Abstract:

After the Strategy of Lisbon, the creation of the European Research Area, aiming to foster gender equality in scientific careers, represented a landmark to the European scientific research system. Following the so-called knowledge society and the previous reforms that, over the last decades, were implemented in higher education systems worldwide, regarded as affecting women and early-career researchers the most, it is relevant to analyse if the European strategies changed the career pathways of doctoral graduates and if there are gender differences in these paths. The increasing number of doctoral graduates intensified demand for academic positions but getting a job outside academy has not been easy either. In order to explore how the scholars have been approaching the gendered career pathways of doctorate holders, a systematic literature review has been carried on, using the Elsevier’s Scopus as a bibliometric data source.

For the selection of the articles, the validity of the papers was assessed based on the criteria:
i) was it relating specifically to doctoral graduates;
ii) was it relating specifically to career pathways?

In the end, the 10 initial publications were selected in order to undertake a deeper analysis. Each article was also labelled according to the dominant topics addressed, resulting in four principal themes: barriers, labour market outcomes, aspirations and motivations, and, lastly, policies and reforms. Barriers to promoting change were referred by several authors. The term ‘gendered contexts’ is used to describe the academic environment where there is a lack of gender sensitivity. The gender dominant regime influence career choices of women and men but, given the gendered distribution of labour, women are kept penalized both to step into academic positions as to get promoted (Bataille, 2016; Gallardo, 2021). The terms “gendered career paths” (Bataille, 2016; Peri-Rotem, 2019), and “occupational segregation by gender” (Shauman, 2017) are used to describe the labour market outcomes of doctoral graduates. Authors agree that family structure influence employment outcomes of women and men differently (Shauman, 2017; Main, 2020) once married women with young dependents, shortly after receive their degree, are less likely to hold faculty positions. Aspirations for an academic career could be a strong predictor for attainment of tenure-track faculty positions (Main, 2020). In other cases, when preferences for family-care issues were assumed, considering the dominant gender regime, early career researchers dropped out the academic rank (Bataile, 2016). As such, reforms in academic policies should consider the inclusion of work-life challenges in positive action measures (Badder, 2017). Overall, the worst working conditions faced by women suggest that women’s PhDs holders are still linked to career patterns, both in higher education institutions and the private sector, with the latter presenting inferior conditions. For future research it is suggested to understand why more women are entering higher education, and if some connection to previous professional experiences arise. Conceiving doctoral graduates, and women, as a heterogeneous group, in a longitudinal and intersectional analysis, which was not observed in any of the studies analysed, is essential so public policies could rely on precise information to produce changes that encounter different citizen’s needs.

Keywords:

Gender, PhD labour market, early-career, career pathways, higher education and research system.