change their behaviour or by making women committee members responsible for the hiring of (more) women candidates. I want to suggest higher education institutions to invest in education for hiring committee members to make them reflexive about the possible gender practices in recruitment and selection, to look at their role in the construction of criteria and inequality, and to take the responsibility for fighting gender practices and practicing gender that affect hiring decisions. As part of the GARCIA project, we developed a toolkit for organizing reflexive working groups for selection committee members4 that can help higher education institutions in taking the first steps in the development of such education.
Finally, I want to encourage higher education institutions (but also other organisations) to open up their hiring practices for trained observants. Recruitment and selection are powerful mechanisms for reproducing and countering (gender) inequality. As I have shown in this dissertation, observations can provide meaningful insight into inequality practices that cannot be known without observing the sayings and doings of hiring committees. Therefore, more insight into the practicing can help
4 See for the toolkit Dennissen, M., Herschberg, C., Benschop, Y. & Van den Brink, M. (2017). Toolkit for organizing reflexive working groups for selection committee members, GARCIA working paper n.19, University of Trento, ISBN 978-88-8443-716-7, http://garciaproject.eu/wp-content/ uploads/2017/01/GARCIA_working_papers_n.19.pdf