Promotions criteria are often held to be neutral, objective descriptors of the standard tasks and levels required to achieve promotion. As such, they provide institutions with apparently transparent mechanisms for sorting out the deserving and the not yet deserving, and they offer those applying for promotion an apparently clear list of requirements and standards that must be demonstrated in order for promotion to be achieved. And yet, research indicates the continuation of gender pay gaps (HESA, 2023), research funding gaps (Weale and Barr, 2018), and an academic promotions success gap shaped by gender, race and class (Bailey, 2022). Despite many years of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives in institutions, promotions practices continue to act as gatekeepers for women academics, producing inequitable outcomes. The result is that in the UK women are highly underrepresented in senior management roles, particularly in SET subjects, but overrepresented in part time roles, lower salary bands and teaching only contracts (AdvanceUK, 2021). In 2019/20 fifty percent of academics were women but seventy-two percent of professors were men (AdvanceUK, 2021). These UK trends are mirrored across Europe.

In this context of these ongoing equities, this paper puts promotions criteria and promotions practices in the spotlight. It argues that the apparently ‘neutral’ promotions criteria are the vehicle for the enactment of deeply embedded and often hidden gendered political micropractices. Many women academics applying for promotion to professor have had the experience of being told they are ‘not ready’ for promotion by male peers but this notion of ‘readiness’ is itself deeply shaped by gendered factors that hide under the radar. Interpretations regarding who or how ‘professorship’ or research leadership should and can be demonstrated, or who possesses the required attributes for promotion, are shaped by gendered assumptions. The paper builds on work by Yamamoto’s (2019: 167) which indicates that women in research leadership positions are often there at the behest of a patriarchal powerbase built on ‘elite, academic, male, social and cultural capital’; on Thornton’s (2013: 3) exploration of the masculinist cultural practices of neoliberal universities; and on Morley’s (2016: 5) comments on the ‘virility culture’ of competitive individualism that thrives in contemporary HEIs. 

This paper arises from a current UKRI/UK University funded project entitled WomenCAN: Breaking Promotion Barriers, Changing University Cultures, this paper develops a feminist theoretical approach which highlights, attends to, and seeks to address the demonstrative mangle of promotions practices in the performative university. The objectives of the project are to:

• Provide a robust evidence base for culture change initiatives to advance women’s research leadership skills and career progression; 
• Build a flexible, distributed leadership structure of women change agents to embed practical systemic change across the university
• Pilot a coaching programme of targeted initiatives for women academics.

Based on empirical data, the paper explores how promotions criteria contribute to the invisibilisation and stigmatisation of women’s’ chosen career and promotion pathways. It illuminates how prevailing structures, cultures and identities (O’Connor, 2020) within HEIs construe women’s choices as lacking in legitimacy in academic authority structures which continue to privilege research over leadership, teaching, citizenship and engagement. The paper contributes a detailed understanding of how the specifics of promotions criteria and promotions practices gain micropolitical animacy, force and power in institutions, in ways which have significant and negative effects on women’s career progression and on perceptions of women’s institutional value. Project findings indicate that, while long-standing patterns of inequality are changing, they are doing so at a glacial pace, and that institutional EDI initiatives are insufficiently agile or targeted to prevent the continual re-entrenchment of power and the reproduction of inequitable gendered practices at the micro-level. 

The research evidence base was gathered in relation to the project objectives as outlined above. In the first stage of the project, twenty-one narrative interviews were conducted with senior female academics at Reader or Professorial levels in a UK university, and a qualitative survey capturing the perspectives of sixteen Heads of Department and Deputy Heads of Department (objective 1). The narrative interviews were carried out across three faculties and the School of Management, with participants drawn from Humanities and Social sciences, Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Maths and the School of Management, and the qualitative survey likewise obtained data from across the university. These data provided an evidence-base for pursuing the second project objective of building a distributed change agents network (CAN) of women academics to improve women’s leadership capacities, enhance career progression, and raise senior women academics’ visibility across the organisation. We disseminated our research findings at three keynote events which also provided a platform to publicize the distributed network. The change agents’ network was soft launched through two workshops for twenty women academics who, through group discussion, outlined their aims and the intended structure and planned activities for the network, their own intended contributions and their expected challenges. Our third objective, to pilot a coaching programme, ran in parallel to the other two activities and comprised of three external coaching workshops for women academics intending to apply for promotion in the next two years. These were attended by up to sixteen women academics at all levels, per session. Ten women were offered an additional one-to-one coaching session to help them prepare for the promotions’ applications process. The coaching sessions were a pilot for testing the feasibility and effectiveness of a promotions coaching programme that could be proposed to the university.

Insights from the project challenge the view that promotions criteria are neutral, objective descriptors of standard tasks and levels which can/are ‘applied equally’ to individual cases across all contexts. In fact, data revealed that promotions’ practices are intimately and invisibly shaped by gendered perceptions of career paths, and sexist interpretations of readiness and deservingness. Project findings demonstrated how promotions practices shape academic women’s perceptions that they have to discipline themselves and their careers within and around institutional inequalities. Data indicates that women academics negotiate ways of bending their minds and accommodating their bodies to try to fit in with (and failing to fit in with) the rules of the neoliberal game which continue to privilege white, middle class, able-bodied, internationally mobile male academics, and to embody individualist, competitive and performative values. Empirical evidence from the project disclosed that women academics’ experiences of promotion are often bruising, and that institutionally gendered micro-practices continue to ensure that ‘merit sticks to men’ (Woodhams et al., 2022). It confirms how it causes affective damage – shame, despair, burnout, for example (Morley, 2003: Taylor, 2020). Findings from the project aim to achieve the following: • Provide new recommendations as to how women can be better supported in promotion through institutional practices at departmental, faculty and university level; • Develop and embed the distributed change agents’ network for women academics; • Use project insights to drive institutional change in structures, norms and behaviours and contest gendered microplitical practices • Equip a cohort of senior and mid-career women academics with research leadership skills to apply for successful promotion. The main outcome is that the WomenCAN project will to model, scaffold and enable diffusion of more diverse, inclusive, creative, effective research leadership across the institution.

AdvanceHE (2021). Equality+ higher education Staff statistical report 2021 [Online]. AdvanceHE. Available from: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/advance-he/AdvHE_Equality%20in%20higher%20education_Saff_stats_2021_1635342217.pdf [Accessed: 26.01.24]. Bailey, P. (2022). The promotion process needs bigger, better data if we’re to make it fairer. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/promotion-process-needs-bigger-better-data-if-were-make-it-fairer HESA (2023). Who’s working in HE: Personal characteristics. https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he/characteristics Jarvinen, M., Mik-Meyer, N., (2024). Giving and receiving gendered service work in academia. Current Sociology. 00(0), pp. 1 – 19. Morley, L. (2003). Quality and Power in Higher Education. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Morley, L. (2016). Troubling intra-actions: Gender, neo-liberalism and research in the global academy, Journal of Education Policy, 31(1): 28–45. O’Connor, P. (2020). Why is it so difficult to reduce gender inequality in male-dominated higher educational organizations? A feminist institutional perspective, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 45:2: 207–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1737903 Sharafizad, F., Brown, K., Jogulu, U., & Omari, M. (2022). Avoiding the burst pipeline post-COVID-19: Drivers of female academic careers in Australia, Personnel Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-12-2021-0909 Taylor, C.A. (2020). Slow singularities for collective mattering: new material feminist praxis in the accelerated academy, Irish Educational Studies, 39(2): 255–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/03323315.2020.1734045 Thornton, M. (2013). The mirage of merit: Reconstituting the ‘ideal academic’, Australian Feminist Studies, 28 (76): 127–143. Weale, S., & Barr, C. (2018). Female scientists urge research grants reform to tackle gender bias. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/aug/10/female-scientists-urge-researchgrants-reform-tackle-gender-bias Woodhams, C., Trojanowski, G. & Wilkinson, K. (2022). Merit sticks to men: Gender pay gaps and (in)equality at UK Russell Group universities, Sex Roles, 86: 544–558. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-022-01277-2 Yamamoto, B. (2019). Actively constructing yourself as a professor after promotion. In R. Murray & D. Mifsud (Eds.) The Positioning and Making of Female Professors. London: Palgrave MacMillan.