PALGRAVE STUDIES IN GENDER AND EDUCATION The Positioning and Making of Female Professors Pushing Career Advancement Open Edited by Rowena Murray · Denise Mifsud Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education Series Editor Yvette Taylor School of Education University of Strathclyde Glasgow, UK This Series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly diverse and complex area of interdisciplinary social science research: gender and education. Because the field of women and gender studies is developing rapidly and becoming ‘internationalised’ – as are traditional social science disciplines such as sociology, educational studies, social geography, and so on – there is a greater need for this dynamic, global Series that plots emerging definitions and debates and monitors criti- cal complexities of gender and education. This Series has an explicitly feminist approach and orientation and attends to key theoretical and methodological debates, ensuring a continued conversation and rele- vance within the well-established, inter-disciplinary field of gender and education. The Series combines renewed and revitalised feminist research meth- ods and theories with emergent and salient public policy issues. These include pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education; ‘early years’ and ‘lifelong’ education; educational (dis)engagements of pupils, stu- dents and staff; trajectories and intersectional inequalities including race, class, sexuality, age and disability; policy and practice across educational landscapes; diversity and difference, including institutional (schools, colleges, universities), locational and embodied (in ‘teacher’–‘learner’ positions); varied global activism in and beyond the classroom and the ‘public university’; educational technologies and transitions and the (ir) relevance of (in)formal educational settings; and emergent educational mainstreams and margins. In using a critical approach to gender and education, the Series recognises the importance of probing beyond the boundaries of specific territorial-legislative domains in order to develop a more international, intersectional focus. In addressing varied concep- tual and methodological questions, the Series combines an intersectional focus on competing – and sometimes colliding – strands of educational provisioning and equality and ‘diversity’, and provides insightful reflec- tions on the continuing critical shift of gender and feminism within (and beyond) the academy. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14626 Rowena Murray · Denise Mifsud Editors The Positioning and Making of Female Professors Pushing Career Advancement Open Editors Rowena Murray Denise Mifsud School of Education Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational University of the West of Scotland Research Ayr, UK University of Malta Msida, Malta ISSN 2524-6445 ISSN 2524-6453 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education ISBN 978-3-030-26186-3 ISBN 978-3-030-26187-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26187-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover image: © Richard Sharrocks/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents 1 Introduction: The Positioning and Making of Female Academics—A Review of the Literature 1 Denise Mifsud 2 Being Tough, Being Humorous and Being Explicitly Feminist—The “Intrinsically Disordered Nature” of My Ways Around Academia 27 Isabel Menezes 3 ‘You Must Wait to Be Asked’: Career Advancement and the Maternal Body 49 Caroline Gatrell 4 Babies Taught Me How to “Do” Academia: Crafting a Career in an Institution That Was Not Built for Mothers 75 Catherine M. Mazak 5 Writing Myself into an Academic Career 89 Rowena Murray v vi Contents 6 Academic Fluidity? An Unconventional Route to the Professoriate 113 Jackie Potter 7 My Personal Journey on the Pathway of Resilience 133 Sarah Skerratt 8 Actively Constructing Yourself as a Professor: After Appointment 155 Beverley Anne Yamamoto 9 Mis-Making an Academic Career: Power, Discipline, Structures, and Practices 177 Devorah Kalekin-Fishman 10 A Personal Journey of a Long and Winding Road to Professorial Status: An Alternative Pathway and the Challenges, Trials and Tribulations 201 Moira Lafferty 11 How to Fall into a Career Trap (Without Even Realising) 217 Inger Mewburn 12 Conclusion: The Process of Becoming a Woman Professor and Unbecoming Gender Equality: A Female Drama of Resistance 221 Denise Mifsud Index 235 Notes on Contributors Caroline Gatrell is Professor of Organization Studies, University of Liverpool Management School, where she holds the position of Associate Dean, Research. Caroline’s research centres on work, family and health. From a sociocultural perspective, she examines how work- ing parents (both fathers and mothers) manage boundaries between paid work and their everyday lives. In so doing, she explores intercon- nections between gender, bodies and employment, including the devel- opment of the concepts ‘Pregnant Presenteeism’ and ‘Maternal Body Work’. Caroline is Co-Editor in Chief, International Journal of Management Reviews and Past Chair of the Northern Advanced Research Training Initiative (NARTI). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. Devorah Kalekin-Fishman is a Senior Researcher in the Faculty of Education, the University of Haifa. She has published widely on alien- ation, the sociology of everyday life, the sociology of knowledge, sociol- ogy of the senses, and problems in education. Authored and edited books include: Ideology, Policy and Practice (Kalekin-Fishman, Kluwer, 2003), vii viii Notes on Contributors Radicals in Spite of Themselves (Kalekin-Fishman and Schneider, Sense, 2007), From the Margins to New Ground (Hagoel and Kalekin-Fishman, Sense, 2016), Practicing Social Science (Kalekin-Fishman, Routledge, 2017), Alienation and the Millennium (Langman, L. and Kalekin- Fishman, D., eds., Krieger, 1996), Multiple Citizenship in Europe (Kalekin- Fishman, D. and Pitkanen, P., eds., Peter Lang, 2007), The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology (Denis, A. and Kalekin-Fishman, D., eds., Sage, 2009), Everyday Life in Asia (Kalekin-Fishman, D. and Low, K. eds., Routledge, 2010), The Shape of Sociology for the 21st Century (Kalekin- Fishman, D. and Denis, A. eds., Sage, 2012), Approaches to Educational and Social Inclusion: An International Perspective (Verma, G. K. and Kalekin-Fishman, D., eds., Routledge, 2016). Currently, she is involved in a study of the implementation of her model for ‘Acquiring Literacy in Participatory Citizenship’ (Kalekin-Fishman, D., Hagoel, L., et al., in progress). She serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, is associate editor of Sociopedia, and was Vice-President for Publications in the International Sociological Association (2006–2010). Moira Lafferty is Professor of Applied Sport Psychology and Deputy Head in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chester. She is a Health and Care Professions Council registered sport and exer- cise psychologist and Chief Supervisor for the Qualification in Sport and Exercise Psychology for the British Psychological Society. With a career in higher education spanning 25 years, she has held numerous roles and positions at department and faculty level. With a diverse portfolio of activity, she has expertise in applied prac- tice, teaching and learning and academic management. Moira has been in receipt of external grants to explore teaching and learning in higher education and has written journal and book chapters exploring this. As an applied sport psychologist, Moira has worked with numerous teams and individuals at national and international level and has a wealth of experience helping athletes maximise their potential. Currently, she is part of a UK-wide research group exploring the supervision of neophyte practitioners and has a strong interest in supervision within both research and practice. Her research exemplifies her desire to help Notes on Contributors ix and support others and she is the principal investigator and leads on the CHANGES programme, working in partnership with British Universities and Colleges Sport. Catherine M. Mazak is a tenured Full Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, where she specialises in translanguaging and bilingual education. She blogs about academic writing at https://www. cathymazak.com. Isabel Menezes has a degree and a Ph.D. in Psychology and a habili- tation in Educational Sciences from the University of Porto, where she is a Full Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences. She is a member of CIIE, a research centre in educational research and inter- vention, and teaches in the fields of educational research, educational and community intervention, political education and political psychol- ogy. Her research deals with the civic and political participation of chil- dren, young people and adults, with a special interest in groups at risk of exclusion on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disa- bility and migrant status, and the ways formal and non-formal educa- tion (including artistic) experiences can generate more complex ways of relationship with the political. She coordinated several funded research projects comprising the Portuguese participation in international pro- jects such as IEA Civic Education Study, FP7 PIDOP and H2020 Catch-EyoU. More recent interests relate to doctoral education and university social responsibility as a way to explore how universities can creatively and proactively respond to societal challenges. Some recent projects include Erasmus+ EU-USR, HE4U2, ESSA, ENGAGE and SOLVINC. She is since 2017 the president of the SPCE (Portuguese Educational Research Association). Inger Mewburn has been working with Ph.D. students and early career researchers to develop their professional skills since 2006. Aside from editing and contributing to the Thesis Whisperer blog, she writes scholarly papers, books and book chapters about research student expe- riences, with a special interest in employability and social media use. Dr. Denise Mifsud is the Gozo College Principal, besides being an independent education researcher and consultant, and a Fellow