Gender inequalities among staff in British and German universities: a qualitative study

Abstract

The purpose of the present research was to study gender inequality in British and German universities. Semi‐structured interviews were undertaken with female academics in each country (UK, N = 40; Germany, N = 47). A generational difference of attitude was perceived in academe, with the younger generation clearly more strategic in career development, and more ready to embrace agency rather than passivity. German respondents were more constrained by social expectations and somewhat more subject to covert prejudice. They found networking more difficult to achieve than their British counterparts, and some struggled to attain full academic inclusion. They were subject to strong pressures to adopt the same habitus as their managers, which indicates the importance of sponsored mobility. Although in both the UK and Germany, children were perceived as the primary factor hindering female achievement, family and work could form a powerful positive synergy, inculcating habits of efficiency that transferred into the work environment: having offspring could be an emancipatory experience. Moreover, the academic achievement of the interviewees was located within a social matrix. Most of the respondents received support from their partners and families of origin to an extent that makes it appropriate to speak of ‘academic communitarianism’. Most men as well as women invested deeply in their families and in their partner's career, thereby blurring the traditional distinction between the public and private domains, and vitiating the radical feminist allegation of patriarchalism.

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