Description
Despite clear progress in the last decades, women continue to experience limited access to top positions in academia, at least in some fields of science. Our goal is to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying gender inequality at the university. We hope to be able to confirm or disprove a few subtle ways in which progress of women in science may be hindered. We will make use of a number of research methods, including interviews, experiments and scientometric analysis to uncover clichés that may negatively affect evaluation of women’s academic work. Our project will help researchers, university authorities and administrators of science and higher education understand ways in which they can provide more of a level playing field for both genders. Among other things, surveys previously administered in Norway and targeted at PhDs will be reanalysed and conducted in Poland as part of the project.Our partnership will let us to learn from the comparison of the results achieved in the two countries.
Summary of project results
Gender equality at the university remains a hotly debated topic. While strong gender imbalance remains at the higher levels of academic hierarchy, identifying its causes is an empirical challenge. Thus studies fine-tuned to disentangle various competing explanations by means of experiments and innovative data modelling approaches are in high demand. The current project proposed and implemented several such approaches, proving viability of methods that can continue to be applied in the future to monitor equality of opportunity for males and females pursuing academic careers. The main output of the project is a series of academic texts describing the methods, collected data sets and results observed. The beneficiaries learned novel ways of studying gender equality and gained valuable experience, documented by publications accepted in reputable journals. Two of them have already been accepted and more are to come. These achievements form a firm basis of further development – several specific research designs have already been conceived. Some of them will have practical implications for the University of Warsaw (and other schools). In particular, based on research pursued in this study, we intend to investigate from the gender perspective the student evaluation of teaching
Summary of bilateral results
The project achieved the set objectives. The project facilitated the following: (1) the promoter became more familiar with the educational system in Norway, particularly on the doctoral level, (2) the partners gained further experience in mechanisms of financing doctoral studies, and (3) the allocation of grants. Moreover, we could (4) compare the Norwegian system with the Polish one, as well as (5) compare the Norwegian system with changes proposed in recent discussions in Poland. One very important part of the study was to compare gender-related policy (mainstreaming) in both countries. Norway is considered as one of the countries that are most sensitive to gender equalization of opportunities in education and on the labor market. The reports will be delivered to the institutions allocating grants and will be available to universities. Conference presentations have already been given to disseminate our findings. Tangible benefits involved one PhD student and two master students defending their theses. We are planning to continue cooperation with our Norwegian partners in the area of study of higher education, particularly to monitor gender equality in longer perspective and to propose effective measures to foster it. Those issues are important because of the growing number of women entering higher education institutions and existing imbalance among different disciplines.