“I Now Realize the Glass Ceiling!”: Becoming a Change Agent for Gender Equality

• In Event: Disrupting from the Inside: Towards a Research System Change - I

Abstract

Since 2011 the European Commission pursues efforts to make research performing organizations (RPOs) more gender equal by funding the implementation of gender equality plans for consortia (European Commission 2018).
Individuals involved in these projects have very different backgrounds in terms of their institutional positions and hierarchy (e.g. researchers from different status groups, or administrative staff), and also related to their organizational gender equality knowledge (e.g. skilled people with previous practical experience in gender change interventions, or persons, who are committed to the topic from a social justice perspective). But they all become agents of change within their gendered institutional contexts through their project involvement. Change agency as capacity of social actors requires the authority and resources to disrupt and challenge organizational routines and practices that reproduce gender imbalance and inequalities (Linstead et al. 2005). Further awareness of gendering processes in organizations and a sensitivity to gender inequalities can be seen as important prerequisites for individuals that act as change agents (Husu 2013).
This paper draws on the experiences of change agents in two European gender equality change projects. It discusses and analyses the narratives of change agents, whose agency was in the majority of cases formalized for a certain time (= funding period) and largely depending on the respective organizational governance. This paper illustrates the multifaceted character of gender equality change agency. Among other points it will identify, how the involvement of the change agents adjusted their inner-institutional social roles, and which factors supported or hindered their freedom of actions.

Author

• Jennifer Dahmen-Adkins, RWTH Aachen University