Varieties of Gender Equality Politics: Higher Ed Reforms in Germany and US

This paper considers the intersection of two reform movements in higher education today: one characterized by policy changes to increase gender equality, particularly in the professoriate and in the STEM disciplines where it is understood to be lagging; the other characterized as a set of neoliberal policies that increase managerialism, emphasize quantification, and heighten precariousness in the division of academic labor.  Both have drawn much scolarly attention but each is usually considered in isolation from the other. By bringing the two together in relation to the varying transformations being untaken in US and German university systems, I highlight the potential for both positive and negative synergies. I argue that neither Cassandra nor Pollyanna is well situated to describe the complex uses each movement makes of the other, and that the specific areas in which one might argue feminism is more or less the coopted or the coopter vary in each national case.