To Örebro University

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.

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.

Peer review by external experts is widely recognized as a legitimate and trustworthy academic practice, essential for ensuring the quality and rigor of research, providing more objective and less impartial assessments, and promoting transparent decision-making in science and academia. Research Funding Organisations (RFOs) usually rely on some form of peer review to evaluate the scientific quality of research proposals to allocate their limited resources. The peer review system is, however, also associated with several weaknesses, such as risks for bias and conflict of interest. This article explores the implications of replacing National Review Panels (NRPs) with International Review Panels (IRPs) in a national RFO, examining how this shift may impact the peer review process. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with staff from a national RFO in a European country and members of its IRPs, the article provides a nuanced analysis of both the potential benefits and challenges with substituting NRPs with IRPs. The results highlight how IRPs increase the distance between applicants and reviewers, which benefits the impartiality of the process. Nevertheless, this distance needs to be balanced by domestic panel members, chairs or research officers possessing appropriate knowledge of the local academic context, culture and structure. IRPs also introduce a greater diversity of perspectives into the assessments of applicants, which may promote objective and balanced assessments. The diversity may however also lower inter-reviewer reliability, and, in turn, complicate calibration practices and hinder the development of informal deliberative norms during the process of reaching decisions and consensus.

This chapter explores crisis management in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through a gender lens. It adopts Branicki’s (2020) distinction between rationalist approaches to crisis management characterised by authoritarian leadership and a masculine logic, and the alternative relationalist conceptualising of crisis management based on a feminist ethics of care. The chapter empirically draws on an analysis of academic crisis management discourses in blog posts published between 2020 and 2022 by eight Vice-Chancellors (VCs) (four women and four men) at Swedish HEIs. The analysis demonstrates that discourses that support a rationalist approach to crisis management dominated among the blogs during the COVID-19 crisis, often reproducing traditional masculine management and leadership ideals. The results, however, also identify expressions of the relationalist approach, communicated by female VCs to a higher degree than the male VCs. These alternative discourses raised otherwise silenced questions, recognised marginalised groups, and provided encouragement and support in times of crisis.

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