Bergsklättrerskan och de militanta lesbiska feministerna. Om könsbarriärer och jämställdhet inom akademin

Abstract

This article deals with challenges connected to the remarkably low representation of women among the academic staff in Danish universities. It explores the paradoxical relation between the ideal of gender equality and the image of Academia as a gender neutral culture of no culture, on one side, and what are considered to be gender barriers, on the other. Nothing in Danish legislation directed at the academic world supports any kind of discrimination against women. The thoughtprovoking picture we are presented with then is that there is actually no contradiction between the ideal of gender equality and the unequal relation between the number of women and the number of men employed as researchers in Danish universities. As an aid to understanding this perhaps surprising lack of contradiction, the artide recommends an approach to the problem of gender barriers in Academia which does not consider the problem as given - i.e. as given as a problem. Instead, the relation between the image of Academia as a gender neutral culture of no culture and the existence of gender barriers is revealed with the aid of discourse analysis. This analysis shows that what is at stake is not a contradictory, but a highly productive relation where gender equality and genderneutrality function as elements in a discrete, but effective and powerful mechanism that tums the problem of gender barriers in Academia into an invalid problem. What is suggested is that an undermining of gender barriers and gender inequality within the universities may not necessarily be achieved through an appeal to the ideal of gender equality. Rather projects designed to undermine the status quo should be developed in the form of feminist interventions and renegotiations of our understanding of what science or scholarship might be and of the relation between science and society and between quality and objectivity in the research process.