The Gendered Innovator: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Danish Research- and Innovation Strategy

Abstract

This thesis examines how innovation is discursively constructed in Danish research and innovation policy, and the impact this construction has on women’s inclusion in innovation processes. Through a critical discourse analysis of the Danish research- and innovation strategy RESEARCH2025, published by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, the study explores how innovation is predominantly framed in terms of economic growth, technological development, and market logics. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of discourse, power/knowledge, and governmentality, the thesis analyses how the strategy functions as a governing text that shapes which types of knowledge, and which innovators are legitimised in the discourse. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and subjectivation is applied to demonstrate how the discourse constructs gendered subject positions, idealising the innovative subject as implicitly masculine, rational, and market aligned. The analysis reveals an absence of gender perspectives within the strategy’s framing of societal challenges and research priorities. This absence is not treated as neutral, but rather as an active exclusion that (re)produces an understanding of innovation which marginalises women’s experiences and bodies, and furthermore neglects socially oriented research fields predominantly dominated by women. Drawing on Caroline Criado Perez’s concept of the gender data gap and the framework of gendered social innovation, the discussion highlights how more inclusive and diverse approaches to innovation can be promoted. The thesis concludes that the prevailing innovation discourse in RESEARCH2025 contributes to the reproduction of structural gender inequality in the research system, but that theoretical and political alternatives exist. These, in combination with a critical approach to the dominant innovation discourses when formulating research- and innovation policies, are argued as relevant when promoting a more inclusive and gender aware understanding of innovation processes.