Inequalities and the Paradigm of Excellence in Academia

Fiona Jenkins is a Professor in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University and the Convenor of the ANU Gender Institute in Canberra, Australia. Her work on the status of women in philosophy has developed into a wider concern about how excellence is measured in academia. She is the leader of the collaborative Australian Research Council Discovery project "Gendered Excellence in the Social Sciences". She is also an expert on the philosophy of Judith Butler. She is the co-editor of Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? (2013) and How Gender Can Transform the Social Sciences: Innovation and Impact (2020).Barbara Hoenig is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Graz, Austria. Her work focuses on the sociology of science and knowledge, history of sociology, social inequalities, and European integration. She is author of Europe's New Scientific Elite: Social Mechanisms of Science in the European Research Area (2017).Susanne Maria Weber is a Professor of social, political, and cultural conditions of education at the Department of Education of Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. Her research interests focus on discourse analytical, practice theoretical and creative research approaches on organising in academia, organisational networks, and social movements. She is co-editor together with Michael A. Peters of Organization and Newness: Discourses and Ecologies of Innovation in the Creative University (2019). Together with Julia Elven she recently edited the book Consultancy in Symbolic Orders (2022, German). Together with Andreas Schröer and Claudia Fahrenwald she edited the book Optimizing Organizations? – Organizational Education Perspectives (2022, German).Andrea Wolffram is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Sociology at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Her research interests include gender relations and careers in engineering and science, gender technology studies, gender and diversity policies in organisations, and organisational change. She is co-editor together with Ingrid Jungwirth of Highly Qualified Migrant Women – Participation in Work and Society (2017, German).

• Introduction: Inequalities and the Paradigm of Excellence in AcademiaPart I. "Inclusive Excellence": How are excellence and gender equality combined?1. Are Equality and Excellence a Happy Marriage of Terms? How Gender Figures in the Business Case for Change2. Implementing Gender Mainstreaming in a Discourse of Academic Excellence3. What are the Real Attitudes of Professors Toward Gender Equality? 4. An Excellent Researcher?: Institutional Programmatics and Organisational Strategies in the Academic FieldPart II. Constructing Excellence: How does gender bias affect the evaluation of excellence?5. Gendered Representations of Excellence in Science and Technology6. Gender Bias in Peer Review Panels: – "The Elephant in the Room"7. Gendered Excellence for Business Interests: A Critical Examination of the Construction of Centres of Excellence in the Estonian Research Policy Discourse8. Excellence?: Gendered Micropolitics in an Irish and Spanish University ContextPart III. Reproducing Inequality: How does the discourse of ‘excellence’ impact women’s careers?9. Scientific Careers and Mobility Patterns of Top Researchers of European Excellence10. The Bargaining of Excellence: Who’s (Not) Appointed by Academics?11. Gendered Excellence in Physics12. Excellent and Care-less? Gendered Everyday Practices of Early Career Scholars in Germany and Austria Is Excellence really so Excellent?: An Afterword

"The idea of excellence not only dominates academic discourse but is used to justify the distribution of (scarce) resources and power in science and institutions of higher education. Thus, we need to better understand the relationship between gender equality and excellence. The contributions of this volume illustrate convincingly from various angles how excellence is a gendered concept, how practices of measuring excellence can be biased, and how the discourses of excellence shapes the careers of women. Thus, this book will inspire new thinking and new practices!This book is a must-read for anyone interested in excellence & meritocracy & gender equality in science and academia!"Kathrin Zippel, Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University, Boston, USA"Inequalities and the Paradigm of Excellence in Academia, edited by Fiona Jenkins, Barbara Hoenig, Susanne Weber and Andrea Wolffram, interrogates the paradigm of excellence and its rise with the entrepreneurial university to pose epistemological questions of social responsibility and justice in relation to gender equality. The discourses of gendered equality are examined from a variety of perspectives using critical sociology, discourse analysis, and feminist institutional theory. This book is an important contribution to understanding the value of academic work by women in a post-COVID world."Michael A. Peters, Distinguished Professor, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, China"Higher education is committed to excellence. Yet academic relationships are defined by persistent inequalities, not least between men and women. This substantial volume brings together empirically grounded and theoretically informed perspectives on the difficult relationship between excellence and equality. This is a must-read for anybody who wants to critically account for academia as a gendered social world today." Johannes Angermuller, Professor of Discourse, Languages and Applied Linguistiscs at Open University (Milton Keynes, UK)"This is a brilliant collection. The struggle for gender justice takes us into the heart of academia and the basic truth that its customary systems and calibrations, neutral in form, have been fashioned for some at the expense of others. Women who push against the dead weight of academic structure and win through open up the universities for all who are excluded and point the way towards the regime of inclusion and epistemic diversity that we need so very much."Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education, University of Oxford and Director ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher Education"This excellent volume shows that the socially constructed standard of 'excellence' still is charged with gender-specific aspects. In competitions for excellence, the norms of meritocracy and of gender equality still play out in gender-structured games for recognition. This compilation of empirical studies of Europe´s academia shows, that in arenas of excellence production, a gender habitus still is at work. The cases provided clearly show the ambivalences and habitually gender-structured games in the battlefield of excellence."Prof. Dr. Tanja Paulitz, Institut für Soziologie, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany