Friday, March 14, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
Although gender equality efforts in higher education institutions have a long history, their recent manifestations have taken a new turn, particularly in Germany, long a bastion of gender politics focused on the male breadwinner, the male scholar and male professorial authority. The development of German university gender equality politics, from the focus on women in the 1980s and early 1990s, through the gender mainstreaming turn of the mid-1990s to the growing importance of the European Union (EU) in defining gender equality in science as a policy goal, provides a context for closely examining three German reform initiatives begun after 2005. We examine the German Excellence Initiative, Program for Women in the Professoriate, and Research-Oriented Standards of the German Research Foundation for what they offer for increasing gender equality in the higher reaches of academia. We identify two major factors leading to these policies, one being international competitive pressures on the German universities and particular German national gender regimes, the other stemming from EU science and research funding policies and their changing notions of gender equality, especially their embrace of “Gender Mainstreaming.” We suggest that the current reliance on external evaluation by peer institutions and funding agencies, and the combination of promoting individual women and committing universities to structural changes will potentially offer leverage for additional gender equality gains, even beyond Germany’s borders.
