Mapping Gender in Academic Workplaces: Ways of Reproducing Gender Inequality within The Discourse of Equality

Sweden is often described as one of the best countries in the world for women to live in. Despite this and despite a number of equal opportunity interventions within the area of higher education from the mid 1990s and on Sweden follows the international pattern of the “leaking pipeline” when it comes to gender distribution in academia. The higher up in the academic hierarchy the more men and the fewer women. The topic of this thesis is mapping gender in academic workplaces. The aim is to explore ways in which the social relations of researchers’ everyday working lives are gendered. This involves studying ways in which gender inequality is produced, maintained or ignored within the discourse of gender equality in Swedish academic workplaces and in Swedish society at large. The study is based on bibliometric and sociological studies of four academic departments in three different scientific disciplines at two Swedish universities. The departments were chosen because they provided good possibilities for realising gender equality and extreme situations have been avoided. The departments have been studied in terms of their intradepartmental co-authorship networks and their citation behaviour. The study has evolved hand in hand with a bibliometric toolbox and the “sociobibliometric mapping technique” is part of the results. In-dept interviews have been conducted with different categories of academic staff focusing mainly on new researchers. All in all 20 researchers have been interviewed. Special attention has been given to different academic workplace cultures and ways of making sense of gender inequality within these settings. The results indicate that gender inequality is produced within seemingly genderneutral everyday working situations. The feminine Other is constructed in relation to various forms of masculinities in everyday working situations and provide an obstacle for collegial relations on equal terms. The lack of available subject positions and the additional workload of creating such provide an obstacle for women academics to supporting each other. Both women and