Sandra Groeneveld, Kea Tijdens and Daphne van Kleef
The purpose of this paper is to examine gender differences in promotion probabilities of the academic staff of a large university in The Netherlands, taking into account the sex…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine gender differences in promotion probabilities of the academic staff of a large university in The Netherlands, taking into account the sex segregated context of the faculty.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses records of the university's personnel information system from 1990 to 2006, covering the data of 1,792 employees in the academic ranks who have entered since 1990. Cox regression models are used to test three hypotheses.
Findings
The findings show that women have lower promotion probabilities than men. The gender differences are primarily explained by differences in years of service and external mobility, and not by the sex segregated context of the faculty. A higher share of women decreases the odds of being promoted for both men and women. Gender differences in working hours do not explain the gender differences in promotion probabilities.
Originality/value
The paper adds to the existing literature because event history analyses have hardly been applied to personnel records for investigating the impact of the sex segregated context on promotion probabilities.
Details
Keywords
Jacob Reilley and Tobias Scheytt
This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of…
Abstract
This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of Germany’s “external quality assurance system” for hospitals, the authors show how methods for quantifying quality align with broader institutional and ideational shifts to form a calculative infrastructure for governance. Our study focuses on three phases of infrastructural development wherein methods for calculating quality, institutions for coordinating data and reform ideals converge with one another. The authors argue that the succession of these phases represents a gradual layering process, whereby old ways of enacting quality governance are not replaced, but augmented by new sets of calculative practices, institutions and ideas. Thinking about infrastructures as multi-layered complexes allows us to explore how they construct possibilities for control, remain stable over time and transform the fields in which they are embedded. Rather than governance being enacted according to a singular goal or value, we see an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple modalities of control, including selective intervention, quality-based competition and automatized budgeting. Infrastructural change, instead of revolving around crises in measurement, is shaped by incubation periods – times of relative calm when political actors, medical practitioners, mathematicians, and many others explore and reflect past experiences, rather than follow erratic reforms fads. Finally, analysing infrastructures as multi-layered constructs underlines how they produce multiple images of care quality, which not only shift existing power relations, but also change the ways we understand and make sense of public services.