Gender equity in academic knowledge production: the influence of politics,power and precarity

Abstract

This paper explores the issue of gender, intersecting with other aspects of identity, in relation to academic staff and academic knowledge production in higher education institutions across Europe. The paper argues for the need to go beyond the ‘topline’ figures regarding gender equity (and intersecting aspects of identity) when considering diversity of academic staff, to a focus on the degree to which academics can meaningfully contribute to knowledge production. Looking across Europe, the paper focuses on a number of factors that are frequently brought up, but not often together, when discussing equity in the academy: gendered discourses of the most valued and legitimate forms of knowledge and the knower; the increasing levels of precarity in the academic workforce; and the growing influence of far right political discourse in Europe and beyond. Drawing on poststructuralist theories of gender, knowledge and precarity, I will be discussing how such dynamics combine to exacerbate already existing inequalities regarding who and what are regarded as legitimate knowledge and legitimate ‘knowers’ in European academia.

Keywords

Gender knowledge production social precarity higher education academic staff

This paper was inspired by the theme of the 2023 European Conference for Educational Research Conference: ‘The Value of Diversity in Education and Educational Research’. In particular, I want to focus on the issue of gender, intersecting with other aspects of identity, in relation to academic staff and academic knowledge production in higher education institutions across Europe. My aim is to explore a number of factors that are frequently brought up, but not often together, when discussing equity in the academy: gendered discourses of the most valued and legitimate forms of knowledge and the knower; the increasing levels of precarity in the academic workforce; and the growing influence of far right political discourse in Europe and beyond.

A major theme of the conference was the difficulty of pinpointing exactly what we mean when we utilise the term ‘diversity’. In relation to academic staff, ‘diversity’ in the academic body is usually taken to mean the diversity of representation (proportional to national statistics of the population as a whole) in terms of particular facets of a person’s identifications and experience, such as gender, gender identity, sexuality, age/maturity, social class, socio-economic background, race, ethnicity, religion and disability. This definition of diversity is of course problematic: being based on over-simplistic, socially constructed categorisations attempting to orderly map and quantify a messy, subjective reality in terms of how people understand themselves, and how others understand and categorise them (Ahmed, 2012). As a range of feminist and anti-racist scholars have argued, institutional goals in relation to student and staff diversity can end up becoming an acritical ‘numbers exercise’ serving commercial and business logics (see e.g. Bhopal, 2022; Deem and Ozga, 1997; Mirza, 2006). As I will go on to discuss, one area of inequity that requires an analysis that goes beyond basic employment statistics is the proportion of staff that are able to meaningfully participate in academic knowledge production, rather than simply those who have been given a staff card.

In exploring these dynamics I will be taking a poststructuralist approach that particularly draws on Foucault’s (1977, 1978) work on discourse and power/knowledge. A key aspect of Foucault’s work is a concern with the complex relationship between power and knowledge. In Foucault’s view, there is no objective ‘truth’: instead, a number of discourses (conversations, unfolding sets of ideas) about what is ‘true’ circulate at any one time or space. Some of these discourses will have more power than others to influence people’s conceptions as to what is ‘true’: the most powerful and widely socially accepted forming what Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’. This includes socially accepted ways or methodologies of establishing what is true, and who is able to judge ‘what counts as true’ (Foucault, 1977: 131). Most dominant today is contemporary scientific knowledge (and academic knowledges more broadly), including the categorisation of knowledges into different disciplines and a normalisation of what is broadly agreed as legitimate knowledge within these disciplines (Foucault, 1978).

Of course, there is considerable multiplicity and competition between knowledges both within disciplines and from outside, including a multiplicity of religious, spiritual and political knowledges. For Foucault there is no power without resistance to that power, and Foucault spends considerable focus on tracing the genealogical flow of discourses that gain social power and legitimacy (such as medical knowledges, and conceptions of crime and punishment). However, there are (and will always be) a multiplicity of discourses – some more powerful than others - concerning who can act as knowledge producers and what are legitimate conditions and techniques for producing and disseminating knowledge. As Medina (2011) notes, Foucault’s theorisation emphasises that alternative knowledges – including marginalised, or in Foucault’s terms, ‘subjugated’ knowledges, also have certain degrees of power in certain contexts, and can therefore potentially challenge and change those discourses that are currently dominant (Foucault, 2003; Medina, 2011).

I also draw on feminist poststructuralist work that sees sex/gender, and indeed all other categorisations of identity as unstable and contextually made intelligible only through recourse to available discourses at any point in time/place (Butler, 1990; Hekman, 2007; Spivak, 1993). And although I focus primarily on gender in this paper, I have tried to include examples of intersectional work and weave in related research on other facets of identity, to try and outline some of the ways in which gendered dynamics will be experienced differently by different social groups in complex patterns of dis/advantage (Brah, 2022).

Taking such an approach, I will firstly be outlining the current state of play in terms of gender equity in academic positions in Europe. I will then touch on the pattern of gender representation across different disciplines and its relation to what are socially considered the most valuable forms of knowledge produced in academia. I will discuss the varieties of ways in which the casualisation of academic work arguably reflects and reinforces existing disadvantages and inequitable patterns in the higher education workforce. Finally, I will move to talk about the influence of far right discourses that also have an influence on what forms of knowledge can be produced, taught and circulated in the academy.

Equity and diversity in the European academic workforce

A 2019 survey of 159 Higher Education institutions (HEIs) from 36 countries across Europe found broad sectoral agreement in principle with the goals of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion [EDI], but that some dimensions of diversity were given more attention by institutions than others (Claeys-Kulik et al., 2019). In relation to academic staff, the aspects of diversity most commonly focused on were gender (83% of responding institutions) and disability (76%). Factors such as race/ethnicity, sexuality and socio-economic background received significantly less attention. Indeed, the majority of EU institutions do not collect data from staff or students on dimensions of diversity other than gender and disability – for some this relates to national law, for example it is illegal to collect data on ethnicity in France (Claeys-Kulik et al., 2019). As Bhopal and Henderson (2021) argue, there is also a tendency for race inequalities to become conflated with, and subsumed by, gender issues in EDI work.

With these caveats in mind, it is difficult to present an overall picture of many aspects of diversity in the academic workforce across Europe. In relation to gender at the EU level, in 2018 women comprised more than 40% of academic staff on average. However, looking at more senior positions, in the same year women made up only a quarter (26.2%) of grade A positions (equivalent to a full professorship). In 2019, women made up less than 25% of heads of institutions in the higher education sector across Europe (European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation [EC], 2021). The UK is one country that collects data on ethnicity: of academic staff with known ethnicity, 20% were from minority ethnic backgrounds in 2021–2022, and of professors with known ethnicity, 12% were from minority ethnic backgrounds. However, in the UK as in the rest of Europe, it is difficult to find statistics on other aspects of identity/positioning, let alone intersectional analysis (EC, 2021). In addition to under-representation in relation to gender and ethnicity, a recent government inquiry into diversity in STEM found evidence that ‘people with disabilities, those from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and those who declared themselves as being LGBTQ+ were under-represented in some areas of STEM education, research and employment settings’ (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee [HCSTC], 2023: 3), but that there was a lack of available statistical data in relation to these characteristics, especially in relation to the workforce. In the UK the official statistics indicate that the number of academics with disabilities is 6%. However, it is likely that a sizeable proportion of academics are reluctant to disclose disability status due to fears of discrimination (Brewer, 2022; Olsen et al., 2020).

Despite such challenges, these data remain vital from an equity standpoint. As the Institute of Physics note, ‘the lack of comprehensive quantitative data on the picture of UK STEM makes change in the sector difficult to track and benchmark, meaning diversity improvement and the effectiveness of interventions cannot be measured’ (HCSTC, 2023: 11). Moreover, the utilisation of statistics can aid in the legitimisation of academic and activist calls to address inequity: in Foucaultian terms, the association of statistics as rooted in scientific method can work to increase the legitimacy of critical discourses, in an academic (and wider social) culture that valorises quantitative ‘objective’ data over the messy subjectivity of the qualitative.

However, if we are to look at equity and diversity amongst academic staff we also need to look beyond the ‘bare bones’ statistics in relation to employment in an academic role, to look at complexities such as the degree to which staff feel able to meaningfully contribute to teaching and knowledge production in ways that reflect their own expertise and experience. This involves a critical look at the inequitable power dynamics of academic cultures and practices more broadly (Steinþórsdóttir et al., 2019).

Gendered patterns in the production and valuing of academic knowledge

Writers such as Moore et al. (2011) and Cavaghan and Kulawik (2020) have discussed how the 21st century has seen an increasing importance placed on knowledge production as part of a ‘knowledge economy’. The utilisation of knowledge has become a crucial aspect of governance, and therefore the dynamics of the knowledge economy includes an explicitly governmental politicisation of knowledge and expertise. Academia, of course, is a key pillar of this influential economy (Allmer, 2018).

Knowledge production intricately reflects and reinforces wider social inequalities of power. The power knowledge has as a form of capital means that ‘as such, it is a site of contestation, inclusions, exclusions and maldistributions’ (Morley, 2015: 28). Postcolonial scholars have noted the unequal global relations of power in terms of which countries and regions are primarily places where data is extracted, and which countries and regions accumulate data and are in a position to construct and disseminate abstract knowledge (Medina, 2024).

Moreover, there are clear gendered and racialised patterns in terms of who is able to meaningfully contribute to academic knowledge production. A number of studies have shown that women are also less likely to be successful in securing research funding, to be named on research publications, and to act in knowledge ‘gatekeeper’ roles, for example as journal editors, or being invited to review manuscripts (Fagan and Teasdale, 2021; Helmer et al., 2017). Studies also indicate that women take on a disproportionate amount of non-research responsibilities. This not only includes teaching but also the range of lower-status service activities described as ‘academic housework’ (Aiston and Kent Fo, 2021; Heijstra et al., 2016; Jebsen et al., 2020; Sümer et al., 2020). As Nygaard et al. (2022) discuss, women academics are also more likely to take on collaboration work considered of lesser status, feeling greater pressure to act collegially at the expense of protecting their own writing time. Women in disciplines where they are the numerical minority are more likely to be asked to take on equity-related work. This can be compounded for women of colour, as academics of colour are more likely to be asked to serve on committees, teach on race whether or not this is their academic specialism, or lead EDI initiatives as a tokenistic gesture towards diversity (Ahmed, 2012, 2018; Doharty et al., 2021; Rollock, 2018).

Some of the reasons behind the gendered aspects of these dynamics are related to wider discourses around care: feminist research has outlined the ways in which women take a disproportionate amount of care responsibilities, and continue to face discrimination when trying to come back into the workforce after (paid or unpaid) maternity breaks (see e.g. Moreau and Robertson, 2019; Villar-Aguilés and Obiol-Francés, 2022). These responsibilities can severely constrain the degree to which such academics are able to sustain research publications and grant funding, and reach senior positions (Crimmins et al., 2023; Tsouroufli, 2020).

There are also more subtle but enduring discourses that can work to influence current social constructions of the typical or expected ‘academic’, which can have a hard to pin down yet pervasive influence. Those who hold any or multiple aspects of identity/positioning that were historically marginalised, on lines including gender, race/ethnicity, regional geography, age/maturity, disability, religion and sexuality – can still today find themselves constructed as ‘other’ to the expected academic norm (see e.g. Brewer, 2022; Crimmins et al., 2023; Dyer et al., 2019; Maylor, 2018; Mirza, 2006, 2018; Pearce et al., 2020). The progressive aim of fostering and growing alternative forms of knowledge authored by those in some way ‘other’ to traditional conceptions of academia therefore means including the successful countering of a conception that such forms of knowledge are in some way invalid or illegitimate in relation to ‘real’ knowledge (that is deemed objective and neutral). It also involves a challenge to the conception of who, in embodied terms, can be recognised or ‘made intelligible’ as a respected or valued knowledge producer. Such challenges remain necessary: for example Van Der Lee and Ellemers’ (2015) study of research award applications in the Netherlands showed markedly lower assessment scores given to women applicants in relation to ‘quality of researcher’, whereas, importantly, no such differences were reported in the other assessment criteria of ‘quality of proposal’ and ‘knowledge utilisation’ (see also Witteman et al., 2019).

A raft of feminist work has discussed how the socially constructed binary connections between objectivity and rationality with masculinity has led to historical conceptions that the seemingly ‘most’ objective and rational academic disciplines, including the sciences, mathematics, economics and philosophy, are more ‘suited’ and appropriate for boys and men – an enduring set of discourses that still arguably affects gender patterns of study and career choice in many countries across the globe (e.g. Burke, 2015; Harding, 1986; Hekman, 2007). Moreover, more masculinised forms of knowledge – particularly from STEM disciplines – are more likely to be socially valorised and more likely to attract political investment (Read and Leathwood, 2024). Moore et al. (2011) have discussed how the sciences have gained in prestige in recent decades due to their perceived political and economic importance. They argue that since the 1980s, scientists have been increasingly encouraged or even pressured to conduct research that will further goals of national economic development. Industry support for scientific research means an increase in prestige to the sciences, and particularly to those fields that attract industry funding (Moore et al., 2011). Finally, this also has a knock-on effect as to which disciplines are more likely to be able to offer secure, stable, permanent positions in academia.

Equity, diversity, and the casualisation of the academic workforce

Precarity of employment is an important issue when considering not only who is able to secure an academic position, but also who is able to meaningfully and sustainably participate in academic knowledge production. Precarity as a concept is most often used in connection to employment insecurities, particularly in relation to short-term, part-time, or fixed-term job contracts. Although I would also like to discuss employment-related precarity here, I have found the broader theorisation of the concept by Butler to be especially helpful. For Butler (2004, 2009), precarity relates particularly to people’s perceptions and experiences of being insecure or unstable in a situation (and the sometimes material consequences of people’s fears that this may engender). Butler is not referring here to insecurity felt in any situation (e.g., fear of slipping on an icy pavement), but insecurities induced by wider sociopolitical policies and practices. Crucial to Butler’s conception is that social precarity can be experienced by a wide range of people, but is more likely to be felt (and experienced more severely and for a longer duration) by those in already less advantaged groups.

Whilst there is an increase in casualised work in many countries across the global north in recent decades, academia has outpaced the trend, with a majority of academics working in ‘non-standard’ employment in many countries (OECD, 2021). Many have linked this rise to the influence of managerialist and neoliberal discourses in the sector valorising cost-cutting, the flexible ‘freedom’ of workers to ‘assume their own risks’ (Lorey, 2015; Pérez and Montoya, 2018: A3) and the intensification of the separation of research from teaching, with both marketised as commodities (see e.g. Courtois and O’Keefe, 2015; Le Feuvre et al., 2019; Sowa, 2020). A 2021 UK Universities and Colleges Union (UCU, 2021) report established that a third of academic staff in the UK are on fixed-term contracts, rising to 68% of staff on research-only contracts. In other countries the figures are even higher: OECD (2021) reported for example that 70% of academics in Finland, and 80% of scientific staff in Switzerland were on fixed-term contracts. Le Feuvre et al. (2020), Sautier (2021) and others have characterised systems such as the Swiss as a ‘survivor model’, where lengthy periods of precarity in academia are expected and normalised as inevitable.

Moreover, supporting Butler’s argument that precarity is more likely to felt by those in already less advantaged groups, statistics relating to employment precarity in HE show that women and black minority ethnic academics are more likely to hold casualised positions in academia. The most recent SHE Figures show that in 2019 the proportion of women researchers working part-time across the EU was higher than men: 11.1% and 7.2% respectively. The proportion of women researchers on precarious contracts in Higher Education in the EU was also slightly higher in 2019: 9% of women and 7.7% of men (EC, 2021). Whilst there is a relatively low gender gap between men and women academics working part-time in some European countries – in Italy, for example, the gap is 2.1% and France it is 3.1% – there are far higher percentage differences between women and men in countries such as Austria (17.8%), Iceland (12.3%) and Hungary (12.1%). There is a lack of available data in relation to trans and non-binary academics – although Pearce et al. (2020) note that overall ‘trans and non-binary people are . . ...overrepresented in precarious and low income employment, as well as being disproportionately unemployed, and more likely to live in unstable housing conditions’ (p. 883). As I have noted above, it is also difficult to find statistics in relation to race/ethnicity for academic staff in many European countries. However UK statistics show a stark disparity – whilst 30% of white academic staff are on fixed-contracts, this rises to 40% of black academic staff and 43% of Asian academic staff (UCU, 2021; see also Arday, 2022; Myers 2022). Writers such as Burlyuk and Rahbari (2023) have drawn attention to the specific dynamics of precarity and inequity experienced by migrant academics from the Global South in Europe. Warnock (2016) has also discussed the ways in which precarity ‘has become the new normal for working-class academics’ (p. 36). Indeed, back in the early 2000s writers such as Reay (2000) and Hey (2001) not only discussed the classed, gendered, and raced dynamics of academic casualisation, but also noted that the relationships between contract staff and their more secure staff managers and Principal Investigators could themselves replicate exploitative class dynamics found in private employment spheres.

Supporting Butler’s assertion above, there is also some evidence to suggest that precarity amongst academics is not only more likely to be experienced by those already in some ways ‘other’ to the traditional academic norm, but that these groups are also more likely to experience precarity more severely. O’Keefe and Courtois (2019) note that women in their study ‘were especially concentrated in forms of temporary work that is hourly paid or based on pro-rata and zero hours contracts while men were more likely to be on yearly or multi-year contracts’ (O’Keefe and Courtois, 2019: 469). In addition, women were more likely to have spent a longer period of their academic career in such contracts (O’Keefe and Courtois, 2019). Precarity also disproportionately affects academics who have recently gained doctoral qualifications and/or are at the early stages of an academic career (see Rothengatter and Hil, 2013). As the OECD report authors note, there are concerns that only those with the most resources and capital will be able to endure long periods of precarity and eventually secure a permanent position (OECD, 2021).

A range of studies have outlined the negative effects of conditions of precarity on such academics’ well-being. In common with those in such employment conditions more broadly, many precarious academics discuss anxieties around insecurity of income; lack of sickness, maternity, paternity or vacation benefits; and anxieties about not being able to plan for the future or take advantage of training (see e.g. Morris et al., 2022; Ylijoki, 2010). Less direct, but acutely felt, anxieties also relate to the possibility of being perceived as less ‘legitimate’ in the eyes of students and fellow academics (Read and Leathwood, 2020; Robson, 2023), and a tendency to individualise academic ‘failures’ (Loveday, 2018). In addition, and crucially in relation to this paper, being in a situation of precarity severely limits or excludes any time or capacity to do your own research, to apply for research or conference funding, or to focus on the topics you find most important (Burton & Bowman, 2022; Courtois and O’Keefe, 2015; Rowell and Morris, 2023; Sowa, 2020). Moreover, contract researchers on projects are also vulnerable to having their own ideas or work going unattributed and/or implicitly or explicitly attributed to the permanent project leads (Harris et al., 2023; Hey, 2001).

Another factor to note is that precarity affects certain disciplines more than others: and notably these disciplines are highly gendered in terms of numerical makeup of faculty and in their discursive cultural connotations. The culturally ‘masculinised’ STEM disciplines have generally fared better than other disciplines in terms of academic job losses in recent decades (Adsit et al., 2015). This was notable in the Covid-19 pandemic and aftermath, where in the UK, threatened or actual job losses were more often reported in the more ‘feminised’ arts, languages and humanities, and in the more ‘feminised’ STEM fields such as health sciences, where significantly more women academics work (Read and Leathwood, 2024).

Nevertheless, in STEM disciplines as elsewhere, women are more likely to be on precarious contracts. Reports from 2020 and 2021 indicated that many universities concentrated job cuts on their casualised staff (UCU, 2021). And research reported by the RRIF on the STEM workforce in Australia found that Covid-related job losses disproportionately affected women (Rapid Research Information Forum, 2020). This emphasises the point returned to a number of times in this paper: that it is those already seemingly in a minority or disadvantaged position that are more likely to experience the negative consequences of precarity, and feel the effects more severely, even in more highly socially and politically regarded disciplines.

So what are the consequences of precarity in relation to knowledge production? As already mentioned, if an academic is employed on a precarious contract they are often not able to conduct their own research, have space to write and publish (or be properly attributed for work they produce), or shape their teaching to their own interests and expertise. These constraints are exacerbated if dealing with financial struggles and/or caring responsibilities outside work. Karran and Mallinson (2017) cite security of employment as one of the four essential aspects of academic freedom. Their report, for the UK’s Universities and Colleges Union, compared academic freedom in the UK and the then other 27 EU nations, using comparable data from over 2000 UCU members in the UK and 4000 staff in universities in EU countries. They found that 14.1% of EU academics and 23.1% of UCU academics in the UK stated they had been bullied as a consequence of their academic views. Moreover, 19.1% of EU academics and 35.5% of UCU respondents indicated they practised self-censorship due to fears of loss of privileges, demotion, or even physical harm (Karran and Mallinson, 2017: 1).

Blell et al. (2022) argue that there are two dimensions to the way in which precarity can limit academic freedom. Firstly, those on precarious contracts are more likely to feel the need to conform and not ‘rock the boat’, for fear of damaging ‘networks of goodwill’ built up with permanent colleagues who may be able to provide future secure employment. A second dimension they define as ‘psychic limitations’ – fears of speaking critically due to potential backlash – which can be compared to the self-censorship described by Karran and Mallinson (2017) above. Blell et al. (2022) note that this can be experienced more severely by those in already ‘othered’ positions in academia: ‘Women of colour academics must already develop strategies for survival and success in a space dominated by masculinity and whiteness. . ..[and this is] exacerbated by conditions of job precarity faced disproportionately by women and people of colour’ (p. 1825; see also Bhopal, 2022). Similarly, Pearce (2021) has pointed out the constraints on academic freedom for trans and pro-trans scholars who may be subject to hate speech or physical violence: ‘If we are afraid to speak out, or have to adapt research to minimise harassment, we are not truly free to undertake our studies’ (Pearce, 2021: 1461).

Precarity not only threatens the academic freedom of all that experience it, but that it also disproportionately affects those who are already under-represented, and in the wake of the pandemic lockdowns these inequitable patterns have only intensified. In the final section of this paper I also want to discuss another dynamic that is impinging on academic freedom and academic knowledge-making in Europe and in countries across the globe: challenges from the political far right.

The influence of the far right in academic representation and the valuing of knowledge

A plethora of work has charted the specific rhetoric of right-wing ‘neo-populism’ and ultraconservative political groups across Europe and the globe in the last few decades (see e.g. Carter, 2005; Krämer, 2014; Wodak and Krzyzanowski, 2017). These movements have a wide variety of characterisations, but often contain a conception of a movement of the ordinary ‘left behind’ against a perceived cultural and intellectual elite, including the universities (Clarke and Newman, 2017; Read, 2018). Populist and ultraconservative movements also vary in terms of their conception of, and position towards, knowledge relating to aspects of diversity such as gender, sexuality and race. For example, in some iterations of far right rhetoric the notion of women’s rights, and/or gay and lesbian rights, is actively supported. However, as De Lange and Mügge (2015) note, this is often advocated as a means to make a distinction between what they construct to be the ‘civilised’ west and ‘repressive’ east, particularly in relation to Islam. They also point out that ‘gender ideologies’ in right-wing movements often construct gender as a product of essentialised ‘natural differences’ between (cis-) men and women. This can be accompanied by a particular focus on women’s roles as mothers and within the family as something that needs to be ‘protected’ due to their idealised role as the ‘mothers of the ‘nation’, echoing nationalist rhetoric from colonial times (De Lange and Mügge, 2015: 66). As such, there has risen a definite pattern whereby far right movements are challenging the legitimacy of ‘gender knowledges’ that have developed in the academic social sciences, especially social constructionist and poststructuralist feminism, queer studies and transgender studies. Vlase and Terian (2023), discussing the case of Romania, note that Gender Studies in Higher Education largely emerged in the post-communist era, connected to the support of US donors and later the ‘EU-isation’ of Higher Education, where the embracing of discourses including liberal conceptions of gender equality was a condition of EU membership (Vlase and Terian, 2023). However, they note academic resistance to feminist research, which is seen by some as ideological and thus not ‘objective’. It is this ostensibly ‘rational’ argument against gender and other forms of equity research that has also been taken up and intensified by some right-wing populist politicians in the Netherlands and the UK who have framed equality measures as ‘cultural Marxism’ (Korulczuk, 2020: 701). This has parallels with the ongoing attack on Critical Race Theory [CRT] in many right-wing quarters, where CRT is argued to be itself discriminatory and anti-democratic (Filimon and Ivănescu, 2020).

Korulczuk (2020) notes that attacks on gender knowledge can take religious/nationalist and neoliberal forms. In an example of a nationalist conservative attack on gender knowledge, Korolczuk (2020) analyses ultraconservative rhetoric around abortion in Poland to argue that there is an attempt not only to de-legitimise existing feminist knowledges ‘but also to establish an alternative set of scientifically legitimised truths about gender, sexuality, and family’ (p. 695). Thus, ‘right-wing populists and religious fundamentalists opposing “gender” seek not only political but also epistemic power’ (Korolczuk, 2020: 695). As well as noting resistances to gender studies by academics, Romanian feminist researchers have also documented right-wing popular resistance to the subject, particularly a resistance to the concept of the social construction of gender. This included an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to legislate against it being taught in any educational space, including extracurricular education (Brodeală and Epure, 2021).

De Lange and Mügge (2015) similarly note how anti-gender movements can be identified across Europe, varying slightly according to national context. In Poland and Italy anti-gender rhetoric has focused on an attack on abortion rights; in France, opposition to marriage equality; and in Germany, a critique of the new sex education curriculum (see also Kuhar and Pattenotte, 2017). Pető also discusses the influence of anti-gender studies movements in Hungary, including the 2018 revoking by the Hungarian government for the licencing of a Masters programme in Gender Studies. The government first explained the move as purely economic: that there was no need for graduates with these skills in the labour market, and/or a lack of demand for the topic. However, later they moved on to a different explanation: that the gender studies programme was incompatible with Christian values (Pető, 2020; see also Tardos and Paksi, 2024).

Neoliberal forms of ultraconservatism also ostensibly appeal to the dispassionate logic of the market in targeting courses and programmes such as gender studies and other areas discussing equity and social justice. Adsit et al. (2015) have outlined how gender studies programmes and courses can be closed through utilising the language of meritocracy in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. Feminist teaching has become increasingly vulnerable in an era where women’s and gender studies programmes have largely been closed and such forms of knowledge are unevenly taken up in ‘mainstream’ HE curricula (Hinton-Smith et al., 2021; Wright, 2016).

The disproportionate vulnerability of the arts and humanities, languages, and social sciences towards closure and censure are couched as impartial but inevitably feel politicised. If they are not explicitly motivated by anti-equity and diversity rhetoric, then this is the result. For, as we have seen, such attacks and cuts are often focused in the same areas of the academy where we see a greater diversity of academic staff; and where we see the production of knowledge that seeks to explore dynamics of inequity in relation to aspects of diversity such as gender, sexuality and race. Attacks on such disciplines in turn creates extra pressures on staff that are already marginalised (Blell et al., 2022).

Conclusion

In this paper I have outlined some key dynamics that need to be considered in any genuinely progressive aim of achieving gender equity in contemporary European academia. I have discussed, firstly, we need to take an intersectional approach to gender equity that also takes into account the wide disparities of participation in the academy in relation to factors such as sexuality, social class background, gender identity, disability and race. There is an urgent need for quantitative data in relation to a spectrum of aspects of academic staff identities and positionings, as well as data on contract type, to allow for the clearest possible intersectional analysis of the diversity of academic staff in HE across the continent and beyond.

We also need to move beyond the available statistics to focus on issues such as the ability of academic staff, once they have entered the door, to have the academic freedom to meaningfully engage in knowledge production. This in turn requires the inclusion of analysis of – and urgent action in relation to – two further phenomena that are presenting a serious challenge to equity, diversity and academic freedom in the academy: the pervasive and seemingly intractable threats of the ‘norm’ of precarity in academic life, and the threat to academic freedom of far right attacks on academic knowledge regarding gender and facets of identity, diversity and social justice. Many activist groups and networks have been established to combat these issues, from union activism (see e.g. UCU, 2021) to groups such as the Network for Decent Labour in Academia (https://mittelbau.net/) and the Scholars at Risk Network ((https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2023/) (see also Vatansever, 2023). In tandem with, and intertwined with, direct action, more qualitative, in-depth and intersectional research is urgently needed to provide further tools and resources from which to challenge and change dominant inequitable cultures and practices in the academy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the European Conference for Educational Research 2023 Organising Committee for their invitation to present at the conference in Glasgow, August 2023.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Barbara Read

Author biography

Barbara Read is Professor of Education at the School of Education, University of Glasgow. She is a sociologist of education, with a particular interest in gender and intersectional inequalities in relation to student and staff experience in Higher Education, and the issue of precarity amongst academic staff. She is one of the current Editors of British Educational Research Journal.

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