Abstract
Men and women remain in unequal positions in coping with their scientific and academic careers. Several of the mechanisms dissuading or preventing women from pursuing scientific careers have already been described in the literature: women getting stuck with paltry, undervalued tasks, thus manufacturing a “sticky floor”; structuring the scientific field around a masculine habitus; and the “Matilda” effect for women. An additional cause of these inequalities is observed in the relationship between the private and professional aspects of the individuals’ lives. The university transmits a “gendered order” in its organizational structures, principles, customs and habits, in short in the practice of scientific work. That is due in particular to the ancient structuring of the university around a male figure: the “university professor” or “scientist” entirely invested in his work, freed from domestic necessities by an invisible carer (he or she who ‘cares’ for him), so he can devote himself to science. Hence the university was constructed on a “greedy” model expecting a total, voluntary and impassioned engagement in work, coupled with a model of work/family dissociation. Based on a research programme dealing with post-doctoral researchers and recently tenured researchers*, this article analyses the role of their private life and how it relates to the professional sphere in their experience of scientific work. In this respect, it provides some explanatory elements on both the greater vulnerability of women-mothers in the university game and on the configurational supports (configurations of professional life and private life) needed to offset that vulnerability.
Introduction
Reflections on the scientific and academic world go back a long way and are unceasingly renewed. Max Weber formulated the problem of the meaning of science for the person who has decided to make a profession of it. 1 Robert King Merton (1942) reflected on the question of the scientific ethos (revised in 1973) and Pierre Bourdieu (1976) enquired into the question of the scientific field and the production of a Homo Academicus (1984). At the same time, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979) questioned the construction of science in the daily life of a laboratory. Yet, the sociology of scientists and scientific careers is an undeveloped research field (Prpic et al., 2014). Today as much as yesterday, having a career 2 as a researcher (or a teacher–researcher) presupposes a major temporal and subjective engagement involving integration in a social field, meaning a space of struggles for access to scientific recognition and positions valorized according to criteria and capital specific to that field, the definition of which represents stakes in a power game between the participants (Bourdieu, 1976).
Norms of commitment in the scientific field
From a functionalist type perspective, the professional socialization of researchers leads to the learning (acceptance and, quite often, reproduction), of an ethos resembling that of other highly qualified professions (Blair-Loy, 2003; Hochschild, 1997). This ethos, which requires demonstrating a vocation and total investment in a professional career (Beaufays and Krais, 2005; Dany et al., 2011), emanates from a greedy institution (Coser, 1974). Such an ethos appears in the accounts researchers offer of their work
3
and in the institutional documents wherein the universities express their expectations. An example from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) can be given in an internal note of its Rectoral Council dating from 2012 stating: “from the professor completely invested in his work and fully benefiting from his academic freedom,
University’s organisation and gender inequalities
The university’s functioning methods produce the sort of gender inequalities described in the expressions “glass ceiling” (redefined as “iron ceiling”; Fassa and Kradolfer, 2010) and “leaky pipeline” (e.g. Alper, 1993; Dubois-Shaik and Fusulier, 2015; Meulders et al., 2012; She Figures, 2013). The specific causes of these inequalities are less rooted in direct and explicit discrimination (notably in recruiting; Musselin and Pigeyre, 2008), as in the dynamics of: a gendered organization (Acker, 1990); resulting in a university management that resembles an old boys’ club (Case and Richley, 2012: 14); and a Matilda effect (Fassa et al., 2012; Rossiter, 1993) penalizing women vis-à-vis their scientific productions, whereby their work is often attributed to their male colleagues enhanced by a closely related Matthew effect (Merton, 1968), which explains how eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is shared or similar. Further, we encounter the injunction to give all priority to work over private life, with the researcher appearing as a “lonely hero” (Benschop and Brouns, 2003), entirely engaged in his work and thus supposedly released from domestic constraints by a carer (which expresses a certain model of work/family relationship according to a gendered order, see Crompton (1999) in particular; Fusulier and Nicole-Drancourt, 2015). In this respect, subsequently and in connection with other works (e.g. Case and Richley, 2013; Etzkowitz et al., 2000; Marry and Jonas, 2005; Perista and Perista, 2014), our research in Belgium shows that an additional cause of inequalities between the sexes is observed in the relationship between the private and professional, which we have described as a “hidden filter” (Fusulier and del Rio Carral, 2012).
According to a survey done in French-speaking Belgium, the relationship between profession and parentality is considered a dimension which discourages the pursuit of a scientific career for 50% of the female PhD students and 27% of the male PhD students (Meulders et al., 2012: 59). These proportions are far from being negligible for both sexes but massive as regards the women. More specifically, a study on postdoctoral research fellows (Fusulier and del Rio Carral, 2012) indicates, in a general manner, that 67% of the researchers believe that their professional life encroaches on their private and family life, a feeling present among 77% of the mothers. For 44% of the mothers, this feeling of encroachment also works in the other direction: an encroachment of the family life on the professional life, which is definitely less keenly felt in the other sub-groups (fathers and childless researchers, around 25 %). It is not surprising that, for a little less than one mother out of two, “the conflict experienced between professional life and family life” represents a factor encouraging them to reorient their careers, with that opinion being shared by 29% of the childless women, 27% of the childless men and 23% of the fathers. Certainly, as we have seen, legal provisions exist to help parents reconcile their professional lives with their family lives, such as vacations for parental reasons (maternity, paternity, parental, etc.). In any case, their use in the scientific field among postdoctoral researchers appears to create problems. Thus Fusulier and del Rio (2012) observed that only 80% of the mothers declared having used their entire maternity leaves (fifteen weeks) and 52% of the fathers their entire paternity leaves (ten days). Use of the parental leave is rather anecdotal. Recourse to those legal provisions is seen by the researchers as liable to have a negative impact on the possibility of having a career due to strong competition for the tenured positions. Indeed, 92% of the mothers, 79% of the childless women, 77% of the fathers and 75% of the childless men consider that taking a leave for private/family reasons or a career pause may have such a negative effect on their scientific career (Fusulier and del Rio Carral, 2012).
In fact, the university institution has been built on a model of work/family dissociation (Kanter, 1977) and fully espouses a gender regime assigning unequal places to men and women in distributing socially useful activities (Le Feuvre, 2015). Because they are historically defined as family heads (pater familias) whose presupposed qualities are self-assertion, technique, rationality and power, men are primarily assigned to the productive sphere and paid work. In contrast, women have historically been considered as sentimental beings whose excellent virtues within relationships of service are assigned to the family sphere and unpaid work. There are also stereotypes associating rationality with the masculine and the emotive sense with the feminine, further contributing to making “Science” a male activity.
Feminist claims and the gains of gender studies, which have denounced and deconstructed naturalists’ arguments, have admittedly transformed the university institution. The university today proclaims itself to be both open to women and sensitive to the wishes of individuals to reconcile their professional lives with their family lives. One example of this institutional endeavour is to be found in the European Charter for Researchers, notably by appealing to workers and funding bodies to provide “working conditions which allow both women and men researchers to combine family and work, children and career”. 6 But does this "good intention" of the institution translate itself into concrete practices which are observable in the experience of researchers today?
From our point of view, the university always encroaches upon the researchers’ private lives through its particular ways of functioning and organization of work (greedy institution that requires total investment), through the particular types of evaluation and selection criteria (more productivity and quantity-based) and processes (numerous steps in non-transparent applications for few available positions). This type of organizing of the university fails to take into account (or very little) the marked differences, which remain between men and women in their investment in the domestic sphere. The presupposition of a total engagement in the career and institution is that the male or female researcher will adjust her/his private life to comply with this or benefits from a sufficiently strong support network within that private life to succeed in her/his career. That amounts to a masked and gendered expectation behind simple “scientific excellence”, a pure genie, foreign to all ordinary considerations.
Research question
In this article, we seek to grasp the interaction between private life and the appreciation/development of scientific work/career. It is about understanding how early career researchers make sense of their engagement in a scientific career and the way this interferes with their life conditions, particularly in way of gendered differences. The postdoctoral phase of the scientific career has been identified in numerous ongoing studies as a particularly critical point, especially from a female point of view, as it involves a particularly precarious, unstable and vulnerable period for work and private life and has been identified as a bottleneck in a leaky pipeline and interrelated phenomena (Dubois-Shaik and Fusulier, 2016). The jump to a tenured position therefore involves a host of configurations that allow this stabilization. In this perspective, we propose providing some elements of explanation both on the great vulnerability of women/mothers in the university game and on the configurational supports (configurations of professional and private life) needed to offset that vulnerability.
To do so, we will first describe four relationships to reconstruct scientific careers based on an analysis of interviews with researchers in postdoctoral situations. We will point out some “determinants” in these relationships, particularly in underlining the differences existing within the group of female postdoctoral researchers in terms of trajectories and material configurations of existence. Finally, we will turn our gaze to the “winning trajectories” of female researchers having recently earned tenure in French-speaking Belgian academic space: female research associates of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium (FNRS).
Methods and analysis process
This article is based on a research project initiated in 2010 at the Université Catholique de Louvain involving researchers at early stages of their career (both male and female post-doctoral researchers and recently tenured researchers). This project combines qualitative interview and quantitative questionnaire approaches. However, this particular paper presents results that draw from the qualitative material and analysis. Our sample as well as the particular method of analysis of interviews, based on ideal-types, will be presented subsequently.
Sample
First of all, this research is based on an investigation targeting both male and female research fellows of the FNRS; it began at the University of Louvain in 2010 and benefited from FNRS financial support. Male and female PhD holding research fellows are chosen by the FNRS in a highly selective competition to carry out a research project over an initial three year period 7 .
In the initial stage, in 2010–2011, an exploratory investigation was carried out by questionnaire. One hundred and eighty-four researchers belonging to all of the university’s disciplinary fields (representative of a total population at that time of three hundred and five individuals) answered the questions dealing with their professional situation, the organization of their work, their work practices, their conception of professional engagement, as well as their private and family situation. Following that questionnaire, we met with eighteen researchers in the context of a semi-directed interview (seven men and eleven women).
In the second stage, an investigation by questionnaire was carried out during the 2011–2012 academic year among researchers in the first year of their research project mandate. 8 Among those individuals, thirty were contacted at random (fourteen women and sixteen men) in view of doing an interview every year during the three years of their post-doctoral mandate. Between December 2013 and January 2014, sixteen additional researchers in the third year of their mandate took part in this investigation (eleven women and five men).
Among the total number of interviews held between 2010 and 2014 (N = 64), thirty-two have been realized with parent researchers (18 mothers and 14 fathers).
In the context of this article, we supplemented that corpus with interviews carried out in late 2014 with sixteen female FNRS research associates, tenured between 2010 and 2014. In fact, they were done to control the information drawn from the first investigations with male and female postdoctoral candidates in unstable professional situations by compiling the itineraries and experiences of female researchers having obtained a permanent mandate, whom we shall describe as having “winning” trajectories (in any case in reference to stabilization in the scientific domain). Out of ninety-two researchers tenured between 2010 and 2014, thirty are women (33%). Out of these thirty female researchers we interviewed sixteen 9 diversified according to their discipline (social and human sciences; sciences and technology; health sciences). The contacts were made at random. We would like to point out that permanent FNRS researchers constitute a specific body in the scientific field and Belgian academic body, comprising four-hundred researchers involving all disciplines (in human and social sciences: science and technology: and health sciences), for all French-speaking Belgian universities (every university has a quota, which is assigned). They are selected on the basis of their scientific applications by an ad-hoc scientific commission, based on criteria coinciding with the idea of scientific excellence as it is defined today (academic pathway, quality of the research project, publication list, international mobility experiences, research funding obtained, recommendation letters, scientific awards, etc.). These researchers moreover, have to be supported by the university that will host them, whereby the latter also selects amidst the final short list established by the FNRS scientific commission. It is therefore a recognized thing in Belgium that the FNRS permanent researchers are those with the "entrance ticket" for a permanent academic position that is highest, at least on the level of the scientific profile; around twenty researchers are tenured annually, although their number has been reduced drastically since 2015 and 2016 depending on the limits of quotas, which imply that a mandate is opened or is free to be taken.
Analysis process
We have studied the experiences and trajectories of both male and female FNRS research fellows and the meaning of their professional positions. More precisely, based on interviews, we have sought to understand how these researchers entered academic research, which gratifications they consider they currently benefit from (resulting from their activity and employment status), what type of engagement they agree to in work and in their scientific field or, further, what types of relationship exist between their professional activity and private life (among which familial).
According to the perspective we adopt, the relationship to work develops not only in professional and social dynamics (Avril et al., 2010) but in family dynamics as well. The interviews are principally divided into sections that include: the entry into doctorate; and the relationship towards work and private life (including parenthood and couple life). Every interview was summarized to produce a "comprehensive summary" of several pages, which is a synthesis of the biographical experience and a dynamic vision of the pathway of the researchers, linking up with their socio-demographic characteristics. This method was to have a holistic vision of every researcher (case study), which is not often possible with a more classic thematic analysis. Finally, we have operated through a double process of identifying similarities as well as differences between the different cases (e.g. the place their professional engagement occupies in their private lives, their conjugal and parental situation, the way in which they perceive and organize the articulation between work and family life, their projects, etc.), in order to be able to identify different rapports to the career, defined as ideal-types in a Weberian perspective (Weber, 1922). By ideal-type, we refer to an intellectual reconstruction, reducing the complexity of information gathered in the interviews and creating a kind of designator (caricatural representation), which expresses a logic that was manifested in certain interviews, without however implying a group of particular persons in a classification (we therefore do not measure the impact of types). In other words, some researchers can incarnate literally a particular ideal-type, whereas others could be partially fitting one and another ideal-type, and others again may be very far from one particular and closer to another. It is through a qualitative analysis of similarities and differences of narratives that we have constructed a typology. In order to create this we have first worked on the first 18 interviews collected between 2010 and2011, then juxtapositioned with two more waves of interviews in order to test and reinforce the typology. The researchers who incarnate most a particular ideal-type also give us information about the socio-demographic characteristics and life configurations, which have more or less tendency for a type of relationship towards the career.
Findings
Four types of career relationships among FNRS post-doctoral research fellows
The analysis of the interviews in a vertical manner, interview by interview, shows the existence of relationships towards the career, which can be very different. While comparing the interviews (horizontal analysis of the comprehensive summaries), we can deduce the following four types of relationships towards the career:
- research may be a priority in life leading to a relationship of engagement (and thus in exclusion of other activities) to the profession;
- research may appear optimistically as an activity compatible with other personal commitments (with the family, leisure, etc.);
- doing research may nourish a form of ambivalence because of the painfully experienced competition with private life it imposes;
- research may be lived in assuming a certain distance from the facts, particularly due to the uncertainty as to professional futures it leaves unresolved.
We insist that this typology does not pretend to be closed or exhaustive (despite a sample of interviews, which showed a saturation of information); it does however assemble some cardinal aspects, which allows us to better understand the experience of the scientific career. Depending on their professional pathway and life path, researchers can modify their rapport towards their career and approach other type(s). Certain researchers can literally incarnate a particular type, whereby the majority shows hybrid rapports towards the profession or the career. We have chosen to illustrate the types that are incarnated by female researchers quite distinctly; this illustration by women is done in order to remind ourselves that although the gender question is fundamental, we should prevent having a deterministic vision, which would associate in a mechanical way the sex with the relationship towards careers.
Analysis of these types of relationships and their determinants has enabled us to grasp particular factors of differentiation among researchers, in turn providing us a better understanding of the inequalities in the access to academic careers between men and women, and between different groups of women too. If the women’s group is significantly inferiorized in the field of scientific research as compared to the men’s, it also presents an internal heterogeneity that is just as significant. After having briefly described differentiated relationships to careers, we will reconsider the factors enriching our understanding of the position of women in the scientific field.
Type 1: Engaged (illustrative case in Box 1)
Illustrative case: Lyn, doctorate in sciences, in a long distance relationship, without children.
Lyn is of Asian origin, she is in a long distance Relationship with a researcher, who is living abroad. Her current position of research fellow was not planned. After obtaining her PhD title in her home country, her project of doing a career in research became clearer. Her thesis permitted not only of acquiring skills, but also in attaining self-confidence. Lyn underlines the central role of a professor at university in the development of her career as a researcher. It is thanks to this support that she was able to apply to different scholarships from abroad, notably a first scholarship from the FNRS. The daily life of Lyn is structured around her professional life. Her apartment is close to university. She works generally from 8 o’clock to 19.30 in her research centre, including Saturdays. Only Sunday is dedicated to affairs of "private life". Her holidays are also steeped in professional activity, although to a lesser extent. Reading articles, answering to emails, etc. are part of the daily tasks that she practices also during periods of holidays. According to Lyn, this constitutes the normal work of the researcher, who has to be productive and respond rapidly to diverse demands. Her current mandate of research has a precise function in her life path: acquiring a maximum of skills and of recognition for obtaining tenure. The project of having a child occupies a secondary place for the moment. Lyn underlines the importance of being independent as a woman in order to live in a "relaxed" way. Marriage and maternity are considered as handicap, which penalizes the professional future. For Lyn, abandoning the scientific career like numerous women, in order to dedicate themselves to family life, represents a real "waste" for science. She concentrates on her professional objective, which in her view, will put her in a situation of good conditions to realize a family project in the future.
This first relationship to the profession consists in the researcher’s strong investment in her/his work, on both temporal and subjective levels. Recognized as a life priority, research appears as a singular activity which cannot be done in a half-way manner and which presupposes private sacrifices (vis-à-vis family and friendships, etc.). Extra-professional activities are thus relegated to second place in the name of a “passion” for research, a research access, which is associated with the register of ‘vocation’. For these researchers, professional success is tangible and the precariousness it involves appears onerous but unavoidable. That precariousness leads to an intense engagement aimed at “giving yourself every chance” and thus to being totally available for work, with that often happening in the context of a feeling of obligation. Flavie, a 30-year-old female researcher in psychology testifies, for example, to that relationship to work. Her daily life is entirely rhythmed by research, from Monday to Sunday, and only leaves room for a few odd moments of leisure. Thus the sport of climbing, which she loves and practices on Sunday midmornings is wedged in between research activities, before and after. She feels she needs to work on Sundays to finish up what she could not do during the week. The same applies to her “holiday” time, which she uses (at Christmas, for example) to write a research project or carry out activities calling for long periods of concentration, like drafting articles. This commitment to work is linked to a particular vision of scientific work: it is likened to a form of leisure. Flavie works the same way at the laboratory or at home, benefiting from the freedom of her activity to advance, whatever the circumstances (school holiday periods, weekends, etc.). For her, obtaining a stable post is a horizon, which cannot be limited by private life and spill over of work into daily life never appear as sacrifices. Single and childless, like other engaged female researchers, she moreover considers that parenthood is rather incompatible with a researcher’s activity.
Type 2: Optimistic (illustrative case in Box 2)
Illustrative case: Sybille, doctorate in sciences, married, three children.
At 33, Sybille is a research fellow in sciences. She is in a couple, has three children between one and six years of age. This researcher lives her daily life in the conciliation between work and her family through a solid organization, which structures her activities and puts clear limits between the two life spheres (for example, she works highly concentrated and without stopping during the day, normally until six o’clock in the evening, but rarely works evenings or during the week-end). On the level of the family, the routine plays a key role in the managing of responsibilities as a parent, in household chores, which she explains she shares equally with her partner, who is employed as an informatics expert. The couple and the family are a source of subjective satisfaction. On the professional level, she is affiliated to a very recognized laboratory in her domain, which she tries to play out in order to avoid too much international mobility. The support of her laboratory head in the consolidation of her career is very important to her. Although she is extremely motivated by the enigma that science represents on a daily basis, Sybille recognizes that she is nonetheless preoccupied by her future, particularly the financial aspect in view of her familial responsibilities. However, she prefers not to think too much about it.
A second type of career relationship is characterized by attributing a similar value to scientific work, coupled with a high idea of research and its requirements. That activity is regarded as strongly competitive and demanding but also gratifying, because of the freedom and autonomy it provides. But unlike the engaged individuals who give total priority to professional life to the detriment of private life, these researchers develop similar expectations towards work and private life. This similarity is due to a consideration which singularly distinguishes them from the first group: scientific work is seen as an activity reconcilable with private life. Consequently, these researchers have no intention of relegating life outside of work, while at the same time they intend to attain a level of scientific production, regulated by the same standards as the engaged researchers. This is the sense of “optimism”: the male or female researcher is as optimistic as to his/her ability to meet the demands of the academic milieu as about his/her chances of success with regard to his/her current investment (one which does not scrimp on his/her private life). Optimism thus means that familial involvement is not lived as a brake on involvement and professional productivity. On the contrary, the effect may be positive. For example, the presence of children appears as a career advantage because it ensures a structure, helps in avoiding bad habits and inducing greater efficiency. For example, this is the case of Mathilde, a 38-year-old female researcher, mother of two children who explains that she can count on her parents to take care of her children whenever she only gets home from work at 8 p.m., due to managing her laboratory “cultures” – which happens regularly. That is also the case of Christelle, 30 years old with one daughter, who benefits from the availability of her husband, a secondary school teacher. He takes care of their daughter every evening, thereby allowing Christelle to attend meetings at her laboratory or participate in the group life characterizing the end-of-day.
Type 3: Ambivalent (illustrative case in Box 3)
Illustrative case: Sia, doctorate in human and social sciences, married, 1 child.
In a couple since 15 years with a lecturer–researcher, Sia just had her first child at 40 years. She and her partner have constructed their career and their couple via international mobility. However, as much as this mobility stabilized the career of her partner, it did not serve well for that of Sia. Already in possession of two PhDs and with numerous postdoctoral experiences in prestigious universities abroad, she tried multiple international applications without succeeding in obtaining a stable position. Passionate about her research activity, she is today disappointed by the institutional system, which according to her is based on "political" decisions rather than the actual merit of the researchers. Moreover, she expresses a great frustration concerning the sacrifices that she had to undertake on the familial level, as she and her partner had to try to stabilize Sia in her professional sphere before having a child. She underwent very difficult periods on a personal level as much as on the conjugal level before obtaining the actual permanent mandate. However, she feels that she has given too much in the name of "scientific excellence" without having plucked the fruits of such a sacrifice. Since her return from her maternity leave, Sia is torn between the run of the scientific production and her family life, notably in her role as a mother. This researcher expresses the need of taking time to reflect about her own view of and positioning in the career, but also feels guilty of doing it, in face of the impact this has on scientific efficiency.
A third career relationship consists in the experience of ambivalence. This is the result of a frustrated desire to attach the same importance to work and to private life. Ambivalence comes from a similar incapacity “to do what needs to be done for work” and “to do what needs to be done for the family”. These ambivalent researchers claim an ideal of investment in work similar to that of the engaged and the optimists. But that ideal is constrained by sacrifices which increase the cost of the scientific career on personal, social and family levels. Their interest in research suffers faced with these sacrifices and the demanding character of work, the precariousness of employment and the difficulty of planning a future into account. Blandine, a 32-year-old female researcher, is the perfect incarnation of this career relationship. Her husband is heavily invested in his career activity as an independent veterinary surgeon. He works a lot; evenings, weekends and ‘on-call periods’ prevent his being very flexible and involved in parental and domestic work from a temporal point of view. Blandine in turn takes full responsibility for family life: caring for children, dropping them off at daycare and school, preparing meals, etc.; these tasks are described by Blandine as routine and servile and she complains about seeing her husband benefiting from solely happy moments with her daughters. Beyond her husband’s professional constraints, in her eyes that is due to his “not very modern” vision of family life: she should do everything – in the name of the children’s needs and the primacy of her husband’s career. Certainly he recognizes that Blandine does more. But, at the same time, he thinks that that’s justified by the flexible character of Blandine’s work. While he recognizes constraints inherent in his wife’s activity, particularly involving international mobility, for the time being he refuses to entertain the possibility of Blandine’s travelling abroad.
Type 4: Distant (illustrative case in Box 4)
Illustrative case: Camille, married, without children.
Camille has lived as part of a couple for three years. She finds herself in research "by chance", whereby she never had thought about a scientific career; she "grasped" a given opportunity via her supervisor. Although she takes pleasure in doing research on a daily basis and loves her subject, Camille no longer wants to have a scientific career in view of the professional uncertainty in her discipline. This probable "abandoning" is not lived as a failure. She takes a positive view of her experience and her mandate as research fellow is viewed as very rich, notably because it has given her a lot of competences. She is however not entirely sure about leaving, before having other perspectives in view. In particular, she is passionate about the cultural sphere and the world of theatre. This is, according to her, the first time she is thinking about a professional reconversion and is doubtful about her future. This doubt was "stifled" for a long time by the urgency of finding research contracts, one after the other. Today, she has a critical view about the demands of research, of the contradiction between planning her research projects, and the contracts, which are temporary and short-term. Camille feels especially the dilemma of needing to choose between research and cultural and artistic activities, which she had to renounce in her daily life in order to succeed in professional obligations. This sacrifice is weighing increasingly upon her. Camille does not feel much supported by her environment in her scientific activity. Her mother, who is a teacher, confuses research activities with studies, and believes it is a student life. Her companion on the other hand, who travels a lot as an entrepreneur, does not understand the restrictions of Camille’s profession in view of the great liberty she has concerning deadlines of research projects. The managing of links between work and private life is translated in a difficulty to set limits towards the professional activity in order for Camille to become dedicated to other activities. The stability in the family has become clearer: Camille and her partner have the project of buying a house in the district where they live. The desire of motherhood is also present.
A last type of career relationship consists in “distanciation”. This means placing oneself at a distance (not always leading to a disinvestment) from the ordinary requirements of scientific work: competition; temporal availability; and uncertainty and precariousness. These researchers continue to play the game, to the extent they feel they can go along with it. But, unlike the earlier cases, the game seems to have lost its substance: the illusio which ‘made the other researchers go’ has been weakened (without disappearing). These researchers seem relieved in explaining their distanciation, insisting on their awareness of the selective process at work in their career and the narrowness of the door giving access to a stable post in the scientific world. The taste for research still remains (among all the researchers we met, only a small handful said they were no longer interested in their work), but it is relativized by the constraints weighing on how things are done and which dictate how the value of the male or female researcher is assessed. These constraints no longer make sense and the distanced researchers no longer tolerate relegating their private life to the service of professional life. At home research is deemed secondary compared to other projects, and the possibility of a professional reconversion is at the centre of their relation to the future, even if it remains hard to imagine, if only because of disciplinary specializations making competences hard to sell on the labour market. 10 This is how it is with Aude, formerly engaged and now become distant. While testifying to the intense pleasure she obtains in research activity, and of a deep respect for the FNRS institution (her only employer to date), Aude today takes her distance from work in concrete ways in her daily life (she dis-activates Thunderbird on weekends or stays away from the computer). Moved by a desire to make the most of her son, her distance also appears as a form of protective shield given her fears of not obtaining a tenured post in academic research. Consequently, she turns to the private sphere and refuses to look ahead – from a professional point of view. This distance seems all the more satisfactory as she has a research background that is just as attractive to public research as to private.
What are the “determinants” of these relationships?
Can we determine the factors favouring a certain type of career relationship? Thanks to a comparative analysis of the interviews, we have been able to distinguish out some significant factors, which, while again revealing gender inequalities, help us in thinking about the variations within the women’s group.
Analysis of these differentiated relationships to careers, particularly the proportions of men and women in the four different relationships, allows us to grasp the role of gender in the differentiation of these researchers’ trajectories. Thus, within our qualitative sample, if we find men and women among the engaged and optimistic, the ambivalents are exclusively women. There is clearly a difference in the way parenthood affects women and men in their work experience. While interference between the spheres of work and parenthood is observed among women and men, we do not observe it among men as we do among women. Like the women, the men estimate that their professional activity is limited by family life (a family life which increases the cost of access to a scientific career and transforms the meaning of engagement in work). But unlike the female researchers, that deterioration is not accompanied – in each case for the men we met – by fear of imposing a professional constraint on family life. Thus the interference impacts upon time but does not result in questioning the prospect of an academic career, at least on a subjective level. The men regret less not being more involved in parenthood than they do not being able to carry out their professional project or enjoy their leisure as they see fit. Thus a significant difference in the assessment of the costs of interference between work and family on the family entourage is revealed here between men and women. And, sometimes on the margins, even the most “optimistic” women voice feelings of guilt – even if attenuated – transforming their relationship to work. However, it is often that feeling which produces ambivalence and sometimes leads to distanciation. This observation corroborates Julie Jarty’s who, on the subject of woman teachers, remarked that “guilt over ‘time stolen’ from the family or additional constraints imposed on the partner […] represents a female speciality" (Jarty, 2009), produced by the gendered nature of the allocation of responsibility for domestic life. In this regard, the case of researchers raises a factor which can further reinforce guilt feelings: flexibility and autonomy in the organization of work (Brannen, 2005; Negrey, 2012). These dimensions of the activity allow one to decide places and times of work. However, in a context of employment uncertainty, a weak temporal regulation of work by research laboratories and a social injunction for assumption of responsibility for domestic life by women (retranslated daily in employment relationships), flexibility and autonomy can actually increase women’s risks of being exposed to complaints from the domestic sphere and thus possibly lead to a sort of tug-of-war. In other words, flexibility is an opportunity for many researchers who insist on a unique “privilege”. But it can also lead to being straight away identified and/or identifying oneself with a carer figure who can, if need be, always be there at the right moment (Bessin and Gaudart, 2009). In sum, this specific point on work–family interference illustrates the well-known inequalities between men and women: gender and familial situation appear together as a “hidden filter” in the management of careers (Fusulier and Del Rio Carral, 2012), hidden by the consecrated criterion of “scientific excellence”.
But there are significant variations between women
Beyond these now well-known observations on the inequalities between men and women in the academic field, our research shows that groups of women also have internal factors of differentiation.
Variations linked to trajectories
The engaged relationship is first of all to be observed among unmarried female researchers, or else cohabiting with a male or female researcher, or having prolonged experience in the academic field. This was Sarah’s case, who when we met for the first time, lived alone and devoted the greater part of her time to her work. Engagement presupposes a de facto freedom of organization subject to no domestic constraints. These researchers all insist on the idea of research as “all-consuming”, where the male or female researcher cannot “realistically” work 35 hours a week. The fact of not having children generally comes up while invoking the total incompatibility of parenthood and research, at least as conceived and implemented by the female researcher.
The two relationships presenting high level engagement in work, excluding family life or compatible with family life (engaged and optimistic) are to be observed among researchers having known a rectilinear professional trajectory. Their access to a doctoral and post-doctoral research mandate came immediately after obtaining their Master’s degree or thesis. In addition, these female researchers insist on significant events that sharpened their desire to work intensely in academic research. Indeed, besides their fast track insertion, distancing them from more risky experiences, these female researchers refer to what seem to us to be positive signals – emitted by the scientific circle: the publication of an article or book; recognition by their peers in the context of a talk or seminar invitations; obtaining a prestigious scholarship; etc. It is thus the conjunction of a favourable insertion into the academic field and significant events which is at the origin of their desire to give as much back as possible – in a professional environment which is well-known to be based on an ideal of intense professional engagement. That ideal conveys a masculine professional ethos (Beaufays and Krais, 2005; Dany et al., 2011; Zarca, 2006), valuing an over-investment in work accompanied, as we have observed in other activities, by a familial underinvestment (Lapeyre, 2004, 2008).
Variations related to material configurations of existence
Demonstrating an optimism leading to the same level of investment in work and family presupposes specific material conditions of existence. These parent-female researchers (with the sole exception of one researcher trying to have a child when interviewed) in fact present professional and family configurations providing favourable supports: the possibility of ensuring an assumption of shared responsibility for the children between the female researcher, the partner and the family entourage; use of collective services, a home near the work place; etc. This configuration allows them to ensure an extended presence at the work place, such as evenings, but also to cope with long absences for scientific stays abroad (see Mathilde’s case above).
Beyond the partner’s availability, it is his understanding that favours optimism: he can liberate the female researcher by dint of understanding of the kind of constraints the female researcher is caught up in. In this sense, the partner is truly a mobilizable resource in daily life in satisfying the requirements of the scientific milieu. More simply, these optimistic female researchers present a strong homogamy (sometimes endogamy). If the partner shares a professional activity based on similar operating rules, the female researcher can work evenings or weekends, at the same time as her partner.
These are precisely the material living conditions which are lacking among the ambivalents. This career relationship, which is only observed among the parents, is in fact based on the absence of an essential resource, even if, in theory, compensated for by the presence of other organizational resources: living far from the work place and caring for children, the partner’s professional activity is not very compatible with the researcher’s, the children’s fragile health may require a prolonged presence at home (this is, for example, Blandine’s case above). It may also result from isolation with respect to the family entourage. Consequently, family life weighs down on the practise of work: days are shortened and the family configuration is not amenable to resuming work at the end-of-day because the partner does not work evenings (or not at home), or because domestic chores are too weighty, etc. Those difficulties nourish a frustration which does not directly touch the pleasure taken in doing their work, which remains powerful, but rather the sense they attribute to their engagement. Whereas that sense may be solid and structuring, founded on indices of professional success and their sharing an illusio that the scientific field legitimizes the efforts expected of them, the arrival of a child in a context of scarce resources from the private viewpoint increases the cost of access to a scientific career (cost in energy, frustration and guilt feelings at having to ask so much of one’s entourage and of not measuring up to the demands of one’s milieu). Activities that were not perceived as efforts before come to be seen as “sacrifices”.
The weight of (professional and private) configurational supports in “winning” trajectories among women
As our analysis and stylization of relationships to scientific careers have been carried out with researchers in uncertain situations as to their professional futures, we cannot deduce an impact on access to permanent positions in the academic field. That encouraged us to widen the study among female FNRS researchers recently tenured (between 2010 and 2014). From a socio-demographical point of view, these female researchers have a rather homogeneous profile although some important differences exist. The great majority are Belgian (five are of foreign origin), are between 32 and 35 years of age upon being tenured (four were tenured after 40, including three working in health sciences 11 and one who, for conjugal reasons – her companion living in Belgium – left a permanent position in her country of origin for the FNRS mandate), come from prosperous or even affluent socio-cultural economic milieux (only one comes from what might be termed an unskilled milieu with a low socio-professional status 12 ), and are living as couples with children (only one is unmarried without children, and 2 are couples without children). Among the thirteen mothers we met, four have sought to obtain a permanent mandate before deciding on the size of the family.
For most of them, the trajectory of their professional insertion has been fluid and dense: a Master’s followed by a doctorate (often encouraged by their Master’s thesis director) and then several years of doctoral experience with long stays abroad (generally in leading international research centres), except for one female researcher who pointed out her “special” side in not having “extensive experience abroad” (which she justifies by her work on a literary subject which does not really require it). Yet some of them spoke of having had professional difficulties linked to meagre periods during research mandates or doubts as to the real possibilities of pursuing a scientific career. However they all found persons of resource in their professional field, sometimes mentors, who supported and even stimulated them in their undertaking, providing them with opportunities for new encounters through their own networks. These mentors were generally men; only one female researcher indicated the gender of her female thesis director. Moreover, these female researchers do not consider themselves to have been victims of gender discrimination. Nevertheless several criticized academia as a milieu unfavourable to maternity because of its rules of productivity and competitiveness. One interviewee nevertheless pointed out that when she announced she was pregnant, one of her promoters stopped speaking to her. Another spoke of a “male stronghold” whose obstacles for women are “invisible” but nonetheless “real”.
It must be acknowledged that their “winning” trajectories are marked on the professional side by internal supports belonging to the university where they were tenured (most of them have a post in the university where they did their Master’s and doctorates but that is a classic phenomenon in Belgium), with significant moments, such as research results that have had major repercussions in the field or an award winning book published, etc., or else a meeting with a researcher with high scientific standing during a post-doctorate, or presence in a research centre where they felt valued and became “the driving force” of the research, to use the expression of one female researcher interviewed. Yet almost all of them at some time evoke “luck” in accounting for their professional success, implying that even with a lot going for them in the game nothing guaranteed their obtaining the result that being tenured represents.
As regards their private sphere, we see clearly that their parents’ support (moral, practical and financial) is important. Thus Muriel says this about her parents: “they didn’t have much in the way of resources” [although my father has a university degree] but they always pushed us, my brother and I”. As we have underlined, the social origin of these female researchers indicates a certain relation of “connaturality” fostering the production of scientific knowledge. Several have pursued their studies and research in a discipline or domain in which at least one of their parents have a qualification (a father doctor for a female researcher in medicine or an engineer or geophysicist for others in sciences and technologies; or a mother novelist for a historian). Emeline for example remembers that at the origin of her “passion”, at the age of nine she had asked about the movement of the stars and her father had explained to her why: the Earth turns.
Far from being reduced to parents, we observe that that support is present in a marked way in the ‘couple’ relationship. In fact Manon will do her post-doctorate at a prestigious university accompanied by her husband and their first child. The same applies to Adeline who, following a first candidature for qualification as an FNRS mandate, understands from her failure that she must do her post-doctorate abroad, which she will do overseas with her husband and children. Cassandra will do two years of residency at “Marie Curie Fellowship”, which, according to her, will be an excellent moment spent with family. Even if the support does not necessarily result in a common temporary expatriation over the course of a doctoral thesis or in the context of a post-doctorate, the partner proves to be understanding and accepts a temporary separation. This is for example the case of Elise (mother of a child), of foreign origin, for whom international mobility is not only integrated into her family of origin but also accepted by her partner who is himself a university professor.
Nevertheless for certain female researchers, having a child before obtaining a definitive mandate was unthinkable. For Emeline married to an engineer, the “project of a child during the thesis and post-doctoral period was impossible for lack of time since it’s a constant fight to stay on top”. Monica says the same thing: “A child – of course I put it off. I had this lingering question on whether or not my CV was sufficiently dense, rich, whether it would suit the FNRS because you can only apply three times there”. It is less a conjugal question than a desire to be available to achieve a professional goal that maternity would have impeded, in any case from their point of view.
If the mothers explicitly evoke the difficulties of reconciling work/family in a job where “the work is never finished”, they also express the feeling that the arrival of a child was “healthy” for them and sometimes had a structuring effect in the sense that several associate their maternity with a greater effectiveness in their work. This obligation, not necessarily seen as a constraint, “if I have children, it’s to take care of them” declares Cassandra, affords them a better definition of research time, in attempting to optimize it. However, this effectiveness is also linked to their spouse’s support. This is particularly the case of Caroline who speaks about her greater effectiveness at work while stressing her husband’s “strong support” and “his good situation” (stable employment with accommodating schedules), or of Dominique who also says that her “companion supports her completely, and [that] her five-year-old son does not suffer from the situation”. In this respect, we find what we have called logic of parenthood/work reinforcement in the case of female postdoctoral researchers (Barbier and Fusulier, 2015), which has nonetheless sometimes been stressed more by the researcher fathers than by the mothers.
Thus analysis of the trajectories of these women, who were able obtain valued posts in Belgian scientific space, underlines the extent to which (professional and private) supportive configurations are of prime importance, to that extent alleviating the situations of ambivalence and distanciation referred to earlier. On the gender analysis level, a female partner’s support for her husband or partner’s career fits into the traditional gendered order. Without thereby transgressing that order, these women researchers testify here to the possibility they have, and have had, of making a place for themselves in the academic field while also benefiting from such support, provided by their partner, a man. Cases of homogamy, hypogamy and hypergamy are observed. Thus it is impossible here to define one type of conjugal structure as being more propitious for the scientific careers of women in couples. On the other hand, we observe that the partner’s employment intervenes in a rather decisive manner but according to varying modalities: thus, for one of the female researchers the fact that her husband is a doctor ensured a level of income freeing her from being overly worried as to whether her own wages could be stretched out over the post-doctoral period; another proposed the stability of her partner’s employment which, although less remunerative and “prestigious” than hers, provided her serenity in relationship to her own career; another pointed to her partner’s professional flexibility, enabling her to make a stay abroad with him. In any case, such remarks reinforce the interest of studying scientific careers from the angle of the positive (or negative) work/family interference.
Discussion and conclusion
It is a foregone conclusion that the university is largely feminized today in Europe: in 2010, the proportion of female students (55%) and graduates (59%) exceeded that of male students, and women currently represent 46% of all PhD graduates in the current 27 European Union countries ( Le Feuvre, 2015; She Figures, 2013). Yet the fact remains that the “leaky pipeline”, along with (vertical and horizontal) segregation, is observable as a result of interrelated phenomena (Dubois-Shaik and Fusulier, 2015).
We wanted to show here the extent to which interference between working life and private life was an important dimension not only in the development of relationships to the scientific career of postdoctoral researchers (engaged, optimistic, ambivalent and distant) but also of “winning” trajectories among female researchers having obtained a highly valued permanent position in academic space. The credo of Excellence in science, research and teaching (which also results in a policy supporting an increase in the number of doctoral and postdoctoral candidates) governing universities today exacerbates the pressure on young male and female researchers seeking a durable insertion in the profession and hence in the field. However, far from revealing a “lonely hero or heroine” (Benschop and Brouns, 2003) which our accounts of experiences in the scientific milieu might convey, our study underlines the importance of the configurational supports that researchers find (or do not find) both in their professional environment (a supportive promoter, access to a carrier network, a well published article, benevolent colleagues, etc.) and in their private milieu (few conjugal or family constraints, or strong support from parents and partner, easy access to services, living near the work place, etc.).
However, these two types of supports do not seem equally distributed among the sexes (as well as socially, although we have analysed that less here). Thus, an ambivalent relationship to their career is mainly expressed by young mothers who, as Marry and Jonas (2005) have already clearly shown, are caught up in a double culpability: having the feeling of not being a sufficiently good mother or researcher. For example, Manuella, a postdoctoral researcher, regrets not taking care of her child correctly (when, for example, she plays “the wildcard of putting on a film for him” to be able to work) while still not finishing all her work. Then, she says, “it all turns into a race. […] and I think to myself, he must feel it too. As if he were a nuisance. Because I want to work. He’s there. At some point this is going to affect him”.
But this ambivalence is also linked to deficient support configurations which may play themselves out in very concrete aspects of daily life, such as regularly going to pick up a child at the end of day-care because the husband is not available (or does not make himself available), in being subjected to the disapproving glances of colleagues who stay late at the laboratory, or in being subjected to the remarks of the day-care centre entourage and employees on the benefits of family time.
Nevertheless, women in science may find themselves at intersections of strong professional and family supports enabling them to assume, for example, maternity without living it as a career handicap. If their work availability ends up being reduced and difficulties in reconciliation are acknowledged, their effectiveness (at least in their discourses) increases. If analysis of the “winning” trajectories of women in science shows the importance of configurations throughout their scientific careers, we want to stress that these configurations are also observed in male trajectories, but unlike the women’s, they appear more naturalized and thus less problematic.
Finally, this article confirms through new empirical material, a fact that has been much documented already in the literature, that it is always much more difficult for women than for men to undertake a scientific career, not because of a direct discrimination, but due to the perpetuation of a gendered societal order and a male-centric university organization. It shows an important indication that despite the discourses about equality between men and women, the institution provides little support for women researchers, who depend instead on support that they (on their own) to some respect find in their immediate working environment and especially in their private environment. We could presume that an ambitious gender policy in universities and research centres, with measures that favour parent researchers, could contribute in combating asymmetries in the scientific career between men and women. However, in the current context, the scientific institution has subscribed itself to new tools of evaluation, which reinforce a “short-term, accountability and productivity based regime”, which equates the good to the surplus, in the sense that whatever is expected of a good researcher is always more publications, more projects, more funding obtained, more mobility, etc., in a lapse of time as short as possible (Fusulier, 2016). Thus, these tools, norms of scientific work and this regime accentuate the pressure upon researchers, which in consequence, potentially reinforces the tension between work–family. This goes against the intentions of acting favourably towards gender equality. There is therefore not only a questioning about organizational support measures that are required, about what universities can provide and set up, but also about the institutional regulation of the scientific space and its current call in the name of Excellence, always pointing towards more productivity, mobility, competition and accountability. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to think about an “alter-Excellence”, which puts quality before quantity, supporting intellectual risk-taking and taking into account the rhythm of scientific production (“slow science”). Simultaneously, such an alternate Excellence would permit researchers to control in a more effective way their professional lives, to articulate in a more harmonious way their private lives, and thus favour a development of scientific careers that is more gender neutral. In addition to changing the “Excellence-based” norms, the university can also rethink what demands are needed for the different stages of the career, whether scientific hyper-production needs to govern the postdoctoral phase and whether this responds to the requirements of tenured scientific or academic positions that involve more varied tasks. Structures and programmes that assist early stage researchers and academics can easily be set up to create collaboration-based support for both work and career guidance within research units and among colleagues (Adam et al., 2016). Moreover, the high significance of funding structures and conditions is something that remains an invisible yet powerful source of gender inequalities (Finnborg et al., 2016). However, this debate takes us beyond the scope of this article.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interest
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.