Gender and Higher Education Management in Times of Crisis by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031989414
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland
Published: 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Summary and Conclusions

The EC (2025, p. 12) noted that: “improving the working conditions of men and women researchers is a key policy commitment in the EU”. Similarly, OECD (2021b, p. 12) recognises that precarity is a global systemic issue and that there is a need to “strengthen the evidence base on research careers in a formal and systematic way”. However, although it refers to the importance of a better ratio of contract to permanent posts in laboratories, like The European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers (EC 2005), its other recommendations involving improving working conditions, employment status, and the need for sustainable careers, are vague. In terms of strategy, it reverts to an individual approach around career development, offering training and promoting equity and mobility.

This chapter shows that roughly half of all academic and research staff in Portuguese HEIs and almost two fifths of those in Irish ones are precarious. Precarity is most likely to occur among those in research rather than academic posts and in Irish HEIs it is highest in the more prestigious pre-2019 universities (since these are more likely to be successful in accessing funding and hence hiring precarious workers). Overall, in Irish HEIs, the proportion of academics in permanent academic posts increased between 2022 and 2023—but the gender difference persisted—with men more likely to be in those positions than women. In contrast there appears to be little gender differences in the research area in Irish HEIs, although women researchers are more likely than their male counterparts to be in precarious research positions in Portuguese HEIs.

There are a multiplicity of forms of precarity ranging from non-academic citizenship (those with none or short contracts) to probationary academic citizenship (those with a formal and/or longer contract). Following Bacchi’s (1999) framework, it was suggested that Statistical Vagueness provides the context which facilitates HEIs use of different strategies to avoid seeing it. Four such strategies were identified: Strategic Obfuscation; Deviant Practices; Normalisation and Individual Responsibilisation.

These strategies are interrelated. They produce positive effects for the HEIs in terms of increasing their research outputs and hence their global ranking. Even more fundamentally, the model underpinning valued knowledge production in hierarchical HEIs legitimates exploitation by permanent academics. It is effectively seen as part of the normal processes of segmentation and stratification in HEIs and a non-negotiable model for knowledge production. Ending it would impact on permanent academic research output and careers and on their HEIs global ranking. In this situation, HEIs appear unwilling to define precarity as a crisis despite pressure by international bodies (EU Directive 99/70/EC; OECD 2021a, 2021b, 2024).

The differential valuation of research and the imbalance between the number of PhDs and the number of permanent posts is a key structural factor in creating precarity, particularly in the research area in both Ireland and Portugal. Reducing the number of PhDs is not on the agenda in either country. The assumption that surplus early career academics in any one HEI system could be reduced by encouraging them to move to other jurisdictions is not realistic since this is a global problem (OECD 2021b).

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