Gender, cognitive closeness and situated assessments in academic recruitment

Abstract

Gendered bias in peer-review and other forms of assessments is a well-studied area. But how do researchers actually execute their positions of power in recruitment processes? In Sweden, recruitment for academic tenure and the reviewers’ reports are public and thus open for scrutiny. This study uses both bibliographic coupling and close reading of three cases of reviewers’ reports to map cognitive closeness, distance and particularities as intrinsic aspects of peer review. All these concepts point towards the fact that reviewers are researchers as well. Their own research interests are both what makes their expert assessment possible as well as an aggravation, which calls for ‘situated knowledges’: a reflection of why and how they make the particular recruitment decisions they do. The cases are read against the backdrop of the emerging neoliberalisation of Swedish academia. At the breaking point between traditional academic ideals and neoliberal accounts of concepts like ‘research quality’, different forms of masculinities are struggling for hegemony, while the system’s lack of transparency creates disadvantage for women academics.