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Despite higher education openness to the inclusion of women and increasing external pressures for institutions to adopt an equal discourse on gender but also on ethnicity, under neoliberalism the dichotomous construction of men and women has not been deconstructed. Although the number of women in higher education increased, horizontal and vertical segregation persist, questioning the dominant idea of universities as democratic, plural and equitable spaces. Management and leadership positions are reserved to the 'ideal academics' who, in a neoliberal context, are defined as hard workers, competitive individuals. This ideal-type is also aligned with the hegemonic masculinity values. Different notions of masculinity have been emerging in society, more caring oriented. This is also evidenced in Portugal. The way masculinity is intertwined with neoliberalism and how it can contribute to create or eliminate tensions between the productivity demands of professional life and personal and family responsibilities is still little investigated. Based on a case study in a Portuguese university, the aim of this article is to expose the way neoliberal policies impose an ideal academic leader aligned with a careerist masculinity that values commitment to work over care and family responsibilities. This dominant masculinity allows the reproduction of gender inequalities inside of the academy, based on subtle inequalities sustained on: i) a hard worker philosophy that maintains more caring and balanced professionals as 'others'; ii) the construction of the idea that work-life balance is an individual and not an institutional problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving gender equality (GE) in science and research has become an important issue in the European Union (EU) and one of the objectives of the European Research Area (ERA). Progress in this area is sluggish and difficult, with several indicators showing that women tend to remain in a disadvantage position when compared to men, despite several efforts and initiatives to correct the situation. It is widely acknowledged that gender inequality may be leading to huge losses of talent, detrimental to organisations, to the economy and to the society (European Commission 2020). To overcome this situation, the European Commission (EC) has funded several action-research projects (through FP6, FP7 and H2020) in order to accelerate and/or stimulate effective and structural institutional changes through the implementation of tailor-made Gender Equality Plans (GEPs). Several GEPs have been implemented in Research Performing Organisations (RPOs) in many countries. Although the effective impact of these plans and their contribution to the creation of more egalitarian working environments in organisations has not yet been fully determined, it seems that resistance may be one of the main obstacles to their successful implementation. This study aims to analyse the organisational dynamics of resistance to the implementation of GEPs in Portuguese RPOs. Thus, drawing on the experience of key actors directly involved in the design, planning and implementation of the GEPs, the authors identify the main forms of resistance felt and discuss the reasons underlying this resistance, while analysing some potential strategies to overcome them and to ensure the success of both gender initiatives and national projects. To achieve the objective of the work, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the Principal Investigators (PI) of three projects developed in Portuguese RPOs. In an attempt to find 'meaning-oriented regularities' in the data, the interviews were analysed using the 'interpretative qualitative' approach. The authors conclude that resistance to GE initiatives is identified in all institutional contexts but it can assume different forms and configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender differences in research performance are widely acknowledged in the literature, with several studies revealing that men have higher productivity rates in terms of outputs than women. However, concerning citations per publication, gender differences are not so evident and there are even some studies showing that women have higher citation scores than men. In Portugal, women are still underrepresented in the researchers' population, but their presence has been steadily increasing in the last years. The country has now a proportion of female researchers above the EU-28 average and, in the higher education sector, the proportion of women working as researchers is particularly high in comparison to other countries (European Commission, 2019). This paper intends to be a first step in the characterization of gender differences in Portuguese research performance taking the University of Aveiro (UAVR) as a case study. Based on a data set exported from SciVal the productivity and impact indicators of the UAVR Top 500 authors (from 2017 to 2019) were analyzed according to their sex. The publications' FORD area was considered in this analysis since it is well known that research patterns tend to be substantially different by scientific area. The results indicate that there is still, to some extent, a performance gap between men and women at UAVR, particularly when indicators consider the number of outputs (Scholarly Output and h-index). When indicators are a proxy for the quality of outputs (Citations, Citations per publication and Field/Weighted Citation Impact) this performance gap is not present with gender differences being less evidenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]