Mapping Gender in Academic Workplaces : Ways of reproducing gender inequality within the discourse of equality

Abstract: Sweden is often described as one of the best countries in the world for women to live in. Despite this and despite a number of equal opportunity interventions within the area of higher education from the mid 1990s and on, Sweden follows the international pattern of the "leaking pipeline" when it comes to gender distribution in academia. The higher up in the academic hierarchy the more men and the fewer women. The topic of this thesis is mapping gender in academic workplaces. The aim is to explore ways in which the social relations of researchers everyday working lives are gendered. This involves studing ways in which gender inequality is produced, maintained or ignored within the discource of gender equality in Swedish academic workplaces and in Swedish society at large.