Prestige. Gender Balance in Research Leadership

Prestige Project collaborates with the UiT’s administration for developing such mechanisms by uncovering how gendered quality assessments and implicit biases affect career opportunities and the distribution of power and resources for men and women at UiT. For accomplishing this goal, Prestige Project advances in four research fronts: Conceptual Analyses, Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, and Normative Analyses.

Our hypothesis is that the gender gaps can be explained by a gap of “prestige”.  “Prestige” is understood as an impression of respect and admiration based on a reputation for high quality, competence, success, and social influence. So understood, it seems that “prestige” has been more strongly associated with men and that biases have hindered women’s opportunities even in an institution with a strong tradition of promoting gender balance such as the UiT.

With this in mind, Prestige Project aims at mapping and deconstructing the gendered impressions of "prestige" within and across the institution’s structures and further provide research-based normative guidance for UiT on how to achieve a more gender equal organization beyond numerical parity.

Prestige Project is hosted at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the UiT in close collaboration with UiT’s Equality and Diversity Committee. It is jointly financed by the Research Council of Norway and UiT and runs from 2018-2021. The project is led by Kenneth Ruud, the Deputy Chancellor for research and development and leader of the  Equality and Diversity Committee at UiT. From 2018-2019, the project had been coordinated by Sigfrid Kjeldaas, Postdoctoral fellow at Genøk, and it is now (2020-2021) coordinated by Melina Duarte, Associate Professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Researcher at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research.

In 2020, Prestige Project has mapped and analysed the internal gender balance in professors positions and in research group leadership roles at the institution and introduced a new monitoring tool called “UiT Gender Balancinator for Organizations”.  In addition, Prestige Project has conducted some engaging conversations with selected Head of Departments/Centres at UiT about leadership and gender management challenges. Edited versions of these conversations are being released in the form of podcasts.

In 2021, the Prestige project has tried to approach this puzzle from different perspectives in order to figure out where exactly the problem lies, and which measures should be implemented in order to solve it. Our main findings in 2021 are related to gender and research leadership roles and gendered work environments. Within the former category, we have found out that gender correlates with variations in leadership roles and structure of the research groups at UiT. More precisely, while both men and women in leader functions at UiT tend to perform equality management tasks, men tend to perform more of the tasks commonly ascribed in the literature as leadership tasks (e.g. sets the research agenda for the group). Within the latter category, through a large-scale climate survey conducted among all employees at UiT on their perceptions and experiences of discrimination at the workplace, we have found out that both women and men feel more comfortable working with people of same gender. In addition, women have reported experiencing more negative stereotypes and discrimination at the workplace than men and the effect increases in units with a low proportion of women among the staff.