Women in Academia

Most of us either work in academia or studied at a university, which made this the session where the figures and the personal stories were hardest to keep apart. We started with what sexism actually is, using a continuum that runs from the everyday subtle kind that makes you wonder whether you are imagining it all the way through to harassment. Then we went to the numbers: KU Leuven’s own scissor graph, the credit and citation gaps, the motherhood penalty, and what happens to women of colour in a system that already loses women early. The easy explanation for why women leave academia is children, so we spent most of the session on the harder ones - departmental culture, double standards, the service burden, and the absence of anyone senior who looks like you. We ended somewhere smaller and more practical than the problem: read each other’s applications, practise each other’s interviews, pass on the jobs and conferences we hear about.

1. What counts as sexism
   • Lisa Ann Richey's continuum model: from everyday subtle sexism that makes you think "is it just me, am I crazy?" through to sexual harassment
   • Recognising it is the precondition for acting against it
   • "Did this really happen to me" - the one that stuck with you
   • #MeTooSTEM, and the #MeToo wave in Danish higher education
2. Racism in academia
   • The "inclusion tax": the various labours expected of you to be included in white spaces, and to resist or adhere to white social norms
   • The minority tax
   • The recent Jason Arday case
3. Going over the numbers
   • Gender Action Plans as the standard policy instrument since the 2010s
   • KU Leuven: almost 50% of staff are women, but only 12% of professors in 2014 and 20% in 2020
   • The university's position is that the scissor gap closes slightly each year and that this takes time because it only happens through promotion, which struck some of us as a lazy excuse even if the action plan helps
   • Fewer women work full time
   • The scissor graph looks completely different per faculty: extreme in biomedical sciences, essentially absent in science and engineering
   • On women of colour in US academia there is very little research at all, and what exists shows underrepresentation starting early and accumulating drastically
   • What that research does investigate is the sense of belonging: lack of role models, solo status, and difficulty forming relationships with senior colleagues
   • Across every group, women report having to work harder, having their work valued less by their department, and significantly more subtle discrimination
   • Women also carry more of the workload with students, meetings, and non-research work
   • Professional isolation, mediated by department climate, comes out as a driver of women of colour leaving STEM
   • The myth of historical bias versus the leaky pipeline, and which of the two the papers actually support
4. Output and credit
   • Women in research teams are significantly less likely than men to be credited with authorship, with real consequences for their careers
   • This is not a productivity gap: women are not less productive, their work is undervalued
   • Men cite their own papers 56% more than women do, and citations compound into impact and further citations
   • Papers by women stay longer under review: 9% longer for mixed teams, 20% for all-female ones
5. Motherhood in academia
   • From a Nature paper on Danish academia: women take on five times more childcare responsibility, and spend more time on every individual childcare task
   • Motherhood penalties in pay and in promotion, still present after the first academic job post-PhD
   • The effect exists in other sectors too, but bites harder in academia because the career is almost entirely output-focused
   • The penalty is more pronounced in departments with no women in senior positions
6. Why do women leave academia?
   • The easy answer is children, but the real answer is institutional barriers and culture
   • Double standards: higher expectations of women in community service and in article quality, plus the service burden
   • Internalised misogyny - why do women in academia turn on other women, why are prolific female scientists so often perceived as evil, and why are some of them actually evil?
   • Departmental culture, confidence and imposter syndrome, and the absence of role models
   • We shared personal experiences here, including why each of us chose, or did not choose, academia as a workplace
7. Do DEI efforts work?
   • The increase in Asian staff in the US is driven mainly by hiring foreign-born people
   • There was a brief effect of DEI in post-pandemic hiring, and it did not last
   • The claims of a "lost generation" of white male hires, or of a massive boost to minority applicants, are simply unsupported by the data
8. So what do we do?
   • Report? Only 7% of students and 23% of staff report gender-based violence incidents at their institution
   • The European Commission's 2024 zero-tolerance code of conduct
   • Mentoring?
   • Support each other concretely, with jobs in mind: read each other's applications, practise interviews, share job and conference calls - possibly as a group of its own