ConGender and FemPhil research groups invite you to the closing event of the Prestige Project (RCN 2018-2023:
Book launching: Gender Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Academia: A Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Transformation
When? May 30, from 9h-16h
Where? SV- og HUM-bygget: B 1005 Auditorium
*Concert with Ronja Larsen and Elias Dass
* Production of a short movie about UiTs work for Equality and Diversity by Fjellfrosk Media AS (interviews will be conducted during the event with people wanting to be part of the movie)
*Free copies of the book will be distributed during the event
* Registration is now open on Tavla. Free of charge and open for all.
Prestige is both a research and an intervention project financed by the BALANSE Program, Research Council of Norway, and UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The project has a twofold goal: (1) advance knowledge on gendered quality assessments and implicit biases by uncovering how they impact career opportunities and the distribution of power and resources in research; (2) promote research-based organizational changes at the UiT by creating mechanisms for fostering gender balance in top positions.
Welcome!
UiT The Arctic University of Norway has the highest share of women in academic top positions among the comprehensive universities in the country. After decades of research and systematic measures for improving gender balance in the organisation, UiT has increased the share of women in professor positions from 9% in 2000 to over 40% in 2023. As of June 2020, women lead 43% of the research groups at UiT (85/196).
A closer look into the data, however, still reveals great numerical disparities within and across the different fields of knowledge, disciplines, and research traditions. Within the STEM-fields, for example, men hold 82% of the professorship positions and account for 80% of the research group leaders (Faculty of Science and Technology and Faculty of Engineering Science and Technology combined).
There is therefore a current need at UiT for creating monitoring mechanisms that are able to capture these internal disparities and their variations. This will enable UiT to improve gender-aware management in the organisation and to move forward with the implementation of more specific and effective measures for gender balance.
Prestige Project collaborates with the UiT’s administration for developing such mechanisms by uncovering how gendered quality assessments and implicit biases affect career opportunities and the distribution of power and resources for men and women at UiT. For accomplishing this goal, Prestige Project advances in four research fronts: Conceptual Analyses, Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, and Normative Analyses.
Our hypothesis is that the gender gaps can be explained by a gap of “prestige”. “Prestige” is understood as an impression of respect and admiration based on a reputation for high quality, competence, success, and social influence. So understood, it seems that “prestige” has been more strongly associated with men and that biases have hindered women’s opportunities even in an institution with a strong tradition of promoting gender balance such as the UiT.
With this in mind, Prestige Project aims at mapping and deconstructing the gendered impressions of "prestige" within and across the institution’s structures and further provide research-based normative guidance for UiT on how to achieve a more gender equal organization beyond numerical parity.
Prestige Project is hosted at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the UiT in close collaboration with UiT’s Equality and Diversity Committee. It is jointly financed by the Research Council of Norway and UiT and runs from 2018-2021. The project is led by Kenneth Ruud, the Deputy Chancellor for research and development and leader of the Equality and Diversity Committee at UiT. From 2018-2019, the project had been coordinated by Sigfrid Kjeldaas, Postdoctoral fellow at Genøk, and it is now (2020-2021) coordinated by Melina Duarte, Associate Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Researcher at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research.
Contact us if you want to engage in the project and share your ideas. In spite of a period of social reclusion, our network is constantly growing in online platforms.
Thanks for visiting our web page,
Melina Duarte
4 Research Fronts
Concepts
Concepts
Concepts
Gender Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Academia: A Conceptual Framework for Sustainable Transformation
Editors: Melina Duarte, Kjersti Fjørtoft and Katrin Losleben
Institutional focus on diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) has affected all parts of higher education management. DEI standards have, for example, become a yardstick for institution’s internal evaluation and external ranking. Consequently, the pressure for improving their own performance as well as for gaining competitive advantages over other institutions have sparked pressing needs for institutions to take concrete actions and obtain satisfactory results. Concrete actions have the power to transform the organization’s culture. They are implemented at many levels within an institution (e.g. organizational, intergroup, interpersonal) and are carried out by employees holding different positions (e.g. administrative and academic staff) and exercising different functions across an institution (e.g. leaders, DEI workers, program directors, committee members). This means that employees are more and more taking on roles through which they directly or indirectly decide and influence how DEI work materializes in concrete settings. Centred on gender, this book scrutinizes the conceptual framework for DEI actions by applying contemporary theory into concrete contexts in academia. The book’s main goals are (1) to facilitate research-based decisions in the ongoing transformation of higher education management and (2) promote fair and sustainable organizational cultures for all.
Gender Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Academia aims at providing knowledge and analytical tools laying on the foundation for sustainable transformative work in academia. The book has 25 short chapters, each focused on one of 25 fundamental concepts that are essential for identifying, understanding, and implementing organizational changes and counteracting unjustified disadvantages faced by women and members of other gender minorities in academia. It provides a language for communicating DEI in practice and approaching it as a common effort across groups. The concepts explored in this book target both internal norms used to regulate research communities and external social norms that contribute to produce gendered structures within academia. Examples of discussions of standards and problems emerging from internal norms are rules for assessment, conceptions of excellence, epistemic injustice, merit, and canonization. Examples of discussions of standards and problems emerging from external gendered structures are stereotype threat, self-respect, identity bias, and motherhood. The book also discusses concepts directed towards solutions, such asaffirmative action and feminist pedagogies and overcomes the traditional binary approach on gender by incorporating specific challenges faced by LGBTQ+ and transgender staff and students.
UiT The Arctic University of Norway has built a strong tradition of promoting gender balance within the institution. After decades of research and systematic measures, the university has increased the share of women in professor positions from 9% in 2000 to almost 40% in 2020. Today, UiT leads the national ranking in that category, being the university with highest representation of women in professor positions among the comprehensive Higher Education institutions in Norway. While this is a great achievement for the institution, Prestige Project calls, in this report, for a cautious interpretation of these results. While almost 40% of women hold professor positions at the university level, great disparities remain within and across knowledge fields and disciplines. A more nuanced view on the data shows that as of January 2020, 82% of the professor positions in the STEM fields at UiT were still held by men (NT and IVT Faculties combined). In addition, the overrepresentation of women in the fields commonly associated with female activities such as social sciences, care, and education have inflated the overall results for the better.
This report argues that the measurements of proportion of women and men in professor positions at the university level is a limited tool for a meaningful monitoring of gender balance in these positions at the university. This is because this metric does not allow for the monitoring of disparities within and across the different fields of knowledge and disciplines constituting the broad educational and research portfolio of the institution, neither for evaluating the effects of interventions at the units’ level. These limitations show that there is a need for more precise indicators for enabling the monitoring and evaluation of significant progress/deterioration in gender balance. In this perspective, a more precise metric can better serve as guidance for the generation of effective and more gender-aware management practices at the institution. Prestige Project proposes in this report an alternative metric that intends to better respond to this need: the scatterplot for gender balance in professor positions at UiT.
Keywords: Gender Balance; Organizational Changes; Gender-aware management practices; Metric for monitoring and evaluating gender balance within and across fields of knowledge and disciplines.
Kochanska&Duarte. 2021. Gender Distribution in Leader Roles at UiT. Prestige Project: Gender Balance in Research Leadership (RCN 281862). Center for Women’s and Gender Research (SKK), UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
UiT The Arctic University of Norway has a decade-long tradition of channelling research through formally accredited research groups. These research groups have dynamic structures and networks, unlimited duration, a defined leader, and gather academics of all levels to pursue research on a common topic of interest. The formalisation of research groups at the institution followed strategies aimed at supporting the creation of more robust and resilient research communities and boost cutting-edge research produced at the university.
Ten years after initiating the formalisation process, UiT has around 196 research groups distributed fairly evenly across faculties by their size. HELSE and HSL are the largest faculties and also the ones with the largest number of research groups. As of June 2020, 57% of these research groups were led by men. This shows that gender balance has been achieved in research group leadership at the university level in terms of numerical parity. While the formalisation of the research groups may have contributed to achieving this balance, data collected for this study represents an inaugural attempt to map gender-disaggregated research group leadership at UiT.
This report shows that the gender distribution in research group leadership across faculties and departments or centres follows the remaining disparities existing in top academic positions (professor and docent) as they were observed in former studies conducted by the Prestige Project. This result is consistent since 93% of all research groups at UiT are led either by associate professors or professors. BFE, HELSE, and HSL are the most gender-balanced faculties, while IVT and NT are the least balanced. At IVT and NT faculties, 80% of the research groups are led by men. At the faculties that follow a level system for research groups (HSL and JUR), women currently lead more top-level groups than men.
Despite the achievement of gender balance in research group leadership functions at UiT, a survey conducted by the Prestige Project that complements the dataset showed that gender shapes relevant differences regarding the basic structure of research groups and their leadership roles. Highlights of these differences can be systematised as follows:
(1) The average size of research groups at UiT is 12.6 members. Men tend to lead smaller groups with a higher proportion of members holding 50% or more research contracts. (2) Most of the research groups at UiT follows a “stjerneklubb” structure, in which leaders are one of the several key researchers within the group. Three times more men than women reported leading a group with a “rakett” structure, in which the leader is the group’s key researcher. (3) Concerning the reported activity level following each groups evaluated potential from the leader’s perspective, men reported a higher maximal achievement of the group’s potential. At the same time, women indicated greater room for improvement. (4) Finally, regarding leadership and leadership roles, men have been more often appointed as leaders by the head of departments or centres, while women have more often been chosen by the group members. Furthermore, while both men and women in leadership roles engage equally in managerial tasks in their functions as research group leaders, men reported performing more of the tasks associated with a leadership role. Twice as many men reported that they set the group's research agenda and control the workflow of delegated tasks.
We do not claim that these differences are necessarily negative since they can also be seen as a sign that gender balance increases the diversity of approaches in leadership at the university, which is a desirable aim in fostering excellence. The meaning of these differences has to be investigated further in future research.
Keywords:Gender Balance, Research Leadership, Research Groups, Diversity, Kjønnsbalanse, Forskningsledelse, Forskningsgrupper, Mangfold
Forthcoming:
Report 03/2022: Research Project Leadership at UiT. Contact: Adrianna Kochanska, Dinah Abdel-Fattah, Viktoriia Kuz, Melina Duarte (ongoing survey).
Report 04/2022: Perceptions and Experiences of Discrimination at UiT. Contact: Sarah Martiny & Lise Guilli (to be released).
Report 05/2022: Knowledge and Awareness about UiT's mechanisms of support and career development. Contact: Gregor Maxwell & Lilli Mittner
Duarte, M., Kochanska, A., & Nustad T. (2020). List of Recommendations for Administrators and Managers at UiT. In: Gender balance beyond coarse measurements: balancing gender distribution in professor positions at UiT from 2020 onwards. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7557/sr.2020.8
Download the List of Recommendations 01/2020 here.
Mittner, L., & Blix, H. S. (accepted). Career paths in higher music education: Challenges for gender equality in the arts. In S. Valde-Onsrud, I. Lunde Vestad, & H. S. Blix (Eds.), Gender Issues in Music Education. From stereotypes to multiple possibilities? Routledge.
Fjørtoft, Kjersti. Fra hverdagspraksis til strukturell urettferdighet. Tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning 2020 (1). ISSN 0809-6341.s 39 - 52.s doi: https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1891-1781.
The BalanceXplorer and the Balancinator are free and open source softwares originally created in 2020 by Lilli & Matthias Mittner. They allows anyone to build coloured plots to visualize distribution of men and women by inserting simple excel sheets instead of writing programming code.
The Balancinator apps operationalizes gender balance as binary between men and women. When interpreting the plots we encourage to acknowledge that there might be more than two genders in your organization and that representation of men and women is only one of many indicators for gender equality.
Members
Katrin LoslebenProfessor
Katrin Losleben – Professor
Research interests:
My research is driven by the wish to analyze power relations in the narratives that infuse societies both in history, present, and future times. As a feminist scholar, I have broadened my focus from analyzing the existing stories about one specific historic actor (in my Ph.D.) and re-narrating it differently to scrutinizing dominant tropes in Western culture. I aim to unpack the potential of the humanities to contribute to a better understanding of the cultural aspects of environmental crises. With my actual research, I move beyond persistent Western narratives on environment and climate change to understand how places can be understood also through embodied knowledges, and what impact this could have on the living and dying of humans and Earth kin. My research draws from feminist and critical theories to learn how sonic thought can dismantle dominant epistemologies and social/racial/gendered/bodily hierarchies. It lies at the intersection of sensory, artistic, local, and Indigenous knowledges with a geographical focus on the North of Norway/Northern Sápmi. I am PI of Arctic Auditories - Hydrospheres of the High North (NFR 325506, 2021-25). Moreover, I serve as a member of the advisory board of WoVen (NFR 2021-26, PI: Melania Bucciarelli, NTNU) and am a member of the ThinkTank Sustainability at UiT. Since 2016, I have been co-editor of the European Journal of Musicology.
Social identity threat in cognitive and motor tasks
Masculinity threat
Men in communal roles
Immigration (factors influencing the under-performance of children of immigrants)
Cooperation and conflicts between social groups ( group-based self-esteem, identity management strategies)
Effects of inequality framing
Research projects (ongoing)
Principal Investigator (together with Prof. Dr. Toni Schmader, University of British Colombia, Canada, and Prof. Dr. Colettte van Laar, University of Leuven, Belgium) of the international research project Understanding Communal Orientation in Men (UCOM).
Collaboration partner in the research project Gender equality in the 21st century: Country-specific and individual factors for the intended contributions of women and men to child care - a cross-cultural study in 49 countries funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). PI: Jun. Prof. Dr. Carolin Schuster. 2021-2023.
Collaboration partner and leader of Work Package 1 in the research project Masculinity Navigator – Unpacking the relationship between masculine roles, well-being and gender equality (EQUAMAN) funded by the National Science Centre Poland. PI: Associate Prof. Dr. Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka. 2022-2024.
Research projects (finished)
Collaboration partner in the research project Do I belong? - How negative stereotypes influence the social relationships of young people with a migration background in a school context funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). PI: Dr. Laura Froehlich. 2022-2023.
Collaboration partner in the research project Framing in inequality: How different ways of describing economic inequality affect evaluations of and reactions to inequality funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). PI: Prof. Dr. Susanne Bruckmueller & Prof. Dr. Gerhard Reese. 2020-2023.
Principal Investigator in the research project Stereotype threat as reason for the low performance of students with migration background in the German educational system funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. 2012-2015.
Main international collaboration partners
Prof. Dr. Colette van Laar, KU Leuven, Belgium
Prof. Dr. Toni Schmader, University of British Columbia, Canada
Ass. Prof. Dr. Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka, University of Gdansk, Poland
Dr. Laura Froehlich, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
Kenneth Ruud is a professor of theoretical chemistry at the University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway (Norway) and the Director General of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Oslo in 1998 (supervisor Trygve Helgaker) and spent 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow in San Diego with Peter Taylor before moving to Tromsø in 2001. His main research interests are development of new ab initio methods for the study of molecular properties for non-relativistic and relativistic methods. Additional interests include solvent effects (continuum and QM/MM methods) and vibronic and relativistic effects. He is an author of several quantum chemistry program: Dalton, Dirac, ReSpect, and OpenRSP.
Centre for Women's and Gender Research, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Postbox 6050, Langnes 9037, Tromsø, Norway
UiT Breiviklia, 1st floor, N-110, 9019 Tromsø
+ 77644329 melina.duarte(at)uit.no Show map
