Jämställdhet, meritokrati och kvalitet - Ett triangeldrama i den akademiska vardagen

Abstract

In Sweden, the issue of gender equality in higher education and research has been on the agenda since women entered universities in significant numbers more than 40 years ago. Several political initiatives have been taken, which have been crucial to enhanced gender equality but, at the same time, they have been essentially contested in academia itself. In this article we analyse how specific logics, based on the culture of academic research, are hard to reconcile with logics based on political justice that govern the politics of gender equality. Secondly, gender equality is often understood today as concerning knowledge produced by research. Ever since the 1970s, the two lines of development — more women in academia and more gender studies — have been intertwined in Swedish research policy. Support for female-dominated research fields like gender studies has been perceived as supporting gender equality in higher education. Gender studies have, in many ways, benefited from this support but, at the same time, reduced the field to being a matter of gender equality, rather than a research area in its own right. Consequently, gender studies in Sweden have been challenged from other disciplinary perspectives by those who claim that they represent not research, but a political endeavor to bring about gender equality. Without a clear distinction between methods of improving conditions both for women researchers and for gender research, the two will be conflated. This confusion is problematic not only for women involved in gender research but for the field itself. Supporting gender studies may be dismissed as political and incompatible with academic doxa and self-understanding. On the other hand, favoring women in the name of gender equality is incompatible with the understanding of fairness, which forms the meritocratic order in academia.