Neoliberal academia is marked by vertical and horizontal gender segregation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a particularly concerning case. Women with PhDs are underrepresented, and when they do participate, they are more likely than men to be in teaching-intensive roles. Beyond equality concerns, this is problematic because when women are interpreters rather than producers of disciplinary knowledge, the STEM enterprise remains gender-biased. Using data from a 2-year ethnography with physical science faculty in teaching-intensive roles, this paper argues that gender inequity is reproduced through postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. Participants who are mothers say they are flying under the radar at work. They self-surveille as they engage in both paid labor as university educators and unpaid carework at home. Importantly, when participants challenge hegemonic gender norms, they attract the radar's attention and are sanctioned. This study contributes to a growing understanding of how and why women are marginalized in STEM careers. Women with science PhDs fulfill their university's teaching mission with minimal support for the implied compensation of work-life balance, leaving the institutional structures which privilege men's participation in STEM research intact.

Seeking to make upper secondary school physics more relevant and engaging, an online collaborative learning curriculum was designed. Each of the curriculum's lessons was structured as a goal-based scenario about human scientists on Mars. Video and audio data from the curriculum's implementation in Denmark was collected. This study utilized the theoretical lenses intersectionality, repertoires of practice, and epistemic agency. The use of comics as an analytical tool provided a novel and accessible way to depict the complex dynamics within the physics classroom. It allowed for a multimodal representation of the data and enabled a nuanced examination of the students' interactions. Findings suggest that interactions were shaped by the students' identities and these dynamics shaped their repertoires of practice. Moreover, the interactions had a profound impact on students' epistemic agency in physics. Collaborative learning with a goal-based scenario can include and empower diverse gender, racial, and language identities. It can also, however, work to disempower and exclude when the hegemonically white and masculine culture of physics is left unproblematized. This leads to the conclusion that if reform-based science education is untethered from a critical stance on socioscientific issues, students and teachers may reproduce social problems as much as they also may challenge them.

This article reports on how gender shapes the work of university science faculty. Theories of gender as a social system are used to disentangle how individuals, social interactions, and institutions (re)produce inequality by sustaining occupational gender segregation in higher education science. The study uses qualitative data from an ethnography of six teaching faculty at a large research-intensive public university in the United States. These teaching faculty, largely women in a department in which the majority are men, are ineligible for tenure and institutionally positioned as having lower status. The disadvantages are experienced in different ways across all the women on the teaching faculty. In contrast, men on the teaching faculty are recognizable as scientists and are by default treated with respect. As such, they are elevated regardless of their skill as teachers. This study offers a theoretical contribution to the current understanding of gendered occupations by suggesting that the experiences of the science teaching faculty can be conceptualized as chutes and ladders. Ladders are mechanisms reserved for the elevation of men. Chutes are reserved for women because regardless of how women approach their work, the gender system is constructed to hold them back.

This study utilizes interviews with 33 racially diverse high school girls who have expressed interest in engineering careers. Using the framework of critical consciousness and informed by intersectional theories, the authors examine their views about gender inequality in engineering. Results revealed that while most articulated systemic understandings of inequality, Black participants were particularly likely to exhibit this critical reflection. Yet many young women revealed a more emerging form of critical reflection, particularly Asian participants. Few respondents expressed critical self-efficacy, or confidence to challenge gender inequality in their future careers; such views were almost exclusively held by Black and Latinx respondents. In contrast, White respondents commonly invoked a "lean-in" self-efficacy to be successful navigating, but not challenging, the White male-dominated engineering workforce. Overall, we find clear evidence that young women's racialized identities have implications not only for their understandings of gender inequality, but also for their motivation to disrupt it.

This inquiry into the nature of feminist solidarity in the academic sciences is guided by the intra-activity of gendered bodies in teaching-intensive faculty positions. It uses diffractive methodology to examine how response-able research practice can account for enactment of social discourse through agential cuts. Over the course of a two-year ethnography in a university with high research activity, gender performativity in the contested space of feminized teaching and masculine science was analysed. This article aims to make visible how researcher subjectivities entangle with data collection. Results show how specific agential cuts – alpha female, silencing, less-than-person, squashing passion, and staying to get tenure – illuminate a unique diffractive pattern. The pattern troubles structural notions of feminist solidarity, as ethnographic participants marginalized by institutional hierarchies survive by queering it. Furthermore, the inquiry gestures towards a humble, local, and tentative contribution to post-human theorizing on ‘queering the glass ceiling’.

The aim of this study is to examine the enduring impact of digital competence on university educators’ practices. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated higher education’s shift to digitization as universities adopted emergency remote teaching. While educators digitized their teaching in only few days, there is asignificant difference between the quality of instruction of a well-designed online course and courses offered online in response to the health crisis. In theaftermath of this crisis, is important to characterize educators’ digital competences for several reasons. These include to empower their use of learning technology, to support their teaching in innovative ways, and to ensure accessibility to learning resources and activities to all learners, including those withspecial needs. To do this, we turn to the research-based European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu). DigCompEdu’s purposeis to develop teacher digital competences and take advantage of learning technology to improve and innovate education. DigCompEdu provides the frameworkfor qualitative analysis of data collected from lesson observations and interviews with university educators (n= ~30). The study participants, faculty at one university in Scandinavia, represent a diverse range of disciplines, genders, and other social categories. The significance of this research is both theoretical andapplied. It increases knowledge of how educators develop their digital competences and take advantage of learning technologies to innovate. In addition, itsupports inclusive education, as students’ need to become digitally competent depends on educators’ development of their own digital competence

Young women remain underrepresented among engineering bachelor's degree holders. While there is a relatively large body of extant research on the many factors that curtail young women's interest in pursuing engineering, less is known about high school girls who are on an engineering pathway. Therefore, this study focuses on a select group of precollege young women who express a strong interest in engineering. Specifically, informed by theories of gender as a social system and previous empirical research, this mixed-methods study explores the constellation of significant actors within the daily lives of these young women, to understand from whom and how they are supported in pursuing this gender-atypical field, and simultaneously, from whom and how they are discouraged. To do so, the researchers analyzed survey and interview data from a sample of diverse high school girls who participate in the Society of Women Engineers' (SWE) SWENext programme. Quantitative results indicate that young women report high levels of encouragement from most sources, including parents, teachers, and other young women. However, across various peer contexts, they receive much more support from other young women than from young men. Qualitative results further reveal that parents and teachers stand out in young women's recollections of encouragement, often through advocating their participation in engineering activities or providing mentoring support. In contrast, young men in engineering spaces were recalled as particularly discouraging of their engineering participation, by socially or physically excluding them or refusing to provide recognition. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

After decades of virtual exclusion from participation in STEM, women have majored in, earned graduate degrees in, and forged careers in male-dominated fields such as the physical sciences in increasing numbers. At each step of the way, however, women’s participation diminishes, and this is especially apparent in the workforce. Moreover, these women are likely to be doing different work than men; that is, STEM workplaces are vertically segregated by gender, and women’s work, while important, is often lower-paid and lower-prestige than men’s work. The purpose of this research was to characterize one example of vertical segregation, teaching-intensive faculty positions in a university physical science department, and to explore how and why gender matters for the women, and men, who are on the teaching faculty. Using ethnographic methodology to trace, through their social interactions, how individuals’ experiences are shaped by institutional viii norms and ideologies, the analysis was shaped by theories of gender as a social system that works to perpetuate inequality. The teaching track is an alternative job track that allows participants to have work-life balance, which is commonly explained to be more suitable than the research track for women in science who want to have children. Concerningly, there are significant negative consequences for pursuing this track, at least for the women. Fundamental aspects of fulfilling and equitable work, such as fair pay, respect, and advancement pathways, are elusive. When women do resist or challenge their marginalization, they are met with unfair treatment and even harassment. The experience of men on teaching faculty is a sharp contrast; as men, they belong in science and this brings a default of respect as well as elevation to higher pay. Thus, the teaching faculty has an internal gender hierarchy. As such, this inquiry offers the conclusion that college science teaching is women’s work not because it offers a safe and fair space to have a career and a family, but because the neoliberal academy requires low-cost and flexible labor to carry out its teaching mission, and women are easily exploited to provide this labor. 

This study utilizes interviews from 22 young female engineers from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds as they first entered the White and male-dominated engineering labor force with the goal of examining: (1) how these women endorsed a gender- blind frame that characterizes their workplaces as fundamentally meritocratic, and alternatively, (2) how they named gender as relevant or salient to experiences and interactions at work. Drawing on the insights of intersectional scholars to answer the previous questions, the study calls attention to how the invocation of these frames differed for women of color compared to their majority White female peers. Results revealed that most respondents strongly endorsed the idea that engineering workplaces are meritocratic and that their gender is not relevant. However, there is also evidence of racial divergence in the themes expressed. For example, some White women expressed a narrative contradictory to meritocracy, discussing their workplaces as like family, while in contrast, women of color often expressed uncomfortable experiences of standing out. Overall, the results suggest that female engineers’ tendency to disavow, either explicitly or implicitly, that discrimination and bias occurs in their workplaces, likely contributes to continued gender and racial inequality; subsequently, programs and interventions to facilitate awareness of inequality are critically needed.