Experiencing Gender Regimes: Accounts of Women Professors in Mexico, the UK and Sweden

This article investigates differences between statistics on gender equality in Mexico, the UK and Sweden, and similarities in women professors’ career experiences in these countries. We use Acker’s inequality regime framework, focusing on gender, to explore our data, and argue that similarities in women professors’ lived experiences are related to an image of the ideal academic. This ideal type is produced in the interplay of the university gender regime and other gender regimes, and reproduced through the process of structuration: signification, domination and legitimation. We suggest that the struggle over legitimation can also be a trigger for change.

The Effect of Women Academic Leaders on Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Professors

Using a sample of women natural sciences and engineering (NSE) faculty members from 13 Canadian universities, we investigated the impact of women academic leaders on women professors’ perceptions of gender bias. Logistic regression analyses indicated that professors who perceived more workplace gender bias were more likely to feel that they needed to work harder to be seen as legitimate scholars than those who perceived less gender bias. However, professors who perceived that women were better represented amongst their faculty/college and university leadership were significantly less likely to feel that they needed to work harder for legitimacy than those who perceived greater gender bias in leadership. These results suggest that addressing gendered university hierarchies may moderate the impact of gender bias on women in NSE units.

Black Women’s Labor and White Ally Development in an Urban Teacher Education Program

The article uses events and narratives from the perspectives of Black women professors as examples of how allyship can be birthed and to illustrate the roles, responsibilities, and risks inherent in allyship development and work. It focuses on the labor needed to establish and sustain allyship as critical anti-racist educators in an Urban Teacher Preparation Program at a Historical White Institution. Dispositions of White allies are discussed, in addition to the various tensions allies may face in creating and sustaining equitable spaces and practices. Considerations for reciprocity are also offered to better support faculty of color.

Fra unntak til norm – å utvikle resiliens i et nettverk

From Exception to Norm – the Development of Resilience in a Network Combining gender theory with research on resilience, this chapter analyzes the effects of an action research project aimed at increasing the number of women in senior research positions at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Oslo University. As a part of the project, the faculty management nominated fifteen women professors and associate professors to attend a programme to improve their skills in writing articles and research applications. Individual interviews with all participants prior to the programme revealed that they would prefer to build a network where they could share experiences and discuss various topics. The two-year programme was therefore structured as a forum where we as action researchers offered theoretical input on topics chosen by the participants and worked with dialogue tools, focusing on these topics, in a structured and time-efficient exchange of experiences. The analysis shows that resilience is an essential skill in organizations characterized by critical scrutiny and competition. In the chapter, we describe how the network participants become more resilient by reflecting themselves in, and sharing experiences with, each other. Being in a context with other recognized top researchers without being the odd one out – the woman who has to prove herself – improves the ability to cope with adversity.

The Transformational Change Agent Equation

As Native women professors, counselors, and administrators within higher education, the four authors will focus on transformational change within oppressive environments, addressing institutionalized racism stemming from a colonial history of education. The authors will discuss identified barriers including operating in an oppressive work environment which can sometimes render us invisible and silent for self-preservation, threats to our positions from taking a stand against racial or cultural inequity, and resisting assimilation strategies created by structural racism. It is important to share experiences with working in systematically oppressive environments and the covert ways in which Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) are transformational change agents, leaders against racial and cultural oppression.

Interviewing elite women professors: Methodological reflections with feminist research ethics

Interviewing senior professors in universities is a common qualitative method of conducting leadership research on higher education. Like other types of elite interviews, researching established scholars can create multiple challenges for emerging researchers because of power differences. Feminist research ethics offer principles to tackle these issues by focusing on power, boundaries and relationships in the research process. This study is based on the methodological reflections of my doctoral project: investigating intellectual leadership of 22 women full professors in Hong Kong. I argue that feminist research ethics benefit new researchers by addressing some dilemmas of elite interviews, including how to define elite participants, how to gain access, how to prepare for interviews and how to interact effectively. This empirical study sheds light on feasible practices of interviewing elite women scholars from the perspective of feminist approaches.