Research
The Research Group on Gender Studies uses intersectional, comparative, cross-national, and global perspectives to create bridges and synergies between gender, science, organizations, and policy studies. Professor Zippel’s books and articles examine the mechanisms through which gender equality - a core value of liberal modernity - has been slow, at times stalling, and highly uneven across key institutions such as education, work, science, and politics. Recent research explores gender and global transformations of science and education.
Funded by the Einstein Foundation, this research uncovers points of leverage and/or weakness for specific policies, institutional arrangements, and various negotiations among increasingly transnational actors. Such comparative analyses help to explain why some countries and institutions adopted measures to further the cause of equity, while others have not.
The research streams explore the variability and inconsistency of change across institutions and countries that have witnessed decades of contentious debates about intersectional gender equality and diversity along with a variety of legal reforms, policies, interventions, and social movements aimed at addressing (or resisting) it to varying degrees.
Research stream I “Diffusion of Policy Ideas on Gender and Diversity”
Projects in this stream explore how “change agents” frame and negotiate demands for equity and diversity in science that create tensions within and across institutions, countries, and regions of the world. For example, discourses about academic excellence in higher education tend to position beliefs in meritocracy against the democratic values of equity and diversity.
To analyze the role of gender and diversity in debates surrounding these and related concepts (such as quotas, violence, participation, and voice), projects in this research stream will use qualitative and computational text analysis of reports on gender and diversity in science to trace the emergence and dissemination of ideas about these concepts.
In addition, we ask how developments and ongoing struggles around gender and diversity in science are related to other ideas and processes in the field, such as the notion of “academic excellence”, the neoliberalisation of academia, demands to improve the international competitiveness of universities, and the seemingly oppositional concepts of “meritocracy” vs. the democratic values of equality and diversity.
Research stream II “Internationalization of Academia”
This research stream investigates how processes of globalization and internationalization reshape notions of diversity and challenge or reproduce gendered inequalities in higher education. It analyzes both institutional strategies—such as university alliances and policy frameworks—and the lived experiences of mobile academics navigating different academic systems. Particular attention is given to how concepts like excellence, inclusion, and cooperation are interpreted and enacted in international academic contexts.
The projects in this stream examine how gender, diversity and internationalization intersect across multiple scales: from European higher education policy to transatlantic academic mobility. Drawing on Professor Kathrin Zippel’s foundational work on international scientific collaboration in the U.S.—outlined in her book Women in Global Science (Stanford University Press, 2017)—this stream explores how internationalization strategies can simultaneously foster new opportunities and reproduce inequalities. It investigates how universities incorporate gender and diversity into their global agendas and how mobile academics experience and negotiate inclusion, recognition, and institutional boundaries.
Further Research Projects
Beyond the two main research streams, the research group also pursues additional projects that expand and deepen our understanding of gender, diversity, and social transformation across different domains of society. These studies address questions that do not neatly fit within the framework of policy diffusion or academic internationalization but nonetheless engage with the broader themes of the group: the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of gender equality in modern institutions.