Women Professors across STEMM and Non-STEMM Disciplines: Navigating Gendered Spaces and Playing the Academic Game

Colette Fagan and Nina Teasdale
Additional contact information
Colette Fagan: The University of Manchester, UK
Nina Teasdale: Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

Work, Employment & Society, 2021, vol. 35, issue 4, 774-792

Abstract: Women remain poorly represented in the highest positions in academia, despite their increasing participation. This article seeks to understand how women who have reached senior occupational positions in Higher Education Institutions have navigated their organisational and disciplinary settings. In the process we explore how experiences compare across male and female-dominated spaces, integrating field theory with Acker’s work on ‘gendered organisations’ to develop the idea of academic disciplines as ‘gendered spaces’. Empirically we draw upon a qualitative study of women professors working across science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEMM) and non-STEMM disciplines in a large research-intensive university in the UK. Utilising Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the game’, we show how they navigate the academic game within the context of differing ‘gendered spaces’; complicit in the game yet recognising it as unfair, and thus (inadvertently) reproducing gendered structures and practices.

Keywords: academia; field theory; gender; gendered spaces; universities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017020916182 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:35:y:2021:i:4:p:774-792

DOI: 10.1177/0950017020916182

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().