Gender and precarious careers in academia and research Macro, meso and micro perspectives

This chapter aims to analyse how the principal transformations of the higher education sector, including globalisation, marketisation and neoliberalism, affect the relationships between gender inequalities and precariousness among early-career researchers. In an attempt to discuss different perspectives on academic careers, the dynamics distinguishing three different levels of analysis will be examined, focusing on institutional, organisational and subjective levels. Particular attention will be paid to the general process of precarisation within higher education, and its connections with gender differences in academia. The competition between and within higher education institutions has grown, and the working environment has become all the more frantic and frenetic, while working lives and private lives often overlap. This chapter will analyse how these factors intensify the precarisation process of the working and life trajectories of early career researchers, reinforcing practices and mechanisms that (re)produce gender inequalities, both in the labour market and in academia. The conclusion will stress the need to develop alternative policies and practices at a macro, meso and micro level, in order to resist and challenge the rules of neoliberal academia and to counter the reproduction of gender inequalities.