There is general agreement that academia should be a space for the construction and dissemination of knowledge, and funding research is key to that process (Daza 2013). Researchers and academics struggle with obtaining funding, and female scholars face more challenges than their male colleagues in this task (Leberman, Eames, and Barnett 2016). Chile has developed a strong agenda on advancing human capital which has increased the number of academic women in universities (Berrios 2015). However, during the past few years women have made complaints through newspapers about the gender gap in the distribution of research funding and their low representation in leadership positions. For example, research projects led by women represented the 22.2% in 2005, and in 2015, at 22.5%. Furthermore, women still remain significantly underrepresented among leadership positions within Chilean universities (Aequalis 2017). These analyses make the discrimination based on gender visible; however, questions about the positioning of women in the construction of knowledge have been eclipsed by concerns about access to higher education and progress in their academic careers. The common omission that underlies the discussion on policies of knowledge invites us to wonder about the processes of constant negotiation, resistance, and creativity of women to escape the naturalized patriarchal relations in academic spaces. Based on a study of research policies, this paper is an invitation to understand the main discourses raised by the academic community when issues of women working on research emerge. A feminism articulated from the new materialism gave me tools to analyze the material conditions of doing knowledge in academia and allowed me to question the constant omission of the knower body of who constructs knowledge within academia. From the interviews of policy makers and managers on research units within the university, the main discourses on women’s issues in higher education have been the ways women can advance to leadership positions and obtain research grants, as well as, the need for maternity leave policies. This type of finding becomes problematic when the focus on access maintain the untouched notion of women as a homogenous category, ignore the corporeality of the process of the construction of knowledge, and portray maternity issues as a women’s problem rather than a structural issue that concerns the society as whole. This paper is an invitation to resituate the knower body within the discussion on research practices and to de-hierarchize the division between the so-called object and subject of knowledge.

Aequalis. 2017. Participación femenina en cargos directivos en instituciones de educación superior chilena. Nota Técnica. Berrios, Paulina. 2015. "La profesión Académica en Chile: Crecimiento y profesionalización." In La educación superior de Chile: Transformación, desarrollo y crisis, edited by Andres Bernasconi, 345-370. Santiago, Chile: EdicionesUC. Daza, Stephanie L. 2013. "A promiscuous (feminist) look at grant-science: how colliding imaginaries shape the practice of NSF policy." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (5):580-598. Leberman, S. I., B. Eames, and S. Barnett. 2016. ""Unless you are collaborating with a big name successful professor, you are unlikely to receive funding'." Gender and Education 28 (5):644-661.