The Precarisation of Research Careers: a Comparative Gender Analysis

What is it about?

The book is about gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations. Its especial focus is on early careers and on the process of precarisation currently affecting higher education. This growing phenomenon is closely related to recent organisational and cultural changes in the research sector, especially in the management models and emergent rhetorics within universities marked by an increasingly widespread neoliberal ideology.

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Why is it important?

The contribution of the book is innovative for several reasons. Firstly, it focuses on the early stages of academic and scientific careers, and not just on the topmost positions, as does most of the literature on gender and science. In particular, it considers the growth of positions based on unstable and temporary contracts (non tenured) with important consequences from a gender perspective that to date have been insufficiently considered by the literature. Secondly, the book tackles the issue of gender asymmetries in research organisations. It does so within the framework of the neoliberal agenda, the economic crisis, and the ‘greedy organisations’ where scientific work becomes more market-driven and focused on dimensions such as flexibility, performativity, competitiveness, internationalisation, and commodification with significant impacts in terms of both generation and gender. Thirdly the focus is not only on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) but also on the more feminised SSH ones (Social Science and Humanities), in order to determine differences but also similarities between them in regard to gender presence and career opportunities.