This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through…

The underrepresentation of women in the most senior ranks, and senior leadership positions in the academy, is a global phenomenon. How and why women academics experience the higher education profession differently to their male colleagues has been the subject of extensive research. This paper brings a new, original conceptual dimension to our…

Changes in higher education internationally, including the corporatisation of universities, greater codification of research and teaching performance, and more precarious employment, have led to a chillier environment for academics. Employing an autoethnographic approach, we interrogate our career experiences as academic women and the important…

Gender inequality prevails in academia; there is currently no review on the barriers and facilitators to success for female academics in UK Higher Education. We conducted a systematic search identifying 32 papers addressing this issue. Narrative review revealed six themes: networks (prohibiting the inclusion of women), home-work balance (where…

This study is grounded on the idea that women academics could be experiencing significant challenges and injustices in the gender-blind, market-driven, and performative culture of the neoliberal academe. The study particularly explores the perceptions of Turkish academic women regarding their career experiences, and evaluates these perceptions in…

This article draws on findings from my doctoral research to exemplify some of the difficulties I encountered when interviewing 20 female professors and subsequently writing about their life histories. In this article, I discuss how I addressed the issues of representing and positioning my participants, and I reflect on the power dynamics present…

Internationalisation, competition and performance orientation are nowadays essential in the managing and financing of universities. This pattern has intensified with the austerity measures and fiscal consolidation that followed the financial crisis in 2008. This article examines the academic labour process and career making of academics from a…

This paper develops a dialogical encounter between northern-inspired theorisations of gender and Vietnam's historical and cultural differentiation identified through the presence of matriarchy in ancient societies and its popularity in folklore and contemporary politics. The article draws on interviews with 12 senior women from 8 universities in…

This article addresses the issue of gender imbalance in Finnish universities in the domain of physics as a historical and dialectical phenomenon. Drawing from the Gramscian notion of hegemony and the activity-theoretical notion of contradiction, this paper analyses gendered hegemonic and contradictory forces steering physicists' careers. This…

This paper traces the academic identity formation(s) of 10 Canadian female academics whose disciplinary knowledge is in the field of educational administration. We trace the ways in which discourses of gender, institutional power, and other cultural and social influences shaped their sense of themselves as academics in the highly patriarchal…

This article explores issues of gender and race in the academic careers of female sociologists in South Africa by focusing on selected women who left academic departments in higher education institutions. In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 participants who left various Sociology departments at different times. It was found that young black…

This paper examines indirect discrimination in Australian universities that tends to obstruct and delay women's academic careers. The topic is defined and contextualised via a 1998 speech by the Australian Human Rights Commission's Sex Discrimination Commissioner, juxtaposed with a brief contemporaneous exemplar. The paper discusses the prevalence…

In this paper, comments made by a group of senior male academics in Australian universities about their leadership behaviours, are considered. Whereas the majority of the men in the study spoke about gender relations, and sometimes feminism in their workplaces, only two of the men engaged in discourses of gender and/or feminism, as well as…