L’excellence académique entre « compétition » et « intégration ». Analyse des critères de recrutement académique et des biais de genre qu’ils induisent

Abstract

The formal barriers of women's access to university studies and academic positions have long since skipped. However, recent studies show that there are still social mechanisms that reduce the proportion of women as the scientific and academic careers unfold, which is imaged by a "leaky pipeline". Rather than seeking to explain this phenomenon in individual behavior, different works have focused on the normative as well as the organizational dimensions that produce it. Adopting this point of view, we have studied the normative and discursive frameworks mobilized by members of committees recruiting academic staff within a Belgian university. We highlight the coexistence of two distinct reference frameworks for assessing the quality of the candidates (the competition reference system, and the integration reference system), and we show how these two reference systems contribute to the maintenance and perhaps to strengthen a gendered organization of scientific work.

Keywords

• science
• university
• leaky pipeline
• gender
• academic career
• excellence