Abstract:

 This research explores female academics in India’s engineering institutions and their opportunities to conduct research in a developing country scenario, and how Higher Education (HE) research policies or the lack of it influences their research. With India and other developing countries like Armenia and Eastern European countries undergoing rapid changes socio-economically, this work further explores the impact of socio-cultural factors on academics’ research productivity. A qualitative approach has been used to collect data, especially since the study looks to identify and understand the social and the cultural factors’ influence on the research of male and female academics in engineering. The results reveal a range of barriers for female to conduct research and the stark absence of gender specific research policies in creating an equitable research environment.

Literature review:

 Research Productivity (RP) is an outcome with several factors influencing them including demographics of the academics, institutional policies, the changing academic environment, governing bodies, personal and professional factors (Callaghan, 2015; Rani, 2010). Conducting and publishing research are increasingly being seen as the indicators to measure academics’ productivity, academic distinction, acquiring grants, and impacts their promotion and institutional rankings. Especially in the developing countries, where currently there is a hurried transition from a teaching based to a research-based institution (Bakthavatchaalam, 2018). The academics in these institutions are encouraged and often forced to conduct research and publish, despite the lack of infrastructure and policies (Horodnic and Zait, 2015). Quite a number of these institutions are now trying to form their policies to enable their academics to conduct research; however, now the question arises if these policies consider gender dimension and do these policies provide academics of both gender to have equitable opportunities to conduct research? (Bakthavatchaalam et al., 2021).

Exploring the literature, the lower RP of women compared to their male counterparts seems to be a commonplace (Rørstad and Aksnes, 2015; Aksnes et al., 2011). Few of the factors attributed to lower female research includes child-rearing, cultural prejudices, institutional policies, being allocated more teaching duties and pastoral care compared with male academics, inequality in time and resource allocation, absence of networking and an outright denial of gender related issues in HE etc. (Huang, 2019; Bosanquet, 2017; Gupta, 2017). Looking at STEM related subjects, it is a common trend to have more male reprentation than female across countries and so Astegiano et al. (2019) comment that this male-orientation has resulted in a gamut of socio-psychological barriers for female academics. Furthermore, the works of Aiston and Jung (2015) and Ozkanlı et al. (2009) point out the existence of structural and systemic discriminatory practices embedded in academia that disadvantage female academics.

 Even though this is an important field, very few studies have looked at RP with a gender lens in a developing country scenario and the policies to promote an equitable research opportunity for both the genders. This study is timely especially that 42% of the Indian academics being female (UGC-Report, 2018) and RP increasingly being used as a metric for promotion, institutional ranking etc., making it important for academics to publish. Thus, it becomes essential to explore if the existing research policies consider the diverse factors influencing RP from a gender perspective.

 This research explores the following questions: 

1. How are the opportunities for male and female academics to conduct research?
2. How do the HEI’s draft policies that considers the gender differences?
3. How does the cultural system influence genders’ opportunities to conduct research and their overall RP?

This research is based on the study of around 60 engineering HEIs by Bakthavatchaalam (2018) which questioned the presence of credible institutional policies on gender mainstreaming. The current research builds on it using a qualitative approach to study in depth the perception of females’ research opportunities, various cultural barriers influencing female and the gender policies within the institutions. A qualitative has been used as it would be more suited for the proposed research questions and a privileged way of exploring the respondent’s perceptions, feelings, social worlds, history and perspectives (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted for data collection, with each of them lasting approximately an hour. The target population were engineering academics working in various institutions in south India. Of the twenty, ten were male academics and the other female. Five of the respondents from each gender were chosen to be experienced (more than 10 years of academic experience) and the other five respondents being early-career academics (two to five years of experience) and conducting their PhD. This assortment in gender and experience was purposefully selected to provide a balance in the data. The experience of the academics was chosen as an important aspect as the rationale for conducting research during and post PhD would be different. This was also done to see how academics with different experience viewed the opportunities to conduct research, the research policies and how they have evolved over the years. The interviews were conducted online and telephonically. The academics were contacted directly and the outlines of the questions were sent to them prior to the interview. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were analysed only after the respondents’ confirmation. After the eighteenth interview, no new themes, categories of explanations appeared, thus achieving saturation, two further interviews were conducted to confirm the theoretical and empirical saturation. Data was analysed with content analysis, which enabled the compression of a large number of words using explicit rules of coding into fewer categories (Bardin, 1977). As commented by Strauss and Corbin (1998), the interviews were coded by paragraphs and sentences and classified according to their meanings and the emerging themes.

The results revealed a plethora of barriers that impede female academics’ ability and opportunity to conduct research compared with male academics. These include the socio-cultural expectations, family-oriented issues, financial issues, institutional factors and the lack of specific institutional policies to help female academics. The results showed how these negatively impacted female academics’ research and their career progression overall. Female academics’ lack of mobility/independent travel due to socio-cultural norms and their dependence on male family-member or a fellow male-academic in collecting data, attending conferences, purchasing research equipment, not being able to relocate for job/research etc. negatively affecting their RP. It was reported how men use this dependence as a control mechanism to their advantage! When female focussed more on their career rather than the primary expectation to be a home-maker, there were both active and passive sanctions from the family, further hindering their research. The findings showed a clear lack of institutional policies that considered the above-mentioned barriers and support female academics’ research. Even few of the Governmental policies that exists in theory were not adhered to at the institutional level. These include an absence of job security during maternity, not being able to have flexible timing during child rearing, a glass ceiling for career progression, adjusting teaching loads for research, policies to counter passive harassments, the cultural and societal factors that limit their ability to move etc. The female academics reported that the current policies if any were ‘Gender-neutral’ and this did more harm than good in helping their research. The research recommends that the policymakers and HEIs to consider gender differences and cultural factors whilst designing their research policies, so as to bring about equitable opportunities for female academics and to empower their research and to pave way in achieving of SDG 4 and 5 in academic research.

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