Mathias Wullum Nielsen: New and persistent gender equality challenges in academia

Ph.D. thesis, Department of Political Science - Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, June 2015.

This dissertation is about the cumulative disadvantages slowing down women academics’ advancement and keeping them from gaining the same organizational status as their male colleagues. It is also about understanding and explaining how gender relations are reconstituted in a rapidly changing academic context characterized by increasing demands for international competitiveness, innovation, flexibility and accountability.

The thesis employs a case study approach, adopting a critical realist meta-theoretical framework and a pluralist methodology to investigate the new and persistent gender equality challenges at Aarhus University in Denmark. The overall research objective has been divided into four analytically distinct potential explanatory components, each drawing attention to a number of social mechanisms, which under certain circumstances, can be expected to be instrumental to the persistent underrepresentation of female senior researchers at the university.