Organizational Interventions and the Creation of Gendered Knowledge: U.S. Universities and NSF Advance

• In Event: 3459 - Women’s STEM Underrepresentation: Roles of Employees, Organizations, and Institutions

Abstract

Universities have been the site of both elite knowledge production and reproduction of intersecting gendered inequalities. The NSF ADVANCE program uses universities’ role as self-reflective knowledge producers to design changes promoting gender equality. We argue that the knowledge ADVANCE creates is shaped by the institutional context of its production: NSF as a funder of scientific research; US universities in an exceptionally stratified and competitive market; managerialism as a condition in modern higher education systems; and the separation of basic from applied research in the hierarchy of science. The politics of knowledge reveal tensions and underlying power dimensions between administrative statistics, experiential knowledge, and generalizable principles of organizational change. ADVANCE combines gendered knowledge about inequalities of all three kinds, legitimizes feminist understandings of organizations, and raises the stakes for transcending the division between fundamental and applied knowledge for addressing gendered inequalities in academia.

Authors

• Kathrin Zippel, Northeastern University

• Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin