Gender and advancement in higher education's prestige economy

What does it take to climb the career ladder in UK academia? And who gets to the top? Camille B. Kandiko Howson reports on research that highlights the role of prestige and "indicators of esteem" in hiring and promotion decisions. Prestige is found to be a gendered concept, with the indicators of esteem - publication rates, first author status, keynote invitations – being more easily acquired by men. Meanwhile, the work that motivates many women in academia, such as group success in a research lab or delivering quality teaching programmes, is often ignored or undervalued. Broader aspects of academic work should be recognised to allow for a greater variety of indicators to support diversity and inclusion within the sector

Mid-Career academic women and the prestige economy

Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with women academics based in London higher education institutions in the UK, this paper investigates the gendered nature of the prestige economy in academia. We explore how mid-career academic women strategise their career development and the opportunities and barriers they perceive, particularly in relation to the accrual of academic esteem. Concept maps were used to facilitate dialogue about career plans and provided an artefact from the interviewee’s own perspective. The analysis draws on the concept of prestige, or the indicators of esteem that help advance academic careers, against the backdrop of a higher education context which increasingly relies on quantitative data to make judgements about academic excellence. The interviews indicated that women generally feel that men access status and indicators of esteem more easily than they do. Many women also had ambivalent feelings about gaining recognition through prestige: they understood the importance of status and knew the ‘rules of the game’, but were critical of these rules and sometimes reluctant to overtly pursue prestige. The findings are valuable for understanding how women’s slow access to the highest levels of higher education institutions is shaped by the value that organisations place on individual status

Indicators of esteem: gender and prestige in academic work

The continued gender imbalance in senior positions in higher education is a problem that persists despite decades of feminist research and publications in the area, as well as interventions in many countries to promote the advancement of women. In this article we view the issue of gender inequality through the lens of the prestige economy, which suggests that academics are motivated by prestige factors accrued through advancement in their careers. Prestige, authority and status, we suggest, may be more easily acquired by male academics. We draw on a case study of one institution in the Republic of Ireland, including data from a survey on academic careers (n = 269), to explore how the concept of prestige is gendered. We explore the cumulative effect of four themes: homosociability; non-transparency of criteria; academic workload balance; and self-promotion