To Örebro University

This article draws on 20 qualitative interviews with women between 60 and 78 years of age who migrated from Turkey to Sweden some 40 years ago. It focuses on how they understand, reproduce and challenge both pre- and post-migration gender norms. By analysing the narratives of the 20 women, we investigate how they negotiate work, care and housework with their partners over the course of their lives. Furthermore, we examine how the Turkish diaspora in Sweden influences the ways the interviewed women do and redo gender. The findings show that the interviewed women used implicit and explicit negotiations to change, reconstruct and renegotiate gender norms. Doing and redoing gender is a central aspect of these negotiations, since the interviewed women are ambivalent about gender norms. The conclusion is that the women had one foot in traditional gender norms by “knowing their places” but had adapted to more egalitarian norms over the years.

This article reports on reflection-based monitoring tools developed and used in an action research project to improve gender equality in science and research institutions. Several of these tools were developed to facilitate individual and joint reflection from the perspective of the co-researchers involved. The aim of the article is to make the case for the integration of a systematic reflection-based monitoring approach, to describe its approach and theoretical underpinnings that link critical reflection theory with reflexive action learning theory, and to present the details of six monitoring tools so that they can be adopted in other project settings. It also highlights how these monitoring tools stimulated both individual and group reflection and how they facilitated the sharing of knowledge and experience between change agents involved in co-production. The article also shows that the process monitoring approach based on systematic reflection can contribute to successful project implementation and offers several important advantages.

In analysing the research funding and gender nexus, research funding organisations are key actors to investigate. Research funding organisations in Europe and other nations and international supranational funding agencies increasingly engaged with gender equality in the 2000s. The Nordic countries, specifically Norway and Sweden, have been pioneers in this respect since the 1980s. This chapter explores the role research funding organisations play as change agents in advancing gender equality in the scientific community, including universities. Drawing on recent empirical research in one major Swedish research funding organisation, including document analysis and interviews with employees, panel members and reviewers, the authors critically explore policies and practices related to gender equality in research funding and dilemmas and paradoxes faced in implementation. The Swedish context provides an interesting setting for the study, being characterised by high research intensity, high overall societal gender equality and political will to promote gender equality, on the one hand, but persistent gender inequalities in academic careers, on the other hand.

Previous studies have highlighted how the academic peer review system has been marked by gender bias and nepotism. Panel meetings arranged by research funding organisations (RFOs), where reviewers must explain and account for their assessment and scoring of grant applications, can potentially mitigate and disrupt patterns of inequality. They can however also constitute arenas where biases are reproduced. This article explores, through a gender lens, the shift from face-to-face to digital peer review meetings in a Swedish RFO, focusing on the implications for an unbiased and fair grant allocation process. Drawing on twenty-two interviews with panellists and staff in the RFO, the analysis identifies both benefits and challenges of this shift, regarding use of resources, meeting dynamics, micropolitics, social glue, and possibilities for group reflections. RFOs deliberating digitalisation of their peer review processes need to consider these implications to develop policies promoting unbiased and fair grant allocation processes and procedures.

Research funding organisations (RFOs) are key R&D stakeholders in knowledge production and in development of research careers. How do these organisations address gender and other inequalities in their policies and practices? To what extent do they act as change agents towards equality and diversity with an impact on the whole sector? During recent decades, many national research funding organisations have increasingly become engaged in policies promoting gender equality, diversity, and inclusion Some RFOs are also collaborating increasingly in this area, both nationally and regionally, establishing collaborative networks. An important driver here has been the European Research Area (ERA), in which gender equality is one of priorities. However, the developments in this respect across Europe are complex and uneven, with advanced and ambitious policies established in some national contexts, on the one hand, and very limited and restricted engagements in some others, on the other hand.

We compare the developments in national RFOs in five European national contexts, which vary in their research intensity and gender regimes: Austria, Ireland, Poland, Slovak Republic, and Sweden. We highlight advances and challenges in engagement of national RFOs with gender equality, diversity and inclusion, analyse the contextual factors driving development, and ask to what extent do the RFOs integrate intersectional approaches in their policies. The empirical material draws on policy document analysis and qualitative interview and observation research in GRANTeD (Grant Allocation Disparities from a Gender Perspective), a research project funded (2019-2023) by the EU Horizon2020 framework

This paper explores crisis management discourses in academia through a gender lens. It investigates, through these discourses, which academic management ideals dominate in HEI during and after immediate, emerging, and sustained crises (cf. Parsons, 1996). It addresses the research questions: Which crisis management ideals are performed and expressed by vice-chancellors/university presidents?; Which crisis management ideals are preferred, favoured, and promoted by HEIs?; To what extent are these ideals permeated by gendered management ideals?

The paper builds on a theoretical framework that combines critical masculinities studies and critical feminist theory on gender, management, and leadership, particularly focusing on crises (e.g., Ericson & Mellström, 2016). These theories have demonstrated that crisis management is male-coded, emphasising risk taking, risk management and mastering fear as characteristics closely connected to masculinity and the performativity of masculine heroism (Whitehead, 2002). Other studies, however, suggest that interpersonally oriented leadership traits emphasising communication, and (stereo)typically associated with women, are particularly useful and relevant for crisis management (Bruckmüller & Branscombe, 2010; Gartzia et al., 2012; Ryan et al., 2011).

The analysis draws especially on Branicki’s (2020) definition of rationalist approaches to crisis management characterised by authoritarian leadership, determination, masculine logic, and militaristic language, privileging of the quantifiable, and a conceptualisation of crises as rational and linear processes. She contrasts this with an alternative feminist conceptualising of crisis management based on an ethics of care, with normative assumptions about interpersonal relationships, reciprocal care, situated knowledge, and a focus on marginalised issues and positions, improving lives, and social transformation, which also echo the servant leadership philosophy (Peterson, 2018).

The paper empirically draws on a study of academic crisis management discourses and narratives expressed in interviews with vice-chancellors/university presidents in blogs and in written documents produced by the HEIs, published on the websites of HEIs and in media. The discourses analysed were produced during and after immediate, emerging, and sustained crises (Parsons, 1996), with the analysis specifically focusing on when a vice-chancellor/university president steps down and a new is appointed: To what extent are the crisis management narratives of the outgoing and incoming vice-chancellors characterised by similarities/differences? The study followed frame analysis, and reveals not only expectations on, and performances of, ideal crisis management during and after these crises. The analysis also distinguishes between framings of crises, and if different crisis management ideals are associated with different internal and external crises.

The paper concludes by discussing to what extent crises management ideals have the potential to challenge and transform gendered structures and power relations in academia and/or to what degree ideal academic crisis management can produce academic glass cliffs for women, i.e., situations where women are being appointed to precarious, challenging, and risky leadership roles during turbulent times (Bruckmüller & Branscombe, 2010; Gartzia et al., 2012; Peterson, 2018; Ryan et al., 2011).

A decade ago, women’s position in Swedish Higher Education management and leadership was described using the glass cliff concept. Women had increased dramatically in positions as Vice Chancellor due to political goals and policies regarding gender equality and quantitative target agreements concerning women’s representation in academia. Interviews with the women themselves however highlighted that the feminization of academic leadership positions also should be understood against the backdrop of a restructuring of higher education and reforms in line with new public management, increased financial pressure and administrative burden. A shift in leadership ideals has thus followed the logic of the glass cliff phenomenon: explaining that women increasingly had been appointed to precarious leadership roles with declining status, merit, and prestige. The heroic leadership ideal had been replaced by a serving leadership ideal, reflecting women’s greater responsibilities for the so-called academic housekeeping, i.e., the service work in academia undertaken in addition to teaching and researching. This presentation elaborates on the development of these leadership ideals in Swedish higher education and explores the development during the last couple of years: has the trend towards feminization of academic leadership positions continued and increased during and after the Covid-19 crisis, which put extraordinarily pressure on leadership positions?