Early-Career Women Academics: Between Neoliberalism and Gender Conservatism

Abstract

The article examines the intersection between the gender culture and the neoliberal transformation of research and academia. It focuses on the impact of the transformation on the early-career women academic researchers in the Czech Republic (CR). It examines a sample of women academics to see how their career paths unfold over time and identify the mechanisms, factors, and barriers that affect their academic careers in the early stages. The article looks at 14 excellent early-career women academics from different domains based on two interviews repeated after 7 years and investigates the trajectory of their academic paths from the longitudinal perspective. The combination of a highly conservative gender culture, the neoliberal reforms introduced in the field of research and academia over the past decade, and the resistance to promoting gender equality measures make the CR an informative case to study. I argue that the gender culture of the CR and Czech research and academic institutions and the conditions for work-life balance combine with the neoliberal reforms to have a very negative impact on the early stage of women’s academic careers.

Keywords

academia academic careers CEE gender equality neoliberal transformation research research excellence science women work

Introduction

Since the 1980s, market organisation principles have been introduced in various public domains in most of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including public research (PR) and higher education (HE) (Linková and Vohlídalová, 2017; Shore, 1999). These processes privilege market relations promoting the principle of competition in the domain of PR&HE. Competition (between institutions and within institutions) is believed to lead to increased efficiency, productivity, and excellence in research and innovation (R&I) (European Commission (EC), 2012; Linková, 2017a; Shore, 2008; Thomas and Davies, 2002). ‘Audit culture’ (i.e. a preoccupation with assessing research and ranking academics and institutions according to their output), a typical feature of the new neoliberal governmentality, that is, ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) (Linková, 2017a; Shore, 1999, 2008; Shore and Wright, 2015), is justified on the grounds of promoting accountability to tax-payers and the efficiency and performance of the system. The neoliberal turn, which has spread globally from the UK, has fundamentally impacted the academic labour market, research careers and organisational environments in research and academia, and gender inequality.

Research findings on the gendered impacts in PR and HE vary between countries: ‘Whilst the literature in Germany, Austria or Switzerland explores the ways in which NPM might serve to foster gender equality in academia, the literature of the UK, where NPM has been in place longer, focuses rather on its gendered impact on the academic profession’ (EC, 2012: 141). These differences suggest that the given cultural context plays an important role.

Despite continuous efforts by the EC to promote gender equality in research and innovation (R&I) and to increase the number of women in science, statistics indicate resistance to these trends in many countries.

To understand what factors are linked to the poor representation of women in PR&HE in different cultural contexts, I focus here on the intersection between gender culture and work-life balance conditions and the current transformation of R&I in the Czech Republic. I examine how women’s early career path in research unfold and what mechanisms, factors, and barriers affect career development. I argue that the neoliberal turn’s effects on gender inequality in PR&HE must be analysed in the context of gender culture and the conditions for a work-life balance in a society. The CR is an informative case to study because of its highly conservative gender culture, supported by the nature of Czech family policy, and how this combines with the extensive neoliberal changes introduced to R&I over the past decade. This study analyses the synergic effects that neoliberal reforms to R&I and cultural context have on women’s research careers. My findings might be relevant for countries where the high level of gender inequality is coupled with neoliberal oriented research system.

Neoliberalism and its gendered impacts

A large body of literature has shown that neoliberal governmentality has strongly gendered consequences for academic careers (Morley and Crossouard, 2016; van den Brink and Benschop, 2012). It influences the organisational, individual, and epistemic aspects of research and reproduces and increase inequalities within research domains institutions and among individuals (Linková, 2017a; Shore, 2008; Shore and Wright, 2015).

The norms of research excellence, the ideal promoted by neoliberal governmentality, are more closely aligned with the traditional biographies and work culture of men, where the stress is on individual rather than collective merits (Garforth and Kerr, 2010) – such as regularly publishing papers in high-ranking peer-reviewed journals, winning numerous grants, and (long-term) academic mobility (Acker, 1990: 146; Linková, 2017a; van den Brink et al., 2010). Women’s career paths do not usually fit this model as well because their careers are usually interrupted (González Ramos et al., 2015; Wolfinger et al., 2009) and less spatially and temporally flexible (Ackers, 2004; EC, 2010). Extensive research has shown that what is declared as excellent is highly political, gender-biased, and not at all value-free (Ceci et al., 2014; van den Brink and Benschop, 2012; van den Brink et al., 2010).

Women usually occupy lower ranks in the academic hierarchy, work in less prestigious and resourced institutions, and are less integrated into scientific networks (EC, 2019; Xie and Shauman, 2003). They have fewer chances of attaining a tenure track position (Wolfinger et al., 2009). Women who try to juggle both a family and academic job are usually at greater risk of work-family conflicts than men (Acker and Armenti, 2004; Fox et al., 2011; González Ramos et al., 2015) because they often have more household and care responsibilities. Some research has indicated that women academics are more likely than men to remain childless and single (Hall, 2010). An academic and organisational culture that supports such traditionally ‘masculine’ values and characteristics as aggression and extreme competitiveness often discourages women from aspiring to a higher position (Morley and Crossouard, 2016; White et al., 2011). The literature shows that neoliberal academic environments that adhere to the values of meritocracy and research assessments based on ‘objective’ criteria are not free from discrimination: women and men are not always evaluated and judged equally, with men being seen (even unintentionally) as more competent and more worthy (Wennerås and Wold, 1997; for a review of the literature, see Fox et al., 2017).

The neoliberal transformation in the CR

Over the past decade, Czech research policy has increasingly promoted a managerial model focused on measuring research performance and increasing competitiveness, accompanied by decreased institutional funding and rising job insecurity. An important milestone was the introduction of the Methodology for Evaluating the Results of Research, which since 2008 has determined the distribution of institutional funding for research and development (Linková and Stöckelová, 2012).

Major shifts in the organisation of Czech research introduced new sources of competition into the system. ‘These entail particularly the introduction of a research assessment system, the shift to competitive funding, and the distribution of institutional funding on a competitive basis, [and] a related change in the organization of research labs and organizations’ (Linková, 2017b: 88). There is intense pressure in the Czech academic environment to emulate ‘Western standards of scientific excellence’, which were originally seen as a way of ridding research of underperforming political functionaries after 1989 (Linková and Stöckelová, 2012). Intense work effort, total job commitment, and the pressure to produce excellent research results are values that are strongly shared across the Czech academic community as the only way of producing excellent research (Linková and Červinková, 2013).

Competition has become the focal point of research reforms and it permeates the research system (Linková and Vohlídalová, 2017). Block grants have been significantly reduced and research institutions have become dependent on competitive grant funding. For example, government funding for the Czech Academy of Sciences, the country’s most important research institution, fell from 62% to 35% between 2007 and 2013 (AV ČR, 2014).

Amid uncertain funding, the academic labour market has undergone organisational shake-ups. This entails the disappearance of stable independent research jobs, an increase in temporary (grant project-based) postdoctoral positions requiring extreme mobility (geographical, temporal) (Linková and Červinková, 2013). The academic labour market has become profoundly divided into primary (where working conditions are (so far) still good) and secondary (i.e. precarious) segments (Bauder, 2006). Temporary contracts and financial insecurity have become standard for many researchers. Data suggest that early-career researchers and women especially are being increasingly relegated to precarious academic positions (Vohlídalová, 2018), while the system reinforces the privileged work status of the older generation (Cidlinská et al., 2018).

In the Czech Republic, some hybrid forms of neoliberalism have been identified (Linková, 2017b; Linková and Stöckelová, 2012), where the ‘old’ system (i.e. autonomous and secure academic positions only mildly affected by the increasing demands for performance and competitiveness, occupied mostly by older, well-established, full or associate professors working in HE or older, well-established senior researchers in PR) exists alongside the ‘new’ competitive and dynamic job market that mostly applies to younger academics (Linková and Červinková, 2013; Linková and Stöckelová, 2012).

These trends can be identified in the EU and the USA as well, but Czech academia is exceptional for the extreme role played by competitive grant financing within institutional budgets and the fact that the profound changes in research funding and assessment were not accompanied by HR policies and efforts to solve the gendered impacts of these reforms (Cidlinská et al., 2018).

The institutional and organisational context

The CR ranks among the worst countries in the EU in terms of gender equality in R&I. While women make up the majority of university students and a steadily increasing share of the population with an MA or PhD, since 2001 they continue to account for just 27%–28% of all researchers. In an EU comparison (EC, 2019), the CR ranks 30th out of 32 countries in terms of the proportion of women who are full professors. In the proportion of women in leadership and decision-making positions in R&I, the CR ranked among the last out of the 28 EU countries, with women accounting for just 17% members of research and management boards, that is, 10 p.p. lower than the EU average. The CR has the third largest gender pay gap in the sector of ‘scientific research & development’ in the EU (25.4%) (EC, 2019).

Gender inequality is also very high in Czech society generally. According to the Gender Equality Index by European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE, 2019), CR ‘ranks 21st in the EU. Its score is 11.7 points lower than the EU’s score. […] Czechia is progressing towards gender equality at a slower pace than other EU Member States’. The biggest obstacles to improving the country’s ranking in this index are the low representation of women in decision-making positions and inequalities in the economy and R&I. Pronounced gender inequalities can also be observed at the household level. A comparative study of 18 EU countries (Cunha and Atalaia, 2019) ranked the CR among countries with a pattern of high gender inequality and a high male commitment to paid work (alongside Bulgaria, Germany, and Austria).

Despite this evidence, there is strong resistance to tackling the issue of gender equality (not only) in R&I in Czechia. Tenglerová (2014) calls the strategy a ‘policy of inactivity’: state and academic institutions ignore the issue of gender equality. It is pushed outside the sphere of research policy (as something that should be addressed by family policy only, that is, with state support for kindergartens and nurseries) and if it is treated at all, then solely as an issue of work-life balance. The narrative advanced by policy makers ignores the structural barriers of women’s careers in academia and stresses the need to rely on ‘natural developments’ and prevent ‘any artificial and unnatural intervention into the natural gender order’ (Tenglerová, 2014).

There is no systematic government policy to support and promote gender equality in academia and systematic institutional policies are very rare. The prevailing view is that supporting women in their academic careers just means not actively holding them back (Cidlinská et al., 2018). Any active support for women is viewed as giving them an unacceptable advantage. Resistance to proactive policies for socially disadvantaged groups is typical in Czech society and is linked to the communist past and the rhetoric of the 1990s, which referred to any proactive social policy negatively as ‘social engineering’ (Cidlinská et al., 2018).

The conditions for combining work and care make it even more difficult for women to fit into the standard model of a research career. The state’s family policy and the ideology of motherhood promote a long period of parental leave (until a child reaches the age of 3). Moreover, the public discourse on childcare is controlled by experts (mainly popular psychologists), who claim collective care has a negative impact on early child development (e.g. up to the age of 3) (for details see Hašková and Dudová, 2017; Saxonberg et al., 2012). There are limited spaces available in affordable preschool services (and very few for children under age 3). Unlike many European countries, the Czech parental leave system does not encourage the greater involvement of fathers in early childcare, and gender roles in the family tend to follow a gender-conservative division, with men acting as the primary breadwinners and women being primarily responsible for housework and childcare. This is often the case even in the families of highly qualified women and academics (Vohlídalová, 2014, 2017a).

Methodology

My analysis is based on 14 in-depth interviews carried out with early-career women researchers in two waves: (1) between 2006 and 2007, when they were doctoral fellows or fresh postdocs and most of them did not have children; and (2) between 2013 and 2014, by which time most of them had started a family. The researchers come from a range of disciplines in the natural and technical sciences and in the social sciences and humanities. In the first round of the interviews they were selected with a view to the original research goal, which was to showcase successful young academics. Heads of academic institutions, faculties, departments, and research teams were contacted and asked to recommend talented and successful young women from their institution. This sample thus did not represent a cross-section of the general population of early-career women researchers but a sample of ones who were regarded as exceptional. During the first round of interviews, women were between the ages of 27 and 38, and at the time of the second interview they ranged in age between 34 and 45.

I analysed the interviews in line with the principles of grounded theory (I carried out regular coding according to categories and subcategories led by constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2003). In my analysis, I focus on a ‘structural reading’ of the narratives (Erel, 2007), that is, on how the effects of various structural restrictions and barriers are reflected in the narratives, how these barriers affect the life stories and choices the women academics made, and how the actors reflect and experience these barriers and choices.

The analysis is based on the life-course approach used in many studies on the position of women in research (e.g. Fox et al., 2011; González Ramos et al., 2015; Mason and Goulden, 2004; Wolfinger et al., 2009). A crucial element of this approach is inter-connectedness: looking at how individual aspects of a person’s life, such as work paths and family paths, interact and how the course of these events and individual life choices are affected by changes in institutional frameworks (Elder, 1994; Krüger, 2009; Krüger and Lévy, 2001). The approach examines how a person’s life interacts with and is impacted by the lives of other people (such as a partner’s) (Krüger and Lévy, 2001; Moen and Sweet, 2002). A woman’s life course in particular tends to be closely interconnected with the lives of others (through relations of care), which has important consequences for the course of their work path (Krüger, 2009; Krüger and Lévy, 2001). In this perspective, people’s lives are regarded as the outcome of choices firmly embedded in the specific institutional and structural conditions of society.

The early-career work paths of women academics

Although my interviewees were in most cases doctoral fellows or fresh postdocs at the time of the first interview, many of them were leading research teams, had made important discoveries, had a highly successful publishing history, or had spent time on fellowships at prestigious institutions abroad. By the time of the second interview their work paths had diverged. After 7 years, four types of early-career paths can be identified: significant career advancement, leaving academia, a stalled career, and decelerated career growth. Below I examine what is typical of these four types of career path and what moments and factors had a crucial impact on the type of work path each woman would follow.

Significant career advancement

This group that followed this type of early-career path includes just two women who managed to progress significantly since the first interview. Petra,¹ who was a doctoral student at the time of the first interview, is now a professor at a German university; Regina, who had completed her PhD 1 year before the first interview, is a senior lecturer at a prestigious UK university.

Their stories show that they had in common the possibility to follow a traditional linear career path and a willingness to be geographically mobile. They also had private-life arrangements that made this possible.

While Petra (34, natural sciences (N) is childless and is in a long-distance relationship, Regina (39, humanities (H)) is raising two small children with her partner. Her story shows how important her family situation and a non-traditional division of roles has been for her success. Her partner has been unemployed for a long time and is the primary carer for their children. Her family arrangements and income allow her to be geographically mobile (she resides in London for several days a week and returns to Czechia for the rest). During her workdays her partner is responsible for childcare. Regina’s private life arrangements resemble the conditions that are more typically enjoyed by men. Regina is the primary breadwinner in the family and between the partners her career takes priority.

Petra’s path also resembles the ideal ‘male work path’ to some extent, at least in terms of the extreme geographical mobility she has demonstrated. She has lived in Canada, Germany, the Antarctic, and other countries. She has spent several months on marine expeditions. However, her lifestyle is a response to the growing globalisation of the academic labour market and the increasing pressure for academic mobility.

She has adapted her personal life to this. She usually has long-distance relationships and has never lived with a partner. She has never seriously considered giving up a job for the sake of a relationship and thus lives alone. In this she differs from many men who often travel for work with their partners (see, for example, Ackers et al., 2007; Leemann, 2010).

While my study applies to a small sample, it is worth noting that both these researchers succeeded at academic institutions abroad. Statistics (EC, 2019) and studies (Linková and Červinková, 2013) show that the Czech academic environment tends to shut women out, especially early-career women. Both women described the academic environment abroad as much more friendly to women than the Czech one:

I feel that in Germany no one now doubts that women should enter politics and research. It is evident that there is a real interest in having women in these positions. … if there is an opening and a man and a woman have the same qualifications, they will choose the woman. I don’t think there is any problem in me being a woman. (Petra, 34, N)

Researchers reflected that their work environments had made their advancement into a senior position possible because of the transparent promotion rules. Petra obtained a job as a professor even though she had just received her doctorate, while Regina attained the position of senior lecturer after completing an initial probationary period before moving on to a higher position, in conformity with the standard rules. According to their narratives, they were offered their positions based on their abilities and experience. They were not forced to rely on the help of gatekeepers like in the Czech academic environment, where the position of an associate or full professor can only be reached after completing the complicated and non-transparent habilitation process² (Cidlinská et al., 2018).

Leaving academic research

Three women did not have an academic position at the time of the second interview. Marie (34, N) had moved to project management. Iveta (36, N), who spent a long time on a postdoctoral fellowship abroad, is now unemployed and is taking care of her son, and Pavlína (38, N) decided to leave academic research for the private research sector. Their exit from academia was closely linked to the work-care conflict.

All these researchers worked in the biosciences field. Biosciences, the most representative field of the current transformation of research, is where early-career researchers face the most difficulty in maintaining a balance between their private and work lives (Cidlinská, 2018). An uninterrupted career path, geographical mobility, and job competition are absolute prerequisites for success, and this is embedded in institutional policies in the field: the ideal career path is linear and upwards, a PhD is immediately followed by a short period spent in a series of post-doctoral research posts, where the emphasis is on building one’s reputation and securing a stable position as a lab leader or, after the postdoc stage, becoming an independent researcher or lecturer (Garforth and Kerr, 2010); however, because of the way research is funded, these positions are currently very rare and the job market is extremely competitive.

Fixed-term contracts and motherhood

The main reason these women left academia was the expiration of their work contract. Iveta’s story shows how a mother’s academic career is affected by the inherent job-insecurity of a fixed-term contract culture in a situation where an academic’s success is premised on the steady progression upwards through the academic hierarchy.

In a system of short-term contracts, there is no space for a parental break. Without help from parents and with unaffordable childcare, Iveta saw no other option but to leave her job:

After five years my boss told me that he was only going to extend my contract by half a year and he basically wanted to know what I was planning and what to expect. But I had known for some time that I was pregnant, and it was clear to me that my postdoc was over. […] I have been unemployed since then. (Iveta, 36, N)

Iveta talked about wanting to return to research, but after a series of unsuccessful responses to job adverts her chances of finding a job in her field as an independent researcher proved impossible. She soon realised that all the positions in her field were being converted either to temporary positions, filled by doctoral and postdoctoral fellows, or lab leaders (Linková and Červinková, 2013). If a person does not aspire to the position of lab leader, there is generally no place in the system for experienced researchers after their postdocs, regardless of their research outputs. She significantly lowered her ambitions and decided to look for a position in project management or as a research assistant. This, too, turned out to be a problem. The line between a successful research career at an outstanding research institution and unemployment is thus surprisingly thin.

While I am not denying that it is also difficult for men to work and be successful long term in this competitive system, they are often in a better position to become successful because often their partner performs the care role. Unlike motherhood, fatherhood does not prevent men from participating in the competitive system in the same way they did before they had children. Iveta’s husband is a case in point: he works at a different research institution and, according to Iveta’s narrative, the birth of their son had almost no effect on his work path.

A gender-conservative division of work and care

The way gender roles are divided at home determines how much a person is able to adapt to the demanding conditions of the academic labour market. Pavlína and Marie were in partnerships with a traditional division of gender roles; they were responsible for most of the childcare and housework. This imbalance between partners’ roles played an important part in their decision to leave academia. These women described men as the main breadwinners who help with children and housework only when they have time and saw this as an unchanging fact. The ‘second shift’ was a heavy burden for both women and it contributed to their sense of a serious work-life conflict:

My husband was often away. For ten weeks in a row – he combined business trips and skiing trips, coming home for two or three days. I was dealing with a sick child and our nanny not having time to babysit and no one to help. Amidst all that you’re supposed to be writing a grant, you’re sitting at work because it’s almost the deadline and it’s not going well, you’re almost crying … Lots of smaller issues piled up and I decided to leave [academia]. (Pavlína, 38, N)

Both women felt positive about their decision to leave academia. Marie (working in administration) and Pavlína (working in private-sector research) were happy with their current position in terms of job fulfilment and the conditions for combining work and parenting. Pavlína described the private sector of applied research as a less stressful and more family-friendly environment than the PR sector, where researchers must constantly chase after grant money. This finding was rather surprising, given how the private and public sector tend to be viewed in Czech society (the private sector is usually seen as much more competitive, effective, and goal-oriented than the public sector).

Stalled careers

A stalled career was the most common career pattern among my sample of early-career women researchers. This group included six women from the technical (T) and natural sciences and the humanities and the social sciences (SS).

A sense of career stagnation

Most of these researchers were working at the same institutes, but often in a worse position than what they had at the time of the first interview. While the first interview generally found the women at a time in life when they were receiving accolades for their work and were heading up research teams or groups, by the second interview they were in more precarious positions. Many of them were working with a temporary contract on a grant project with no long-term prospects. Most had only a small number of working hours so they could combine work and parenting.

When talking about their current position, they often expressed some frustration about their career progression. They generally compared their situation to that of the (male) ideal academic career. The only accepted model of a ‘proper academic career’ in Czechia is to work full time and be entirely devoted to one’s job. Even part-time work is seen as evidence that a researcher lacks motivation and enthusiasm (Vohlídalová, 2017b). This is a frustrating comparison for women and may lead them to doubt themselves and abandon their career aspirations (Cidlinská, 2018). Many of the women were disappointed that they were not able to advance in line with their plans and noted the clash between their original plans and their actual situation, which often surprised them negatively and had turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated:

When I did the first interview my children were very young. […] I had grand plans – I wanted to come back to work quickly, submit grants and work on projects. But in reality it wasn’t that easy. I was so naïve to think that this could work. This obviously slows you down, because you want to work but can’t, you want to do experiments but can’t, you want to concentrate fully on writing papers but can’t because you are half at home and half at work and rushing around all the time. You can’t advance your career in these conditions. I was really taken aback. (Beata, 45 let, T)

Many of them were sceptical of their ability now to do excellent research. They underestimated themselves or showed signs of giving up. This is consistent with Fels’ (2004) findings that women more often give up on their aspirations than men do. My findings indicate that may be because it is impossible for them to follow academia’s standard career model. This feeling was especially common among women working in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), where career paths are rigidly structured (Cidlinská, 2018). However, it could also be found among women in some SSH (social sciences and humanities) fields:

I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to have a great scientific career anyway. I wouldn’t be able to achieve that with two children, and having a third won’t make much difference. (Soňa, 36, SS)

These women also felt isolated (because they were working part time and often from home) and a lack of support from their managers and team leaders (cf. Bagilhole and Goode, 2001).

Combining work and private/family life

For the women in this group, most of whom had two children, motherhood was the key development impacting their careers and they had more difficulty combining work and care than the women in the other groups. Out of all the groups defined here the women in this one experienced the most tension in efforts to combine work and care. Unlike the women who had left academic research and then found themselves in a more comfortable situation, these researchers were trying to manoeuvre between two antagonistic normative systems – academic work and motherhood.

The ‘intensive motherhood’ norm that prevails in the CR is premised on devoting maximum attention to one’s children, deep emotional involvement, constant physical proximity, and it being the mother’s duty to adapt as much as possible to the needs of her child, who becomes the centre of her life (Hays, 1996). The ‘intensive motherhood’ norm (and its demands) were strongly reflected in the interviews. All the women in this group talked about their sense of lacking time for work and about the decisions they made being dictated by their children’s needs. They described having to maximally accommodate their children, which defined the time they were able to spend working.

These women also typically devoted a very high standard of care to their children. For example, Edita (40, T), working at 50% of regular working hours, was educating her sons at home using special educational methods and teaching aids that she crafts herself. She usually worked when her children were asleep, especially at night, a strategy frequently cited in this group of women. The narratives of these women were filled with references to exhaustion, lack of sleep, and stress. As Acker and Armenti (2004) argue, a frequent response among women academics to the barriers, obstacles, and conditions of research work is to work harder and sleep less:

When my sons fall asleep, I come alive. I function until two or three in the morning, sometimes longer. The mornings are all the worse for that! Last week I felt nauseous from the lack of sleep, so I decided that I have to cut down and finish by three in the morning. It’s really exhausting when you also have to get up to breastfeed (my younger son turned six months old last week). (Edita, 40, T)

Motherhood is described as a major barrier to geographical mobility, which is often highlighted as another key element of career advancement. Most of the women talked about how they had given up any plans to work abroad for a longer period, deeming it incompatible with family life. They tended to reject outright the notion that they could travel with their partner and children. As other studies confirm, these are gender-specific choices that are typical of women: men make different choices in relation to academic mobility and are more receptive to the idea of travelling abroad with a family (Ackers, 2004; Ackers et al., 2007; Leemann, 2010; Vohlídalová, 2014).

The ability to combine work and care satisfactorily was also affected by the fact that most of the women were in a partnership in which the responsibility for caring for the children and the home rested entirely on them and was not shared by both partners. Like the women researchers who left academia, they described their partners as the main breadwinners, who were very busy and whose careers take precedence in the family. Almost all the partnerships were gender-conservative, and the differences between the careers of the male and female partners and the unequal division of care and housework intensified significantly with the arrival of children.

Decelerated career growth

This group included three researchers. Their career advancement had progressed little since the first interview, they occupied (almost) the same position at work were employed at the same institutions: Dana (39, N), Laura (37, H) as independent researchers, Olga (33, H) as a doctoral fellow. Their narratives largely revolved around criticising the current research assessment system, which prioritises fast output in the form of impact-factor publications, eliminating the differences between disciplines and fields, and a focus on short-term projects and competitive funding. This criticism was not voiced at all in the first-wave interviews. Now the women were complained about the contemporary system, which they actively strove to resist in their everyday work.

Assessment is increasingly about impact factors but overall you write a paper to address someone. Recently I have been feeling that we have to write papers for the sake of writing papers. But my approach is that I write because I want to present my research to the research community, I want to tell them what I’ve been working on and what my results are. I would rather submit a paper to a journal with a lower impact factor knowing it will be read by my colleagues than think about publishing in utilitarian ways. […] I don’t intend to succumb this. (Dana, 39, natural sciences)

All these researchers participated in numerous activities, including ‘academic housekeeping’ and care for the community, students, teams, and good workplace relations (Garforth and Kerr, 2010; Morley, 2006). Although these activities are considered worthless in the contemporary research assessment system, the women assigned great importance to them and actively tried to resist the system’s devaluation of them. This active resistance, however, decreases the time they have to produce the outputs required for a fast career track. Their careers had thus advanced (very) little since the first interview (especially compared to the women in the first group, who worked abroad and complied with current excellence criteria).

Unlike the other interviewees, these women devoted much less space in their narratives to partnership and family life and plans. All of them were childless, two of them were married, and one was single. Both married academics were in a relationship with another academic and described the relationship as egalitarian (both partners’ careers were important for the couple).

Dana (39, N), who was very critical of the neoliberal turn, spoke about the shift in her life priorities since the last interview. She now saw starting a family as an important life goal, but so far had been unsuccessful in her plan to start a family, which she envisioned as the antithesis of working in an environment that she found to be frustrating and discouraging. Her narrative illustrates the thin line between being voluntarily child-free (postponing childbearing because of high work aspirations and demands) and being involuntarily childless and struggling with infertility:

In 2006, [a baby] wasn’t yet my priority. I still wanted to move on. But now it’s becoming a priority. I’m ready for it. Back then my work was my main thing and I wanted it to be my priority. Now I know that I like my job, I want to do my best, but I can imagine my child as a priority. Honestly, given the aforementioned changes in science, there was no point rushing my career […] When I was thirty-five, I thought there would be a right time to start a family, but then life goes on and you think, “Not yet, I still want to finish this and that, go abroad …”. Now I’m thirty-nine and I hope it can happen by my fortie … (Dana, 39, N)

The other interviewees did not discuss the issue of a family or partnership life in the interview. Children were not yet on their list of priorities and they were not willing to discuss their partnership life in great detail either.

These interviews suggest that a very critical approach to research excellence demands slowdown the career development. Whoever does not comply with the narrow perspective of scientific excellence is pushed off the fast career track, regardless how meaningful and important his or her work is. Academia, a greedy institution (Coser, 1974), not only expects people to devote their whole selves to work, but also wants them to identify with the ‘quantifiable’ and identifiable outcomes that count in the current system – a specific type of research subjectivity (Linková, 2017a).

Conclusion

The analysis paints a gloomy picture of the early-career paths of excellent women academics in the Czech Republic and what drives them out of the academic pipeline at an early stage. While at the time of the first interview these researchers had achieved many successes, about 7 years later only two of them were on a clearly upwards trajectory. What is disturbing about this is not only the very small number of women who succeed (given how the sample was recruited) but that both were working abroad. This means that the Czech academic environment has not enabled any of the 14 talented women in my sample to achieve significant career growth. The second striking fact is that both of the researchers who experienced career growth had conditions in life similar to those typically enjoyed by men.

It is well documented that women’s careers in academia are negatively influenced by motherhood and care responsibilities (e.g. Fox, 2005; Fox et al., 2011; González Ramos et al., 2015; Mason and Goulden, 2002; Wolfinger et al., 2009), which slow down their careers and prevent them from conforming to the male model of the ideal academic career. As well as stereotypes they face structural barriers, such as the maternal wall and the glass ceiling (Williams, 2005), all of which leave them more vulnerable in the academic job market. So far, my research is in line with these findings. The unique longitudinal data illustrate the synergic effects of major factors and mechanisms that affect women’s early academic careers and decisions. My study shows the destructive impacts neoliberal changes to R&I have on women’s academic careers when coupled with gender conservatism in the public and private spheres and a lack of targeted state or institutional policies. Women academics in this situation are stuck between two contradictory systems of norms and values and are potentially presented with the moral dilemma of having to choose between being either a good mother or a good researcher.

Many of the tools used to combat gender inequality in R&I (such as the structural change approach) emerged in the cultural environment of ‘centre’ countries in, where the official EU approach to gender equality is embraced and is an accepted policy goal (Nyklová, 2017). In the countries on the ‘periphery’ or ‘semi-periphery’, such as Czechia, this is not the case. The findings indicate that measures supporting women in R&I can only be successful if they are tailored to the particular cultural context.³

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The publication was partly supported by the project “Analysis of Barriers and Strategies to Promote Gender Equality in Science and Research” (reg. No. CZ.03.1.51 / 0.0 / 0.0 / 15_028 / 0003571) funded by the EU from the European Social Fund, the Operational Program Employment.

Notes

Author biography

Marta Vohlídalová, Ph.D., is researcher in Gender & Sociology Dept. at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, and assistant professor in sociology and social research methods at College of Regional Development and Bank Institute -AMBIS, in Prague. In her research she focuses on gender equality on the labour market, with a special regard to academic environment and higher education institutions, on work-life balance, women in decision making and gender and sexual harassment.

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