4.1 Barriers to women’s careers: is it really a matter of choice?

A first barrier to women’s advancement in academic careers is related to a process which has been labeled the “motherhood penalty” (see Baker, 2012; Lutter & Schröder, 2019), and subsequently investigated as hypervisibility of motherhood discrimination (Zippel, 2017; Gaiaschi, 2021). Pregnancy and child-rearing continue to be, according to the interviewees, the main obstacles to female academic careers, because they force academic women to interrupt their work and to reduce their productivity. Francesca, 50 years old with two children aged 17 and 16, talked about motherhood as a career blocker because she considered visibility in the department and making herself available to be very important:

Definitely, the fact that I chose to have children interrupted the progression, in the sense that obviously if you choose to have children and care for them, at least for the first few months of their lives, those are periods when you can’t assume high-profile responsibilities. So that clearly interrupts, let’s say, the chain, I don’t know how to put it, the progression (Francesca, 50, STEM, AP).

This phenomenon is so widespread that some scholars have also spoken of the “specter of motherhood” to indicate the anticipatory expectation that even non-parents have in terms of the negative impact of parenthood on women’s careers (Thébaud & Taylor, 2021). The hyper-visibilization of motherhood is accompanied by its “naturalization”, which renders invisible the institutional and cultural processes, and even the individual (and/or co-parenting) choices, that reproduce these gender asymmetries in the transition to parenthood. In the words of Karen, it is as if they are unchangeable givens:

The gender issue is not man-woman, in my opinion, because I’ve known single women who don’t have any kind of family commitment, or who have a partner but don’t have children, also very determined, who’ve spent two years writing like crazy and they’ve built amazing careers. It’s the children that change things for you, in my opinion. Because if you have a child you can’t spend the day writing. So, it’s not so much the gender, it is the family (Karen, 46, SSH, AP).

The idea prevalent among the advanced career women interviewed — as well as among women at other career levels (see Naldini et al., 2023) — was that there are self-selection mechanisms in action. Hence the main reasons for gender disparity were ascribed to women’s choices regarding a family, as exemplified by the words of this female full professor in the governance of a STEM department:

I wouldn’t ascribe them [the gender imbalances in the university at various career levels] to the department, you know. I look at two women who could have carried on over the years, because they had the capacity: one chose to leave and have three children. She followed her husband to Austria, and she is happily taking care of her three children. The other — who in my opinion is the best person I have worked with so far, considering both men and women — -rather than an academic career, said “I don’t want to lead the life you’ve had, I’m going to work in industry” (Commissaria 4, STEM, FP).

A difference between STEM and SSH disciplines also emerges from this last quote, not so much in terms of the motherhood penalty, but in terms of the options available in private non-academic work organizations for researchers in STEM (and rarely found in our interviews in SSH departments) if it is felt that a university career does not meet the expectations of a life able to hold work and private/family life together.

Indeed, the hyper-visibilization of motherhood and its naturalization tend to make invisible the presence of other processes of production and reproduction of gender asymmetries in universities that do not have only to do with motherhood but also with the division of work among academics and some processes usually ascribed to “self-selective mechanisms”, while they are both extremely gendered. Among academic activities, research work is usually the most rewarding in terms of promotion, and since excellence and merit are mainly measured in terms of publications (and citations in the case of STEM disciplines) (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012) and women are generally more involved in teaching, female career advancement is usually slower, and women are less likely to be considered outstanding in research. Moreover, women tend to be more involved in “service classes” (i.e., classes for other departments). Such courses not only determine a teaching overload, because they are often part of the most crowded degree program curricula. They also make it impossible to establish a “long-term” relationship with students or to recruit graduate and PhD students that could form a research group and therefore engage in large-scale experiments or research.

The “service courses” engage you more than, in our case, the course that you have on your degree program in [name of the discipline] because you deal with fewer students. It would be better to rotate, I mean, taking turns, with each of us doing these kinds of classes, so that everyone has a heavier teaching load sometimes. […] It takes up a lot of time and you don’t get anything out of it because in the service class your relationship with the students ends when you finish the class, complete the exams (Lia, 53, STEM, AP).

Last year, I did 168 hours of teaching. It’s especially challenging in terms of students, number of students, because I have very large courses […]. I am very dedicated to teaching […] because it’s something that I think is very important, so from that point of view maybe my research suffers a little bit (Elisa, 42, STEM, AP).

In regard to the unequal distribution of workloads between female and male colleagues, another obstacle to women’s career advancement has to do with so-called “academic housework” (Heijstra et al., 2017). Especially in Italian academia, characterized by a huge amount of administrative work and a lack of support, women are overburdened by bureaucracy more often than their male colleagues. Moreover, it still happens that some senior male full professors are convinced that these tasks should and can be delegated to junior female associate or assistant professors.

At the beginning, the university was for many years in the hands of the male gender. The professors were all men and the full professor who is currently in our department belongs to that generation. […] The man is helped with his career, the woman is kept in a junior role because that way the professor can make her do things, teach classes for him. He can ask her to do work that ought to be done by a secretary. And since secretaries don’t exist in the university, at least in Italy […], especially with some professors of a certain age, who are now the most powerful ones and who pull the strings, these dynamics are still visible (Stella, 48, SSH, AP).

The under-representation of women in the higher positions in the academic hierarchy, and especially in leadership positions, is often also attributed to “individual self-selection” mechanisms and to women’s lower self-confidence. Added to these, in the case of STEM disciplines, is the fact that there are few female students and female scholars in these areas. This is confirmed by the words of Pia, who underlined that women tend to apply less for prestigious and managerial positions and to show lower self-esteem than many male colleagues. However, it also emerges from her words that there are some structural barriers that induce this (apparent) self-selective mechanism linked to the gender composition of some environments, especially when they are completely male dominated. In this sense, self-selective mechanisms can be interpreted as combining women’s socially constructed image of being less suitable for management positions with a culturally induced low self-esteem in male-dominated work contexts.

I’m going to become the national coordinator of the experiment […] [and out of] twenty or twenty-one national coordinators — I could be wrong by a few units — so far there have been only three women […]. There is a training phase […] and I was invited to speak to this committee a few months ago, […]. Out of ten people who spoke in two days I was the only woman […]. Certainly, there are some inescapable aspects, especially the part of the children, which is still disproportionate managed [by women] and also care of the elderly […]. However, in my opinion, there is also a need for greater self-esteem in later stages. To compete for the post of national coordinator, I spent more than one night thinking a lot about it, about everything, about all the possible aspects imaginable, about whether my skills were enough, etc. etc. etc. I am quite sure that my male colleagues, the ones I know well, I am not saying that they would not have thought about it, but they certainly spent less time doing so. In some ways, I think we are still barriers to ourselves (Pia, 48, STEM, AP).

The gendered aspect of workplaces and the greater difficulty for women to gain recognition as excellent also tend to reproduce the gender system, namely the survival of masculinized “old boys networks”, hindering change in academia. Indeed, a structure where the old “co-optation” is fueled by the “new”, allegedly gender-neutral, meritocratic ideology driven by discretionary ad usum practices and still characterized by an over-representation of men in strategic positions, most often disfavors the female component of the academic body in selection/promotion procedures. The numerical imbalance between men and women within the pool from which to draw, especially in the STEMs, and the localism of recruitment and career advancements (i.e. the common practice of hiring/promoting candidates from within the department) are, in fact, the perfect pretext for the gendered structure to reproduce itself (Anzivino et al., 2023). This practice, moreover, is assisted by the Italian funding system, which does not encourage but instead often hinders the promotion of external candidates, favoring a gendered homophily.

The democratic principle is the basis of how the Italian university is organized, this is true. So there are, let’s say, all the problems related to so-called consensus building and the selection of the so-called governance of the departments and the university that is tied to this principle, which does not guarantee — at least the way it has been developed — any protection for minorities. This is my biggest concern. So, leadership basically emerges from consensus and this then has a whole series of consequences on the selection of researchers, professors, on career progressions, in managing or political academic roles (Rita, 42, SSH, AP).

This reproduction of the gendered character of leadership and managing positions also passes through the (gendered) expectations connected to these roles. First, there is an implicit assumption that leaders are men, but also that men are leaders. Indeed, on the one hand, since female leaders are so rare, it is hard to imagine this position being held by a woman, a fact that encourages the self-selective mechanisms mentioned above, but also the discouraging mechanism that hinders women from standing as candidates. On the other hand, it is assumed that men are more suited for leadership and, even if more women entered into these roles, they would be expected to enact a model implicitly gendered as male.

There is still a bit of a silencing problem. What do I mean by silencing? I mean that there is still the expectation that certain roles pertain to men and therefore that certain characteristics that we see in the leadership figure are expected to be possessed by a man. However, in my opinion, it seems to me that there is a gradual process, whereby those same leadership characteristics that the person who holds a leadership role must have, are today also being required of women (Francesca, 48, SSH, AP).

The alleged less suitability of women is linked to gender stereotypes that also produce discrimination against the few women that have managed to reach top positions. For example, Iole stated that women are more often segregated in roles, such as the coordinator of degree courses, which are not political positions but, instead, more administrative roles connected to teaching, which reinforces the segregation in academic work mentioned above.

[Leaders] are all men, basically, indeed uniquely men. The only role held by a woman was the coordinator of degree courses. This is a role considered suitable for a woman because she has to manage teaching duties. It is a more feminine role. She does not take political decisions because she does not manage funding, resources, positions. She just has to work a lot to manage teaching classes (Iole, 59, STEM, AP).

Moreover, leadership roles require a total commitment which is considered incompatible with women’s role as caregivers. The motherhood penalty is thus crystallized as an obstacle to reaching a top position and to holding it in a proper way. In addition, since work-life balance is not contemplated for leaders, women who are also mothers or caregivers of the elderly are supposed to find individual solutions, sacrificing other work activities or their private life.

As Lena points out in the extract below, women are also more often discredited through microaggressions that take the form of their reduction to sexual objects; of gossip about their alleged sexual/romantic relationships with powerful men that have enabled them to reach the position; of accusations that they lack independence, on the assumption that they are manipulated or hetero directed, again, by men.

We had a female Head of department, and the usual cliché came out, with some people saying “well, she is also a beautiful woman, young as well” and other platitudes about the woman having reached the position not thanks to her capacities but thanks to other “concessions” (Lena, 51, SSH, AP).

This quotation is important also because it sheds light on gender-based violence and especially on sexual harassment against women in universities. In particular, our data made clear how microaggressions of this kind — mostly verbal but not only — are normalized and tolerated in Italian academia, to the point that they emerged only when a direct question was put to our interviewees. Therefore, harassment is, at the same time, a consequence of a hierarchical masculine organization and gendered apical roles (Bondestam & Lundqvist, 2020), and a factor contributing to vertical segregation.

Finally, our data also evidence the existence of the so-called “glass cliff” (Ryan & Haslam, 2007). This metaphor refers to the fact that women’s positions of leadership are more often associated with a greater risk of failure because as soon as a controversial issue arises, it is delegated to them. Therefore, not only are women overburdened with situations difficult to manage but they also risk making mistakes more than their male counterparts, or they create tensions that end up by reinforcing the stereotype of the lesser suitability of women for leadership roles.

Speaking about a procedure of a colleague who had to be evaluated, at the end of his contract as a tenured researcher, to become an associate professor, where the candidate did not receive much support from some colleagues who thought he was not good enough, I was told: “since this is a shitty situation, you will deal with it!”. So, since I did not want to be responsible, I invited as members of the commission two male full professors from other universities very respected at a national level […]. Well, when there is a complex situation, there’s a certain predilection to let me handle it (Commissaria 1, SSH, FP).

This quotation is interesting because it illustrates the strategies that women enact to protect themselves (in this case by involving well-known male colleagues in handling a difficult situation), to try to advance in their career, and sometimes to cope with their “failure” to overcome these obstacles.

4.2 Strategies

In the previous subsection we saw that one of the main barriers — or at least one of those most recognized — to women’s career advancement is motherhood and holding together academic work and other spheres of life. Since the specter of motherhood (Thébaud & Taylor, 2021) is so present among female scholars, they adopt several different strategies in their life courses to try to overcome it. Even if in some cases they expressly choose to remain childless in order to avoid putting their career at risk (De Paola et al., 2022; Tattarini et al., 2022), the most common (time) strategy is the postponement of motherhood until a permanent position is reached, although this sometimes results in involuntary childlessness (Hughes, 2021; De Paola et al., 2022).

I have a child, I had him very late in life because I previously devoted my life to research. So I had a child when I was 43 (Carla, 55, STEM, AP).

It is biology… I must be honest, from this point of view if tomorrow I miraculously got pregnant, [pregnancy] would certainly become the priority. So I did not make any sacrifices because of work. I was not lucky, let’s put it this way (Pia, 48, STEM, AP).

For the same reasons, many mothers in academia tend to adopt other time strategies, reducing maternity leave to the minimum and not taking additional parental leave even if they are breastfeeding.

To become a mother, I waited until I got a permanent post […]. So I waited. My first daughter was born in ’92, I had good pregnancies, so I used to go to the laboratory to write papers. I never stopped. In 1995 I had my second pregnancy, and I took only the mandatory maternity leave, three months after giving birth […], I breastfed for ten months the first time and six months the second (Sandy, 62, STEM, AP).

Though respondents recognized that the motherhood penalty slowed career advancement, it was rarely questioned or considered illegitimate. In the organizational cultures predominant in academia, these inequalities seem to be accepted as facts of life, as structural constraints that do not depend on the universities and can be overcome only through personal effort and sacrifice.

However, the fact that the interviewees with children said that they never interrupted academic work during pregnancy and the postnatal period, is linked to the unconditional worker model that dominates in academia and that, for some women, is reinforced by the so-called “double standard” in evaluation of women’s research. This is, of course, a paradoxical strategy, because, as we saw above, the ideal worker model is precisely one of the obstacles to women’s careers — but sometimes complying with this model is the only way to get promoted.

I put a lot of effort into getting the confirmation, because I was writing my second book and […] in 2012 the first national ASN came out and, also on the recommendation of my mentor, I chose to make an effort, which cost me a lot in terms of health. But I finished that book with which I presented myself and thanks to which, I think, I managed to obtain the ASN […]. However, until 2016 I devoted my life to my career, period (Aurora, 43, SSH, AP).

I don’t think the academic career was the obstacle, I think I am the obstacle […]: if someone decides to go to the United States and live abroad for a long time, this clearly means a life change. Then if someone works as hard as I have done, it is difficult to interface with people who do not lead the same life as you. But these are choices, so I think one can choose (Bea, 44, STEM, AP).

These findings are consistent with those of previous studies on the operation of a widespread mechanism known as the “passion trap” (Armano & Murgia, 2013; Busso & Rivetti, 2014), which results in dynamics of self-exploitation and “voluntary” submission, on the one hand, and the acceptance of discrimination as part of society, on the other. Female respondents who had children in the early stages of their academic career explained that they had encountered additional career difficulties (i.e., penalties) because of the precarious nature of their job contracts, which were not always renewed or confirmed soon after maternity. As Karen told us, they struggled to continue working at the university, which they saw as their vocation:

When my daughter was born, I had no contract of any kind for two years and, on the one hand, I was expected to keep in contact with the university/ [ironic sigh], on the other, I was living a totally different life and could not count on any [income]. However, even in the most discouraging moments, when I was thinking “This is unbearable”, I never changed my mind because I knew that this [work] was the thing that made me happy (Karen, 46, SSH, AP).

Conversely, there were respondents who had decided to give up on some central experiences for their career advancements or to career advancements tout court, in some cases for the good of their family, in others because of the backlashes they had experienced for having a fast career, and in yet others because of the difficulties experienced in becoming an associate professor. The first case is exemplified by Pia, who says she passed up an opportunity to go to the United States in order to stay with her former partner and missed this experience — considered very important in her research field — for the good of her relationship.

What I did was decide not to go to the United States because… I wanted to keep my former relationship alive. It didn’t work. But to be honest, I did… I mean, it was my choice, it was my choice, but it changed several [things]… it’s like the movie “Sliding Doors”, I mean, if I had gone, maybe other things would have happened, but not necessarily better things (Pia, 48, STEM, AP).

The second case is exemplified by Bea, who became associate professor for her merits before other male colleagues, which caused several problems and protests. Even if, after the promotion, she acquired the qualification to become a full professor, at the moment of the interview, she claimed that she did not want to become a full professor unless her department forced her to do so, because this position involves too many management activities while she is totally devoted to research and lab work.

I qualified for a full professorship right after that [promotion], but I don’t think I will apply, at least in the near future, because I don’t want to become a full professor, it’s a terrible life. So, unless they force me, I won’t do it. On the one hand, a full professorship is important […], you’re able to decide on what research is done, on activities in the department […], but when you are young…it’s a job that involves too much bureaucracy, too much management. I would go back to being an assistant professor, I’d go back and get another PhD if I could (Bea, 44, STEM, AP).

Tania, finally, had relinquished the possibility of career advancement because she was very tired after having a slow career, even if she felt qualified to become a full professor, and also her colleagues recognized in her the ability to occupy this position. Her story is particularly interesting because she had always been involved in academic political matters and had also held some important positions in both the departmental and university governance, so she possessed all the requirements to become a full professor. However, paradoxically, precisely this huge engagement in academic life, combined with a long wait to become an associate professor, discouraged her from applying for a full professorship.

There are people who tell me “You have to become a full professor because in this way you could do other things, you have the ability”, and so on. But I don’t know, I’m a little tired, because the path has been long. […] I’m tired because, come on, I’m 56 now! I’ve done everything always with a delay, always trudging along (Tania, 56, STEM, AP).

Concerning the barrier derived from the gendered division of academic duties, women try to keep up on research, devoting their studies to female-dominated fields in order to create a space for themselves to emerge, or doing research in male-dominated fields but pursuing innovative and less central research topics. For example, in the STEM sectors, a strategy adopted by women was to focus on interdisciplinary or applied research. Initially given little value in terms of career and funding, in more recent times this stream of research has become more rewarding and recognized, and also established, thanks to their work also. As regards PAs in SSHs, similar professional choices can be found in research careers concentrated on geographical areas, languages, cultures or socio-economic topics initially considered less central in the Italian academic debate, and then, also due to geopolitical and global social changes, increasingly important and recognized also in terms of academic careers.

In this way, women have tried to compensate for the disadvantages that come with the huge amount of teaching activities by creating fields of research regulated by different rules that may make them still recognizable as scientists. Moreover, the fact that they have not been completely included in mainstream research groups, has enabled them to identify innovative research themes and approaches. These results are consistent with those of other studies on the creative potential of women in specific disciplinary areas (Villa, 2021). Finally, as regards leadership positions, women — as we saw in the previous paragraph — tend to avoid competing for them, reinforcing the self-selective stereotype. When they reach these positions, instead, they adopt two opposite strategies to “survive”. In some cases, they adopt an intrinsically masculinized managerial style, reproducing the gendered model of the leader that dominates in contemporary academia.

Sometimes they [female leaders] show these attitudes that, again, are very aggressive, very masculine, sometimes even more discriminatory towards women and more sexist than those enacted by the average of men (Lena, 51, SSH, AP).

In other cases, instead, women enact a different model of leadership which some interviewees defined as more cooperative and sometimes even “caring” in terms of workstyle, because they brought their experience as women, usually in charge of family duties, to their work in governance. This, of course, could have a positive impact on women’s involvement in leadership and in changing the gendered character of these roles.

In my opinion, having a certain role in society, a role of care and attention towards the family — still a gendered element that belongs to women, we cannot deny it — […] affects how relationships are managed. It is a more personal way to exercise an institutional role that has always been a prerogative of men, and of men of a certain age who keep their distance from their subordinates. So, yes, this is a positive characteristic of female leadership (Commissaria 1, SSH, FP).

It is important to mention these two different strategies enacted by women leaders because they relate in two very different ways with vertical segregation in apical positions. On the one hand, adopting a “masculine” style of leadership may protect from delegitimation and could be considered a form of “undoing gender”, even if it reinforces the stereotyped gendered leadership models and may discourage more women from trying to reach these positions. On the other hand, adopting a “feminine” style may reinforce the naturalization of motherhood, resulting in an increase of administrative and relational work, which, as we have already pointed out, is problematic. Therefore, while providing an alternative model of leadership may encourage women to apply for leadership roles, it also risks becoming a form of “doing gender” and of reproducing a stereotyped model of femininity, considered unsuitable for leadership roles.