Titel:
Gendered Excellence: The Disciplinary Contexts of Persistent Gender Inequalities

Fakultät:
fachbereichsübergreifende Lehrveranstaltungen

Semester:
Winter 2017

VeranstalterIn:
Prof. Dr. Heike Kahlert; Prof. Fiona Jenkins, Ph.D. (Marie-Jahoda-Visiting, Professor in International Gender Studies)

Termin:
Do., 26.10.2017 (14:00-16:00 Uhr); Do., 23.11.2017 bis Fr., 24.11.2017 (je 9:00-18:00 Uhr)

Ort:
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Raum GBCF 04/255

Studiengang:
Essener Kolleg für Geschlechterforschung

Zielgruppe:

Kommentar:
The radical transformation of traditional humanities and social science disciplines through feminist scholarship was an ambition often expressed in an era, roughly spanning the 1980-90’s, which saw the rapid growth of women’s numbers and influence in the academy, alongside the rise and institutionalization of distinctive critical approaches to gender. Such transformation, would mean, as an initial step, “purging [disciplines] of androcentric bias, reshaping dominant paradigms so that women's needs, interests, activities, and concerns can be analyzed and understood systematically, and generating research methodologies that are neither gender-biased nor gender-blind” (Mary Hawkesworth 1994: 98). The extent to which such transformation occurred has been much debated. What seems clear, however, is that different disciplines have undergone widely differing degrees as well as kinds of change.

Today, when renewed attention is being paid to women’s under-representation in many academic disciplines, and particularly among the ranks of the professoriate, perhaps too little attention has been given to assessing the historical impact or successes of such feminist calls for wide-ranging disciplinary transformation. To the extent to which these agendas were taken up, might this have been a factor in improving women’s participation rates and chances of success? And conversely, is there a correspondence between disciplines where we see little evidence that feminist and critical gender scholarship has had an impact on the mainstream and the under-representation of women in these fields? Understanding the complex relationships between women’s rates of participation and success, and the status and uptake of feminist scholarship treating gender as a key dimension of social, political and economic phenomena, is challenging; and perhaps for this reason generic accounts of gender bias are far more often evoked to explain women’s under-representation. Where common explanations evoking psycho-social factors leading to the under-estimation of women’s work in general come into play (such as that labeled unconscious implicit bias) these on the face of it, have little directly to do with the content, methodology, forms of authority or common intellectual practices of disciplinary fields. They thus do little to explain the significant differences in progress toward gender equality among different disciplines.

In several social sciences disciplines, notably in economics, political science and philosophy, we see strong patterns of women’s workforce under-representation, as compared with sociology, anthropology and history. In this class we consider whether women’s status and workforce participation as academics, might be usefully considered alongside histories of the reception and influence of the scholarship that women introduced into particular fields. Feminist standpoint theory offers relevant reflections on the epistemic issues that arise for acceptance of scholarly work that criticizes established hierarchies, contests authoritative norms, and is generated by a subordinated group. Women came to participate in social sciences, not always as feminist scholars, but often as innovators in recognising the importance of gender for their objects of study. Acknowledging, and seeking to understand this innovation and its reception, provides another approach to understanding how gender equality and knowledge are entwined aspects of transformation in these disciplinary fields.