“One of the biggest issues with academia in our country is a lack of ideological commitment to our own research”. I heard this from someone in my social circle in a recent discussion. It was one of those statements that have an impact. We work in an environment where passionate adherence to one’s research ideology borders with irrationality; and a certain cold and distant objectivity is somewhat desirable. It had me thinking for much of what we understand as a ‘given’ is based on this assumption of objectivity.

One of the several issues that have captivated me through the course of my career is the precarious nature of women’s careers. Women, having similar educational background and professional experience levels as their male counterparts, experience way more irregularity in terms of career progression. This may be reflected in the form of long career breaks, opt-outs, slow growth, etc. There are many readily available explanations for this precarity, even if you were to ask somebody at random. The motherhood, caregiving and familial responsibility render many women unable to cope with the nature of their jobs hence they choose to opt-out or take breaks. In this discussion, rarely if ever does one question the nature of the job that is so designed that a woman is unfit for it by virtue of being a woman, or a mother, or having a family to care for.

Among the sectors where irregularity is common across women’s careers is academia. Several recent studies have shown the need for reconstruction of organisational structures to incorporate more equitable structures and norms. One such contribution, albeit recent, is by Ivancheva and colleagues who argue that while the social construction of paid work, in a neoliberal sense, is one of the major contributors to irregularity in women’s careers, there is also need for theorisation into the precarity that is more evident across many sectors including academia.

Arguably, the economic and political ideology of the contemporary world is based on neoliberal capitalism. It institutionalises market values across public and private domains and maintains a cognitive hegemony that spans across social, organisational, and individual spheres of life. It sets the foreground for a discourse within which we define organisations, employment, and work.

Within this discourse, several other traits that are fundamental to the social construction of professionalism in the most neoliberal sense of the word, intersect with the desirable attribute of objectivity. These traits include a certain competitiveness that is individualistic and self-regarding and industrious. It would be safe to posit that the neoliberal definitions of employment and work are rather incongruous to notions such as care-giving, in both practical and philosophical terms.

I believe that this neoliberalisation has long found its way in contemporary academia. Recent studies in high-impact journals have pointed out the effects of such neoliberalisation on the careers of atypical employees (in terms of gender, race and class) with special reference to the irregularity and precarity in their careers. Women are the prime example of such atypical employees whose presence in the academy, or any other sector for that matter, is contingent on the idea of them abiding by organisational norms that are inherently masculine, much like you would find in the work of Joan Acker.

Acker observes that masculine assumptions pervade organisational norms, processes, rules, and regulations; and that the idea of an ideal “professional” indeed defines a man. Her work is a brilliant critique of organisations as well as organisational theory and offers explanation as to why there is such scant attention to the nature of organisations. One of the reasons she points out is the fact that the definitions of work, organisations and professionalism are grounded within the working relations and worlds of men. All critiques of organisations have built upon these definitions and hence have failed to observe the underlying assumptions of masculinity in the very construction of the ideas. With the growing development across the world, employment and terms of service are becoming more precarious, and thus masculinised, as Acker observed in her work of gendered organisations. While the themes relating to the intersection of paid work and care work remains a major highlight in such studies, it is evident that the price for a successful and regular career is higher for women than it is for men.

I believe that Acker’s assessment of organisations being inherently gendered is furthered by the institutionalisation of market values. This cross-over is perilous to the careers of women, especially when they find themselves guilty of not being “professional” enough only by becoming mothers or primary caregivers. The double-bind of women’s lives is a story for another time. For now, all I am mean to put across is the radical idea that it is organisational definitions that require readjustment; and by readjustment, I do not mean women’s experiences appropriated into anecdotal examples by men in the organisations. By readjustment, I mean redefining the ideas, of work and of professionalism – outside the neoliberal box. A good place to begin such overhauling is the academy – for both practical and symbolic reasons.

The author is an assistant professor at Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Islamabad