Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
In the Nordic countries, the labour market participation of women and men has largely reached parity, and women are over-represented among higher education students. At the same time, the share of women in top academic positions remains well below the threshold for a gender balance. In this chapter, we ask what Nordic higher education institutions do to address gender inequalities in academic careers. Our study investigates the use of gender equality measures across a large number of higher education institutions in the Nordic countries, drawing on data collected from universities in Sweden, Finland and Norway in 2019. It highlights specific patterns of the use of gender equality measures and raises the question why these measures are not effective in reducing the persistent inequalities evident in the uneven distribution of women and men in top academic positions.
This chapter explores the ways in which research and innovation as gendered practices and experiences are precarized in academe (Murgia and Poggio, 2019). Drawing on professional biographical interviews conducted in 2017–18 with 30 women and men working in Digital Humanities, an emerging and innovative field in academe, the chapter analyzes how structural, organizational and professional-practice constraints as well as personal biographies shape the opportunities research and innovation afford individual researchers. In invoking the notion of precarization (Standing, 2011), the chapter is less concerned with the effects of the rise of short-term contracts and similar precarizing employment practices in academe (although these certainly feature) than with the structural and organizational ways in which research and innovation are simultaneously invited and disavowed in organizational structures that are not agile but instead work to reproduce the same.
The STS literature on gender in science shows how academic cultures, scientists’ identity-making and gender intersect in multiple and heterogeneous ways. In regard to recruitment processes as well as individual career trajectories, gender is often reduced to a barrier for women in making an academic career. In this chapter, we turn our attention towards early career scientists’ imaginaries of academia and academic life. How do early career scientists reflect upon their possibility of having an academic career? What do they see as ‘boosters’ and ‘blockers’ when it comes to success in academia, and how are these reflections and experiences imbued with gender? The chapter is based on qualitative interviews with early career scientists (PhD students and postdocs) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The interviewees were purposively selected from departments with different levels of gender balance and gender balance change patterns. The chapter demonstrates the role that gender plays in how early career scientists envisage their future careers, and in particular how professorships are connected to over-work, total job dedication and incompatibility with ‘having a life’.
After decades of research, we know quite a lot about factors excluding women from ICT, but we are still short of effective solutions for recruiting women. Most studies exploring the challenges of recruiting women to ICT focus on conventional routes with career decisions made at high school. Here, however, we explore a much less studied phenomenon, which is women pursuing unconventional routes into ICT education and ICT work at a later stage. Based on in-depth interviews with 28 women working with ICT, the analysis illustrates how a majority of these women have found alternative routes to ICT, including a delayed entry into ICT education, a natural progression into ICT due to digitalization of non-technological disciplines, and pursuing opportunities arising as non-technological competences are increasingly valued in digitalization. These less conventional routes illustrate women’s professional development as motivated by processes of digitalization and the recognition of a wide set of professional fields and competences needed in ongoing digital transformations. Relying on entry points less affected by masculine stereotypes, the women contribute to new ways of co-constructing gender and ICT in the new digitalized workspaces.
The Norwegian Research Council has, via the research programme Balanse Programmet, funded research as well as practice-oriented initiatives for increasing the representation of women in research leadership positions (Lund, 2020). In this chapter we explore the experience of female associate professors with practice-oriented equality promoting initiatives, specifically that of preliminary evaluations, at one Norwegian higher education institution. We investigate whether, how and with what consequences preliminary evaluations speed up female associate professors’ processes of becoming full professors. To make sense of the effects of this initiative, we use Sara Ahmed’s (2004, 2006) affective economy and Dorothy Smith’s (2005) concept of ‘ruling relations’ to explicate the affects and discourses that these preliminary evaluations hook into, activate, (re)produce and resist. We argue that these reveal a paradox because while they increase the amount of female research leaders they do so at the cost of diverse ways of doing and living academic work.
