At the Heart or on the Periphery: Gender, (In)visibility and Epistemic Positioning in Academia

This article analyses barriers for women’s careers in higher education from a theoretical perspective focusing on epistemic positioning and gendered (in)visibility. The study is based on 96 qualitative interviews with associate professors in economics, political science and sociology in Denmark. Epistemic positioning is operationalized as four distinct processes of marginalization: reproduction of men’s privileges from cohort to cohort of academics; naturalization of men’s collaboration with other men; appropriation where men’s research fields and methods are defined as constituting the centre of a discipline; and bounding as the discreditation of some types of research by labelling them ‘female’. Taken together, the four processes of positioning marginalize women (as epistemic subjects) and their research (as epistemic objects).