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Probationary or Second-Class Citizens? Postdoctoral Experiences in the Swiss Context

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Gendered Academic Citizenship

Part of the book series: Citizenship, Gender and Diversity ((FEMCIT))

Abstract

This chapter analyses the academic citizenship experiences of postdoctoral researchers in the Swiss context. Adopting the notion of ‘probationary citizenship’, the chapter provides new insights into the contradictory expectations placed on early-career academics, together with an analysis of their implications for the gendering of academic citizenship more generally. In the Swiss context, the transitional status of a large number of postdocs offers a variety of potential outcomes in the form of relatively stable positions (and thus limited or even full academic citizenship) or in the form of voluntary or involuntary exit from the academic labour market (i.e. non-citizenship). Within this framework, the chapter identifies one of the core aspects of the postdoc experience that has been relatively undocumented earlier; namely the ‘divergent prescriptions’ male and female postdocs face at different stages of a typical academic career path, and their consequently divergent experiences of membership and recognition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The resulting categories are defined as follows: Professors (Profs), including Full, Associate and Assistant professorial positions with tenure or on tenure-track; Other academic staff (Oth. teach), including non-professorial academic positions, such as Lecturer or Senior Lecturer, some of which are stable, and which require a PhD; Teaching and/or research positions (Postdocs), fixed-term, reserved for people with a PhD; Teaching and/or research positions (AssDoc), fixed-term, reserved for people without a PhD (e.g. Graduate Students) Administrative and technical support staff (Admin. and Tech. Staff), stable or fixed-term, sometimes requiring a PhD.

  2. 2.

    Names and certain biographical details have been modified to protect the identity of the interviewees.

  3. 3.

    There is no legal paternity leave in Switzerland (Lanfranconi and Valarino 2014).

  4. 4.

    This measure was implemented in 2018.

  5. 5.

    This only applies to staff on the payroll of a university, and not to those working on externally funded projects.

  6. 6.

    A six-month ‘job search’ extension permit can be requested by non-EU citizens who complete a funded PhD contract in Switzerland, but no equivalent arrangement exists for most foreign postdocs.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded under the 7th EU Research Framework Programme GARCIA Gendering the Academy and Research: Combating Career Instability and Asymmetries (SiS.2013.2.1.1-1—Grant agreement n° 611737), with additional support from the National Centre of Competencies in Research LIVES Overcoming Vulnerability: Life-Course Perspectives. For further details, see: www.garciaproject.eu.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Social Sciences and NCCR LIVES, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Nicky Le Feuvre & Marie Sautier

  2. University of Grenoble-Alpes and NCCR LIVES, Grenoble, France

    Pierre Bataille

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  1. Nicky Le Feuvre
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Correspondence to Nicky Le Feuvre .

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Sevil Sümer

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Le Feuvre, N., Bataille, P., Sautier, M. (2020). Probationary or Second-Class Citizens? Postdoctoral Experiences in the Swiss Context. In: Sümer, S. (eds) Gendered Academic Citizenship. Citizenship, Gender and Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52600-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52600-9_3

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