Gender, research and innovation

R&I may be defined as socio-material practices involving multiple actors that produce new scientific knowledge and novel artefacts, processes or practices for societal use (Leyesdorff and Etzkowitz, 2003; Carayannis and Campbell, 2009). In this volume we focus in particular on the academy as a site of R&I, on relatively new and emerging employment fields such as biotechnology, Digital Humanities and ICT, and on women’s careers and gender inequalities in these tech-driven work contexts. R&I both inside and outside of the academy is located within global orders such as capitalism and neoliberalism, as well as regional and national policy regimes. It is high on inter/national political agendas as developed economies become knowledge economies. Transnational organizations such as the European Union and the OECD have produced white papers, guidelines and reports (for example Joint Research Centre, 2013; OECD, 2016; NetWorld, 2020) on how R&I might be harnessed more effectively to meet the requirements of these economies and contemporary societies and cultures.

Simultaneously, there has been an increasing recognition that R&I are significantly gendered (see for example the GenderedInnovations project at Stanford or the EC-funded Efforti project).² These projects, and others (for example Valantine and Collins, 2015), clearly show not only how genderization occurs in R&I but also provide suggestions as to how this might be countered. Nonetheless, we still have a limited understanding of women’s actual experiences of working in R&I within highly tech-driven contexts, and particularly in relation to the Nordic countries where equality is largely assumed to have been achieved and to be fully embedded.

As research into R&I has gained ground over the past 15 years or so, it has become clear that the genderization of R&I is a complex issue (for example Andersson et al, 2012; Lindberg, 2012; Kalpazidou Schmidt and Cacace, 2017), involving, in Charles Tilly’s (1998) terms, exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation and adaptation. These mechanisms, but not just these, in varying and diverse combinations, establish and maintain gendered structures and practices in R&I which, however, do not necessarily follow a unitary path. Rather, they signal a variegated arena of complex interactivity that requires further investigation (see also Valantine and Collins, 2015). Why, for example, is it that even in the Nordic countries, so renowned for their public equality discourses and equality-related legislations, we still see the glass ceiling, the leaking pipeline and the scissors model of women’s research careers when we talk about R&I? How do women negotiate in/equalities in the everyday in R&I? What have the shifts in labour market conditions such as changing funding regimes, moves towards the precarization of the labour force, the rise of neoliberal market economies and new forms of cultural conservatism done in relation to R&I? These are some of the questions this volume seeks to answer as it explores what the contributors consider to be gender paradoxes in R&I in the Nordic countries, that is, the contradiction between the high levels of institutionalized equality measures in the Nordic countries and the persistent gender inequalities that those working in R&I experience and report. To understand these paradoxes it is useful to consider the particularities of the Nordic countries in relation to gender equality.

The Nordic countries and gender equality: similarities and differences

Discursively the Nordic countries are frequently treated as one entity when, in fact, there are significant differences among them, including in terms of how they manage R&I (Pinheiro et al, 2019), and equality measures (Teigen and Skjeie, 2017). The phrase ‘the Nordic countries’ (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faro Islands, Greenland and Åland) suggests a block of similar countries. This emphasis is a response to a number of factors: geographical proximity; language similarities between Denmark, Norway and Sweden; the dominance of Protestantism; a history of similar political regimes, social democratically oriented, in the post-World War II period broadly lasting until the 1990s; a socio-economic welfare model; and a similar approach to international affairs as anti-militaristic, peace-building and compromise-ready (Browning, 2007). These similarities are reinforced by significant, extensive literatures on ‘the Nordic welfare state’ (for example Esping-Andersen, 1990; Kautto, 2010; Pedersen and Kuhnle, 2017) and ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ (for example Delhey and Newton, 2005; Browning, 2007; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012; Martela et al, 2020). However, the supposed cohesiveness of the Nordic countries has increasingly been challenged, not least from the 1990s onwards, when these countries began to pull in somewhat different directions. Whereas Denmark, for example, had been a member of the European Union since 1973, Norway and Iceland became EEA/EFTA³ states in 1994, and Finland and Sweden joined the European Union in 1995. This went together with a gradual embrace of neoliberal agendas such as deregulation, marketization and individualization, and a concomitant reshaping of the welfare state. In 2010 already Kautto suggested that ‘Nordic distinctiveness is by no means as self-evident or as straightforward as it was two decades ago’. This also goes for the ‘Nordic gender equality model’ (2010: 600).

Spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP is somewhat different across the Nordics, with Finland and Sweden being relatively high spenders while Norway spends comparatively little (Table 1.1) but not as little as the UK, for example:

In terms of the proportion (percentage) of female and male scientists and engineers among the total workforce, by sex, in 2017, Finland manifested the greatest gender gap by some considerable margin and Denmark the lowest (Table 1.2):

Teigen and Skjeie (2017) explore the ‘Nordic gender equality model’ and its supposed homogeneity in terms of economic equity and democratic parity (2017: 126). Economic equity includes ‘equal educational opportunities, equal pay for work of equal value, gender balance in family life, and gender-balanced participation in labour markets’ (2017: 126). Democratic parity includes ‘equal rights to vote, assemble and hold office … inclusive opportunity structures for civil society and gender balance in political decision making’ (2017: 126). Teigen and Skjeie (2017) argue that the Nordic scores for democratic parity are more exceptional than those for economic parity (2017: 142) and as high scorers overall, the Nordic countries might be considered very similar but that, in fact, their underlying policies vary significantly (2017: 144). As the chapters in this volume reveal, according to the reported experiences of women in Finland (FI), Norway (NO) and Sweden (SE) working in R&I, inequalities of different kinds are still a norm. These include horizontal and vertical segregation in both education and in the workplace, the persistence of the gender pay gap and the unequal distribution of household and care tasks. These persistent inequalities (Griffin and Vehvilainen, 2021) are evident in relevant international statistics in most areas of R&I. Thus according to the SHE Figures (2018) the proportion (percentage) of women among doctoral graduates by broad field of study in 2016 was as shown in Table 1.3:

Table 1.3 shows that there are quite significant differences between the different Nordic countries in the proportion of women among doctoral graduates by broad field of study, involving a 10 per cent difference between Finland and Norway for education, for example, and 9 per cent difference between Sweden and Norway regarding ICT. The Swedish percentage for ICT is the same as the UK (not shown here, but 24 per cent), and the Finnish one at 18 per cent is only one percentage point above the Polish one which was 17 per cent. Based upon these statistics, one could therefore postulate quite different similarities and differences across European countries than the phrase ‘the Nordic countries’ suggests.

In other words, there are significant discrepancies regarding the gender wage gap among the Nordic countries, with more than 10 percentage points difference between those countries with the lowest wage gap (Denmark, Finland) and those with the highest (Norway, Sweden). Here, again, the Nordics do not emerge as a unitary block but rather as countries with individual particularities. This is also the case when one considers researcher numbers in the government and business sectors (Table 1.4):

The differences in number across the four Nordic countries evident in Table 1.4 cannot be explained through relative population size for example (DK = 5,792,202; FI = 5,540,720; NO = 5,421,241; SE = 10,099,265),⁴ or relative size of the sectors. Table 1.4 shows that the number of female researchers in the public sector in Denmark is significantly lower than in Finland and Norway where the population is roughly the same size. It also shows that the number of female researchers working in the government sector is almost equal to that of men in Denmark, but less equal in Finland, Norway or Sweden. The gender gap regarding female researchers in the business sector is huge compared to the government sector at roughly 25 per cent or fewer of female researchers in that sector. Again, significant discrepancies can be observed for Finland compared to Norway, but also in terms of numbers of female researchers in the business sector in Denmark compared to those in Finland and Norway.

When it comes to precarious working contracts (see also Standing, 2011), women researchers fare consistently worse than male researchers, again with significant discrepancies across the Nordic countries (Table 1.5):

Thus while the gender gap regarding precarious contracts is relatively small in Denmark, in Finland almost twice as many women as men have precarious working contracts, and the gender gap is also significantly larger in Sweden than in Denmark. Further, there are sizeable differences regarding the parental leave schemes across the Nordic countries (Table 1.6):

Table 1.6 shows significant differences in the amount of time allocated to parental leave. There is a 17-week difference in parental leave allocation between Denmark and Sweden, and there are also important differences in the number of parental leave weeks reserved for fathers. Since fathers’ participation in childcare is key to women’s ability to have a career in R&I (see Chapter 9 by Seddighi and Corneliussen, this volume), these differences matter.

What all the figures cited earlier tell us is that any finer-grained analysis of gender equality issues in R&I across the supposedly very similar Nordic countries will reveal significant differences among them (Åseskog, 2018). But rather than assess the relativity of these differences and similarities, it might be more pertinent to ask for what purposes these discourses of similarity or difference are mobilized. One could argue that the public assertion of achieved gender equality serves to silence dissenting voices and absolves relevant bodies and organizations from addressing gender equality issues in the Nordic countries. One could further argue that the homogenization of the Nordic countries under that very umbrella term serves to obscure significant differences (see Larsen et al, 2021) that the individual countries involved might need to address. Conversely, one could also suggest that highlighting the differences between the Nordic countries and the range of gender inequalities that continue to prevail (Griffin and Vehvilainen, 2021) is an incitement for action and change. Any emphasis on differences or similarities between the Nordic countries is thus a strategic and political decision, based on the purpose the comparison is meant to serve.

Institutionally the Nordic countries have cemented their similarities through joint bodies such as the Nordic Council of Ministers. Given the geographic location and proximity of the countries, their relative size both of territory and of population (see Table 1.7), the linguistic affinities between Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, and the Nordic countries’ social-democratic welfare state histories, it makes sense to emphasize the similarities and to foster close allegiances among them. The Nordic countries occupy comparatively large geographical spaces while having small populations as becomes evident in their population per square kilometre ratio (see Table 1.7). Sweden, for instance, is geographically roughly twice the size of the UK but has a population of less than one sixth of the UK’s. This also means that there are few large cities and that large tracts of each country except for Denmark are uninhabited or very sparsely inhabited. This impacts on issues such as social cohesion and trust, but also on interdependence among the Nordic countries.

Countries with small populations benefit and suffer from the fact that members of specific subsections of the population such as those working in Digital Humanities or biotechnology all tend to know each other. Such familiarity fosters trust and social cohesion but it can also produce subtle mechanisms of in- and exclusion (Husu, 2001, 2005) such as become evident in some of the chapters in this volume (for example Chapters 5 and 11). The COVID-19 pandemic has cast this situation into a new global light, not least regarding R&I. The pandemic has highlighted the tensions between globalization and localization, two major forces that are structuring inter- and transnational interaction against a longer-term backdrop of rising populism, right-wing politics and neo-nationalism that is anti-global except where the circulation of capital is concerned. The pandemic, but also climate change, for example, as global phenomena require global cooperation to address them. Here sharing knowledge regarding the virus, for example, constituted a push towards globalized collaboration in R&I, but the manufacture and especially the distribution of the anti-viral vaccines reinforced nationalistic tendencies as countries and indeed in some instances regions within countries ‘looked after their own’, despite the setting up of Covax,⁵ a worldwide distribution system of anti-viral drugs by the World Health Organization. The Nordic countries were no exception in this, responding differently to the pandemic in terms of degrees and timing of restrictive measures and so on. Place and belongingness have thus come to matter in new and unexpected ways, including in the Nordic countries, which, despite their generally close cooperation, closed borders against each other’s citizens, for example, in order to stem the spread of infection. Travel abroad, there as elsewhere, was discouraged and in 2021 many people did not consider holidays abroad. We already have significant research showing how COVID-19 has reinforced existing gender inequalities among women and men (for example Alon et al, 2020; Collins et al, 2021). One concern must be that the pandemic provides license to entrench gender inequalities further, as political and economic priorities displace certain inequalities from policy and governmental agendas. This needs to be guarded against in these times of challenge and change.

Structure of the volume

All the chapters in this volume are based on original empirical qualitative data, collected between 2017 and 2020. Many of these, but not all, derive from research carried out under the auspices of the Nordforsk-funded Excellence Centre Nordwit (nordwit.com). They all engage with the issue of gender inequalities in tech-driven R&I from the perspective of those who work in that context, in other words, from below, and centre on findings from three Nordic countries: Finland, Norway and Sweden. These countries, as discussed earlier, have many similarities, particularly historically, not least their public emphasis on gender equality, and their relatively high investment in R&I as a percentage of GDP (Table 1.8):

However, the Nordics are also countries that have become increasingly drawn into the orbit of neoliberal policies and dispositions (for example Berg et al, 2016; Kamali and Jönsson, 2018; Nygren et al, 2018). Some would argue (for example Browning, 2007; Kautto, 2010) that this is what has begun to create subtle differences among these countries, their policies and modi operandi. Others have suggested for some considerable time that conceptual frames such as ‘woman-friendly states’, applied to ‘the Nordic countries’, ‘downplay differences between the five Nordic countries’ and that there are ‘important differences in the form of women’s mobilization, their inclusion in political parties as well as the extent of institutionalization of gender equality’ in these Nordic countries (Borchorst and Siim, 2002: 92). The chapters in this volume explore those similarities and differences in dialogue with each other, in the understanding that, to quote a well-established feminist line, knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1988), and that gender and R&I, as entangled constructs in particular contexts, are also situated, even as they operate at local, national and international levels simultaneously.

Gabriele Griffin’s chapter on the precariousness of R&I in academe sets the tone for much of the work in this volume which highlights the ambivalences that accompany women’s and to some extent men’s (see also Hearn, 2017) reported working experiences in R&I in contemporary academe (see also Murgia and Poggio, 2019). She draws on interviews with Digital Humanities practitioners in Finland, Norway and Sweden to argue that emerging inter- and multidisciplinary knowledge domains which constitute epistemic innovations operate in ‘unsettledness’. This term describes R&I as such which is all about the new, change and the transformative. It also applies to those working in new knowledge domains which are frequently established in atypical higher education formations such as centres, labs or forums that exist outside the main conventional decision-making structures of academe and are hence marginalized. Drawing on Charles Tilly’s (1998) depiction of inequality mechanisms, in particular opportunity hoarding and exploitation, but also on Henry Etzkowitz and Carol Kemelgor’s (1998) elaboration of the role of centres in universities, Griffin illustrates how conditions of unsettledness which extend to the provisional contractual situation of many Digital Humanities practitioners enable gendered inequalities to flourish in contexts where there is – public equality discourses notwithstanding – little room for redress. Thus R&I institutions such as universities both invite and disavow innovation, for instance through how they both desire innovation as long as it is accompanied by external funding, and disavow it by not supporting it in terms of their recruitment and promotion criteria where interdisciplinarity, for instance in publications terms, can be an active disadvantage. Universities emerge as not agile here, and as insecure sources of employment, pushing women who often embrace innovation opportunities, either out of their jobs or into service appointments which fail to do justice to their expertise, knowledge and competences.

This topic is also taken up by Oili-Helena Ylijoki in her chapter on navigating the career paradoxes of women researchers in biotechnology. Biotechnology, like Digital Humanities, is a new kid on the R&I block, and in academe. And like in Digital Humanities, the researchers are predominantly female. Indeed, Ylijoki’s case study, a biotechnology centre at a Finnish university, originally had only female researchers. As an emerging knowledge domain biotechnology has no track record of institutional embeddedness, professional associations or other obvious support structures. It is hence the object of institutional and educational policy decision-making in ways that challenge its efficacy. Ylijoki discusses how the multiple mergers which this centre underwent as part of a national Finnish higher education restructuring strategy to create bigger units, led to its dissolution, with half its female staff leaving to seek work in the private sector and the other half continuing under constraining working conditions in which they found it almost impossible to gain institutional recognition in the form of permanent jobs and promotions to professorships despite bringing in more money than some of their colleagues from other, much more established, related disciplines such as medicine. Ylijoki identifies three career imaginaries that shape these women’s views of their professional lives: i) the tenure track position, introduced into Finland (but not into other Nordic countries) in 2010, which is open to younger scholars on the basis of their ‘promise’ and which leads to a permanent professorship but is only achieved by very few, hence not a realistic prospect for most; ii) academic entrepreneurs who exist from project to project on insecure temporary employment even if they are highly successful in terms of generating external funding; and iii) leaving academe to gain more secure and less stressful employment in the private sector. The paradox in all this is that biotechnology when it emerged was regarded as having great potential to generate transformative scientific results, opportunities for commercialization and academy-industry links, and its institutionalization was accompanied by great hype. Academe clearly desired it, but unrealistic expectations of the instantaneity of its transformational and income-generating potential coupled with structural changes in higher education challenged the biotechnology centre’s viability, and its absorption into ever larger male-dominated units within the university dissolved its potential, leaving the women in the unit floundering and unable to see their career futures in anything other than bleak terms.

Against such bleakness Hilde G. Corneliussen and Gilda Seddighi’s chapter shows that women find ways into ICT even when the odds are stacked against them, not only because ICT is considered to be male dominated but also because they are not encouraged into ICT at the point of entering higher education or because they are interested in something else at that stage. Corneliussen and Seddighi focus on ICT work in Norway. They found that women migrated to ICT through three different, circuitous routes. One was by doing a second degree in an ICT field later on in life after the women had already completed a first degree (this is, of course, a more likely route in countries where education is free, rather than where one has to pay fees as in the UK). The second occurred as a function of the technologization of non-tech contexts. And the third came about as a result of the need for non-tech specialisms within ICT fields. Importantly, women such as the ones interviewed for this chapter are not captured in OECD and other databases documenting ICT domains because these databases often take only the first higher education degree into account – which in these women’s cases was in non-ICT subjects – and because we have as yet no effective ways of measuring either shifts in occupational parameters as a function of increasing digitalization, or of tracking career moves across domains. The low numbers of women in ICT that are conventionally reported may therefore be somewhat misleading in terms of actual numbers of women engaged in ICT-focussed research and innovation.

In the same way that we know little about women finding their way into ICT through circuitous routes, we also have little research to date that addresses how changing research funding regimes impact differentially on women and men although it is established that gendered biases in research funding occur (Ranga et al, 2012; Van der Lee and Ellemers, 2015). Vehviläinen et al’s chapter provides useful insights into this phenomenon. They chart experiences of an initial great welcome followed by a narrative of decline as a function of changing research funding regimes in relation to women working in biotechnology, a new R&I area in contemporary Finnish academe. They outline Finland’s shifts in research funding, the result of changing economic fortunes and in particular the spectacular rise and decline of one company and private research funder, Nokia. Here the disproportionate influence of one company on the finances of a country with a small population become evident. But Vehviläinen et al’s account also demonstrates that in times of economic contraction women fare significantly worse than men, being excluded from research opportunities, particularly where these collide with family responsibilities and childbearing issues. The women’s inability to resist their exclusion from R&I as funding shrank is painful to behold; it speaks to the difficulty of changing the underlying cultures of gender inequality which are held at bay during times of plenty but surface in almost unchanged ways in times of austerity, even in supposedly gender equal countries.

Charlotte Silander et al’s chapter discusses the effectiveness of different equality measures in redressing prevailing gender inequalities in Finland, Norway and Sweden. It covers the period 2000–18 and compares the relative effectiveness of organizational measures such as having gender equality plans and targeted measures directed specifically at women in STEM universities. They reveal interesting differences between the countries: while all of them use organizational equality measures, Finland did much less regarding targeted measures. However, the findings show that targeted measures, some of which might be construed as positive action, are more effective in achieving change than organizational measures. The paradox and problem is that targeted measures that could be construed as positive action are not permissible under EU law and hence the two countries that used them the most, Norway and Sweden, had to discontinue them (see also Skjeie et al, 2019: 443–4).

The effectiveness of such measures is also under scrutiny in May-Linda Magnussen et al’s chapter, which provides very concrete evidence of what such targeted measures might mean. Here a specific measure, preliminary evaluations of more junior female academics in a technology university in Norway, is under scrutiny. The preliminary evaluations concerned the women’s curricula vitae (CV) and their readiness to be promoted to professor. The chapter finds that women who underwent such evaluations by and large felt motivated to work towards a professorship. For some this was because they felt recognized and made visible through the process of the evaluation itself – they were being paid attention. For others it was about gaining a better understanding of what was required in CV terms, and negotiating more research time to improve their outputs. Magnussen et al, however, point out that such recognition came at a cost. They argue that the women were effectively invited to emulate male-centred academic cultures, that is, become more competitive, more narrowly focussed, say ‘no’ to anything that was not CV-supportive, focus on number one (that is, themselves) and so on; in other words, they were neoliberalized and indeed, invited to adapt themselves to the masculinized work environment that the neoliberal academy has promoted (Hearn, 2017). The authors rightly ask if this is the kind of R&I environment we want to foster (see also Morley and Lund, 2020).

Siri Øyslebø Sørensen and Guro Korsnes Kristensen’s chapter shows how much that work environment has already become rooted in early career researchers’ imaginaries regarding their futures in academe. The Norwegian postdocs they interviewed saw the academic environment as highly competitive and extremely demanding, leaving little room for ‘having a life’. In this they clearly resembled the Finnish academics whom Oili-Helena Ylijoki discussed in her chapter in this volume. However, unlike in Finland where tenure track positions have become a new norm, such positions are not available in Norway, thereby changing the futures early career researchers can imagine. A professorship which would change the Norwegian postdocs’ status from temporary to permanent employment was seen as a way out of the precarity that accompanied their present status, but it was not something they regarded as possible to ‘choose’ as such. This contradicts the neoliberal rhetoric of ‘choice’ that has come to dominate many work-related discourses.

‘Choice’ also played a very limited role in their initial decision to undertake postdoc positions. Being supported by more senior academics, having luck, and serendipity loomed larger than any notion of choice in their imaginaries, with the added gendered, not necessarily expected dimension that women were much more upfront about that support than men who tended to downplay it. Differences in gendered perceptions also played an interesting role in how the entanglement of career and family was narrated. Men talked about their partners as equally committed to their careers as they were, while the women talked more in terms of their own agency in managing family and work. Interestingly, male interviewees suggested that the question of having a family was as pertinent for them as for women, thus pointing to potential new alliances between younger men and their partners regarding this issue.

For the Norwegian postdocs becoming a professor was regarded as desirable because it led out of precarious work situations, it lent authority and it seemed the inevitable goal of pursuing an academic career, but it was also viewed as hugely demanding and incompatible with having a work-life balance. That issue of the work-life balance is also taken up in Gilda Seddighi and Hilde G. Corneliussen’s chapter regarding the challenges women working in ICT research and innovation in Norway in the governmental and business sectors face as they try to reconcile work and family life in an age when flexible working has been heralded as the means to enable women to spend more time with family, and to have both a career and a family. However, and first, the generous childcare policies that are a hallmark of Norway proved insufficient to the needs of these women who were required to draw on their individual personal resources regarding childcare to enable them to pursue their career. In the context of the dual-earner model that is prevalent in the Nordic countries, Norwegian women working in ICT had to rely on partners with different work patterns than their own, in particular predictable standard-office-hour work times, not too much travel or commuting and the flexibility to be home early to manage childcare issues. Second, flexibility in these women’s account of their careers meant working more, rather than less, and often evenings and weekends to ‘make up for’ time spent with children. The ‘greedy’ work cultures that prevail in ICT R&I were difficult to negotiate for women, and even as they worked there full-time, and indeed more, some felt like that they had opted out from a career because they gave their time to family.

One answer to such difficulty might, of course, be to save time by going online (though COVID-19 has shown that this has many gendered implications also – see Alon et al, 2020; Collins et al, 2021; Hupkau and Petrongolo, 2020). Malin Lindberg et al’s chapter on co-creative platforms deals with the question of how gender research can be used effectively across academe and industry or business/enterprise through just such platforms, in this instance two located in Sweden. Co-creative platforms in themselves constitute an innovation, and Lindberg et al’s work explores how gender research can inform – through a co-creative, collaborative endeavour between academe and business – innovative equality practices in businesses. Their study reveals that these platforms engage researchers and stakeholders in innovation processes of joint identification, exploration and solution of societal and organizational challenges, as is common in social innovation. Both struggle, however, to bridge the critical agenda of the researchers and the constructive agendas of the stakeholders. Lindberg et al emphasize the potential of gender research to improve organizational competitiveness, innovativeness and attractiveness, on the one hand, while advancing academic knowledge on mechanisms for organizational and societal transformation, on the other. However, they also indicate some of the vicissitudes of collaborating across sectors, ranging from incompatibilities of timetables which made the arrangement of meetings difficult to managers’ disbelief regarding some of the research findings. Cross-sectoral collaboration, a much vaunted desideratum in contemporary academe, proves more demanding than anticipated.

The volume finishes with a text on a little explored subject, the relationship between ICT R&I and geographical location. We tend to think of R&I as occurring largely in urban conglomerations but technologization has changed work opportunities in rural regions as businesses and government bodies have relocated there, both to support local and regional development and in search of cost effectiveness. This is important in the Nordic countries which have huge rural areas that are sparsely populated and where out-migration by women is more common than out-migration by men (SSB, 2018). For women, as Hilde G. Corneliussen et al show, the changing workscape in rural regions produces interesting job opportunities that might not be available to them in urban areas. In the Norwegian context, on which this chapter concentrates, these opportunities coincide with women’s desire to live in areas where they grew up, to spend more time with family and to enjoy the benefits that living in a rural environment offers such as outdoor activities which are highly popular in the Nordic countries, such as hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. Corneliussen et al found that scarcity of human resources in under-populated areas in Norway and the technologization of companies and the public sector afforded women who were either keen to move to the countryside anyway or who already had family connections there meant that women had opportunities to get jobs and utilize or develop their ICT expertise while at the same time cutting down on commuting and improving their work-life balance. However, for migrant women with no prior family connections isolation in the countryside could also become a problem, and all women had to grapple with the fact that overall there were far fewer workplaces to choose from than in urban arenas. Nonetheless Corneliussen et al’s work counteracts the prevailing assumption that women in ICT research and innovation are inevitably low in numbers and cannot find a way of reconciling work and life. The countryside emerges as a space of qualified opportunity for women in ICT.

Gender inequalities in R&I continue to prevail (see Striebing et al, 2020), even in the Nordic countries. This much is clear. However, there are also signs of gradual change. According to the SHE Figures (2018) ‘the proportion of tertiary educated women and men working as professionals or technicians are almost equal at the EU-28 level’ (2018: 40). ‘Women are also more likely than men to work in knowledge-intensive activities’ (2018: 42) and ‘While women are under-represented as authors in research publications, they are slowly closing the gap’ (2018: 142). The funding success rates for women and men show that in Denmark and Finland overall women have greater success rates than men; in Norway they are almost equal; and only in Sweden do men have higher funding success rates (SHE Figures, 2018: 173). These indicators may signal that women in R&I are gradually adapting to the neoliberal workscape they inhabit without this necessarily changing the work cultures they have to navigate, or it may suggest an overall shift in work environments affecting both women and men. One thing is for sure: living the contradiction is not sustainable.