What professors do in peer review: Interrogating assessment practices in the recruitment of professors in Sweden

Abstract

Sweden is known for its political will to gender equality. Sweden is also a country with a strong tradition of transparency in university recruitments. In this article, the assessment practices in the appointment of full professors in one Swedish university are investigated from an intersectional and postcolonial perspective on gender and place/space. Using a multimethod approach to investigate written evaluations of applicants, recruitment group meeting minutes and interviews with reviewers, the results show that there is great variation in how evaluation criteria are applied and filled with meaning. Moreover, in more than half of the appointment decisions the reviewers disagreed. The interview results show a structural bias operating towards researchers applying from non-Western university contexts. At an aggregated level, national applicants have 3.88 times greater chance to be proposed for a position and national women applicants are the most likely to be proposed for the position. 1 | INTRODUCTION 1 Gender bias in the evaluation of academic staff (O'Connor & Hagan, 2016) during the professorship appointment process (van den Brink & Benschop, 2011) and in research grant distribution (Wennerås & Wold, 1997) is well known and researched worldwide. In a context where gender aspects are actually considered in research into peer review,

Understanding the social and political dimensions of research(er) assessment: Interpretative flexibility and hidden criteria

“…For example, even within the tightly-controlled context of recruitment procedures in Swedish universities, which Hammarfelt and Rushforth (2017, 171) recognise are "designed to be impartial and merit-based in that external reviewers assess the candidates", there are nonetheless "many ways in which the recruiting department can influence the process." The Swedish case is highly instructive here, with research on gender equity in hiring further exploring how "interpretative flexibility" prevails even in seemingly tightly-controlled procedures (Mählck, Kusterer, and Montgomery 2020;Helgesson and Sjögren 2019), with formalisation realised via "evolving and often vague metrics and standards, assessed through an opaque mix of procedural steps" (Helgesson and Sjögren 2019, 574). In the Netherlands, van den Brink et al (2010 examined how attempts to bring transparency and accountability to academic appointment schemes were hindered by the fact that selection protocols "remain toothlesspaper tigresses that are fraught with implementation problems."…”