Ulla Riis

Gender Equality in Swedish Higher Education: Patterns and Shifts.

In most European countries, more women than men attend undergraduate Higher Education (HE) and more women than men obtain degrees. In Sweden the proportion of female students has long been in the vicinity of 51–60%. The number of doctoral entrants and degrees meet a “balanced gender criterion,” defined as no sex constituting more than 60% of the population. Still the unequal gender structure of higher positions persists: men tend to hold the top positions, especially as professors. Explaining this inertia is the main theme of this article. Differences between horizontal and vertical analyses are focused on, and changes due to gender balance during 1999–2007 are shown. Variations in career patterns over research areas are highlighted. Finally, hypotheses are formulated and approaches for further studies on gender balance in HE are discussed.

Assessing educational expertise in academic faculty promotion

During 1999–2010, eligible Swedish university lecturers had an unconditional right to apply for promotion to the position of professor. Our aim was to discuss the motives of the reform and to problematise challenges in making qualitative assessments of educational expertise. We presented the results from an evaluation of the reform, and we focused on the weights that the peer reviewers in their assessment assign to the educational credentials of the applicants as opposed to those assigned to the research credentials. The empirical material consists of the dossiers from 294 cases of promotion. For research expertise and for educational expertise, we created one and three indices, respectively, where different types of credentials were given different weights. Changes over time were examined, as well as differences between disciplinary domains. In the assessment and decision process, educational expertise was outweighed by research expertise, and mainly quantitative aspects of the former were taken into account. There were signs that the peer review system underwent changes and that its intended quality-promoting function diminished over time.