Troubling gender norms and the ideal worker in academic life

Abstract

We are suggesting that the power structure and hierarchy that are foundational to the notion of the ideal worker is more complicated for faculty who also have the ability to access forms of power. Faculty, at least full-time, tenure-line faculty, are not simply under immediate threat of dismissal and other forms of hierarchical power found in other more corporate-like organizations. And, faculty do often create the very processes of evaluation in tenure and promotion which gives them the agency to “run things themselves.” The lack of an immediate threat to job security and the agency to create the systems of evaluation initially appear to stand in contrast to the ideal worker where strict structural hierarchy and false notions of choice frame a discriminatory environment for women. In fact, evidence of some of these efforts is found in research on faculty.