Uniformity Dressed as Diversity? Reorienting female associate professors

Abstract

The Norwegian Research Council has, via the research programme Balanse Programmet, funded research as well as practice-oriented initiatives for increasing the representation of women in research leadership positions (Lund, 2020). In this chapter we explore the experience of female associate professors with practice-oriented equality promoting initiatives, specifically that of preliminary evaluations, at one Norwegian higher education institution. We investigate whether, how and with what consequences preliminary evaluations speed up female associate professors’ processes of becoming full professors. To make sense of the effects of this initiative, we use Sara Ahmed’s (2004, 2006) affective economy and Dorothy Smith’s (2005) concept of ‘ruling relations’ to explicate the affects and discourses that these preliminary evaluations hook into, activate, (re)produce and resist. We argue that these reveal a paradox because while they increase the amount of female research leaders they do so at the cost of diverse ways of doing and living academic work.