We are delighted to begin this year’s issue with the announcement of our newest prize – the Blu Tirohl prize which is awarded in recognition of the substantial contribution made by Blu Tirohl to the Journal and the wider world of gender studies and feminism over two decades. The Blu Tirohl Prize will be awarded annually to an author whose work addresses Blu’s interests and passions: diversity, inclusion, intersectionality and victimization. This year the prize goes to Rachele Girardi, for her article ‘“It’s easy to mistrust police when they keep on killing us”: A queer exploration of police violence and LGBTQ+ Victimization’, which appeared in our last issue and which explores the dynamics between police and young queer people from European countries at a time when LGBTQ+ people are increasingly victimized and criminalized by law enforcement. The article was chosen because of its strong clear focus on queer visibility and its relevance to wider issues around gender and policing. We will be featuring an interview with Rachele in a future issue and her article will be free to view for 6 months. Many congratulations to her!
All of the articles in this issue touch on aspects of gender and higher education. In the first of these, Maria José Nogueira, Carlos Sequeira and Francisco Sampaio draw on their study of freshmen in Lisbon, Portugal, to show that in terms of academic life satisfaction and psychological vulnerability, women fare much worse. Generally speaking, the mental health of freshmen is good, but male students’ responses suggest they enjoy significantly better mental health than female students, whose responses also suggest lower personal satisfaction with academic life.
Tsion Yohannes, Deborah Umucyo, and Agnes Binagwaho report on an audit carried out at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda designed to assess its inclusiveness and awareness of gender and minority groups throughout its own programmes, projects, and policies. Their report identifies a number of areas for action – the need for an explicit statement of equity and diversity goals in all institutional documents, gender and diversity inclusion mandates in all policies and their better integration in organizational practices, better use of diversity-sensitive language, the formalization of equitable and inclusive hiring processes, training to increase knowledge and skills around gender equity and diversity inclusion, appropriate sexual harassment reporting mechanisms, and increased accessibility in order to accommodate wider physical and learning disabilities.
Ebru Eren discusses the interviews she carried out with women studying and researching physics and physical sciences at four universities in Dublin, Ireland, aimed at identifying their attitudes towards feminism in science and their perception of the term ‘women in science’. Eren’s participants largely identified as feminists and were in favour of equal opportunities in science. Many felt that the label ‘women in science’ and the societies organized to support them were of benefit, allowing them to share experiences and network, as well as providing visibility, a public platform and ways to advance their careers. However, others worried that the label could put too much focus on women’s gender, making them vulnerable to accusations that their success in science was due to political initiatives rather than their scientific abilities.
Melanie McCarry and Cassandra Jones offer evidence of the way that women’s presence in academia has disrupted, but not dismantled, cultures and practices of gender inequality and sexual violence, drawing on accounts from staff in a Scottish university. Twenty-six per cent of participants had experienced sexual harassment in the previous 12 months, with senior male colleagues often the perpetrators, and 18.7% female participants reported they were treated unequally because of their gender compared to 9.2% of male participants. McCarry and Jones argue that gender inequality and sexual harassment are mutually supportive and sustaining in universities, part of a culture that is hostile to women.
Isabelle Zinn and Heather Hofmeister show how research in male dominated workplaces – with Swiss butchers and German university professors – allow us to see the gender order in action. Gender is structured but also something individuals ‘do’ through their interactions. Both workplaces are androcentric, with systems, activities, and structures – equipment, infrastructure, scheduling – designed for men, and as such they make men central, allowing them to dominate, while women are devalued and made passive. Their discussion draws attention to the consistency of the gender order across apparently quite different settings.
Finally, Thais França focuses on the experiences of childfree women academics during COVID, noting that research has tended to focus on female academics who are also mothers, leaving undisturbed a perception of childfree women as ‘ideal workers’, unaffected by the pandemic. This focus has tended to distract from the problems faced by female academics in general such as excessive workloads, the concentration of women in precarious positions and the uneven division of work and emotional labour within the academy, while also obscuring the labour undertaken by childfree women academics such as looking after older relatives and community work. França documents the hardships faced by childfree academic women in Portugal during the pandemic. She also reveals the expectations that childfree academic women should be constantly available for work and the burdens resulting from these.