“Should I Stay or Should I Go?” How Early Career Researchers Imagine the (Im)Possible Future in Academia

Abstract

The STS literature on gender in science shows how academic cultures, scientists’ identity-making and gender intersect in multiple and heterogeneous ways. In regard to recruitment processes as well as individual career trajectories, gender is often reduced to a barrier for women in making an academic career. In this chapter, we turn our attention towards early career scientists’ imaginaries of academia and academic life. How do early career scientists reflect upon their possibility of having an academic career? What do they see as ‘boosters’ and ‘blockers’ when it comes to success in academia, and how are these reflections and experiences imbued with gender? The chapter is based on qualitative interviews with early career scientists (PhD students and postdocs) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The interviewees were purposively selected from departments with different levels of gender balance and gender balance change patterns. The chapter demonstrates the role that gender plays in how early career scientists envisage their future careers, and in particular how professorships are connected to over-work, total job dedication and incompatibility with ‘having a life’.

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