Academic career, gender and neoliberal university in Spain: the silent precariousness between publishing and care-giving

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a case study of a Spanish university that sheds light on the precarious nature of many academic posts. It looks at how women academics build their careers in the current neoliberal university, which measures scholarly output through the indexing metric. Application of this yardstick renders many academic careers all the more precarious because it fails to take into account women’s care commitments. Because the issue is ‘hidden’, it is one that is hard to remedy. Based on a quantitative and qualitative methodology, the study’s empirical data revealed that the neoliberal university discriminates against women by overlooking the care burden they bear. We conclude that needs to base itself on non-androcentric principles in which care is a key component. This would avoid academia penalizing those people who either require or provide care – especially women.

Keywords:

• Academic career
• neoliberal university
• gender
• care

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

Funding

This article is part of research on work-life balance. It is funded by the Equality Unit of the University of Valencia (UV). The project began in 2017 and is on-going.

Notes

1 In the Spanish university system, the highest rank on the academic scale is that of Full Professor, followed by Tenured Professor. Both posts are Civil Service ones and thus offer job security. ‘Contracted Doctor’ is a lower-grade post but is also a permanent one. There are also non-permanent teaching posts such as Doctor’s Assistant and Teaching Assistant.

2 The purpose of this job category is to include outside professionals teaching at the university. The last few years have seen many complaints about the way the university has resorted to recruiting such professionals to cover teaching needs and by so doing, avoiding the creation of full-time, long-term posts.

3 A performance metric that researchers can voluntarily submit themselves to is one in which a count is made of the number of papers published in high-impact journals over a given period of six or more years. Here, women make fewer applications (34%) for this voluntary evaluation than their male counterparts. This is despite the fact that women researchers enjoy similar success to male researchers (91% versus 93%) in said evaluations. The low application rate by women is surprising that success in the evaluation brings both academic prestige and a raise in salary.