En riktig professor: Om forskarideal och dess påverkan på några individers relation till forskaryrket

Abstract

Although women have had access to colleges and universities in Sweden for quite some time and the share of women at the undergraduate level has been high for many years (40% by the late 1950:s, nowadays women are a majority at that level), still the share of women professors is low. This paper will study some researchers’ view on how a professor should be, and also how they relate themselves to that ideal. The method used is qualitative interviews, which have then been analysed by discourse analysis. The paper also contains a discussion on the history of the universities from the Middle Ages and forward, to show how the impact of that historical legacy affects universities today.

Eight respondents were interviewed, four women and four men. They all took a similar view as to how a professor should be, but there were some differences in how they related themselves to that picture. A professor, according to their description, is passionate, all but completely focused on the work, likes the work, works overtime and writes papers that are interesting for other researchers. They also describe the way to tenure as lined with insecure terms of employment and a low salary. At large the men seemed more easily self secure in their belief that they had what it takes to become a professor, while the women at the same time as they were sure they had what it takes, still were aware that it is not self evident that a woman, especially not one who chooses to have children, is seen as a potential professor.

The ideal picture of a scientist that the respondents described is also present, but in a different way, in the history of the universities. The universities grew out of the Christian monasteries and stayed a matter of the church for a long time. Around the enlightenment though, it became an organisation for the men of the upper classes. At the universities the “manly” “sense” was cultivated, and made even more evident by its contrast to the “female” “sensibility”. In this way, the universities were adapted to these men’s way of life. It shows even today, partly in the way a scientist is supposed to be able to work passionately for long hours, that is without much responsibility for anything outside the university, and partly because the male body is “natural” within the academy, while the women who wish to gain access to the academia have to exceed their bodies (with the sensibility and inability to sense that is ascribed to it) and prove their right to a place in a way that the men do not.