How Gender Equity Schemes Might Inadvertently “Gender-Wash” Universities, Provoke Backlash, and Propagate Inequality

Abstract

This paper explores the work experience and career trajectories of people working across 12 UK-based universities awarded an Athena Swan Charter, an international scheme that recognizes commitment to gender equality. Despite, or perhaps due to institutional reward leading to gender-washed “peacocking”, everyday sexisms and gender regimes are sustained through acts of gendered microinsults that often go unnoticed and are individualized. Women in “awarded” institutions report being spoken over, disproportionately allocated academic housework, experience re/enforced gendered boundaries, and inadequate equality policy provision. They also identify microinvalidations through exclusion from meetings, mis/appropriation of their ideas, gender inequality denial, and overt or covert resistance to gender equity initiatives. An analysis of these microaggressions determines their interconnected, mutually constitutive, and reproductive nature; it suggests that institutional gender-washing propagates a misconception of current levels of gender inequality which kindles “equity-backlash”. The findings reveal unintended outcomes of gender award schemes that might be mitigated through visibilising and addressing inequality regimes and their impacts.