A woman’s place is in the ‘home’? Gender-specific hiring patterns in academia in gender-equal Norway

Abstract

We investigated women’s hiring patterns in academia, bridging the gap between two streams of literature typically not brought in conversation with one another: (1) access to tenured professorship by gender; (2) academic mobility and the disadvantage it can create for women. We studied all recruitments of new permanent associate and full professors by open call from 2007 to 2017 at one faculty of the largest university in Norway (N = 1009 applicants). We found that women were not reluctant to apply, nor systematically dispreferred in the selection process, nor deterred by the prospect of relocating. About 40% of applicants were women and the percentage was roughly maintained among winners. About 80% of women applicants were external candidates, nearly matching their male counterparts. However, women had an advantage when they were internal applicants and a disadvantage when external, and this disadvantage was a function of the distance. Underneath an overall gender-equal picture, there are gender-specific hiring patterns that are not the consequence of women’s application choices.

Kjønn og akademia

“…They are older and more permanent than any political ideology (such as NPM) that is used to justify exclusion in specific historical phases. While NPM certainly does not serve the cause of women, historical gender marginalization in academia is insufficiently accounted for in NPM-focused critiques; this holds for exclusion both in terms of sheer numbers (Moratti 2020a;2020b), and of exclusionary representations (such as stereotypes of women's abilities) (Moratti 2018;. Managerialism in academia is a natural enemy of diversity, but there are others, older, more normalized and hence better concealed.…”

Contemporary Fairy Tales: Narrating Women Academics Through Metaphors

“…What follows is a brief account of how the idea for this research came about, and the methods I have used. I started to discern a 'myth and tale' semantic pattern by serendipity, while researching metaphors on women academics (Moratti, 2018) and by reading scholarly material for a set of empirical studies on gender and tenure (Moratti, 2020a(Moratti, , 2020b. As my intuition gradually took shape, I further investigated the matter through internetmediated qualitative content analysis (Hewson et al, 2016).…”

“…I found that women (and only women) are advantaged when already working at the institution (internal applicants) and disadvantaged when external applicants. Women apply as external applicants nearly as much as men do, but tend not to be preferred (Moratti, 2020b). This is especially true for women applicants affiliated with a non-Norwegian institution.…”

The balance between status quo and change when minorities try to access top ranks: a tale about women achieving professorship

“…factors beyond individuals' direct agency) has examined the effects of institutional policies and practices on women's careers and explored the broader effects of academic and disciplinary cultures (Fagan and Teasdale, 2020;Berheide and Walzer, 2014;Howe-Walsh and Turnbull, 2016). These findings showed that academia is a conservative environment where women struggle to find legitimacy, even when gender equality is supported (O'Connor, 2020;Bönisch-Brednich and White, 2021;Moratti, 2021;Cohen et al, 2021). Often, neither an increase in the proportion of women (Helitzer et al, 2017) nor the presence of gender equality initiatives (Tzanakou and Pearce, 2019;Roos et al, 2020) is enough to change these deeply-ingrained power dynamics.…”