Entanglements of gender cultures and disciplinary cultures in physical sciences: Resonances and damping

Abstract

Although the decrease of women among the academic personnel with each career step holds for all disciplines, the underlying processes which lead to this problem are closely related to the particular disciplinary culture. Thus when asking for the gendering of academic careers in scientific research and higher education, it is indispensable to take into account that the gendering of the sciences differs between different disciplines – and moreover also within an academic discipline, depending on the particular subfield. Academic careers are influenced by the gender cultures in the respective research institution and its working place cultures. Last not least they are also related to the organizational form of the research institution, e.g. universities or non‐university research institutes. Drawing on an ongoing ethnography in non‐university research institutions I want to discuss the entanglements of gender cultures and disciplinary cultures for the case of different physical sciences, among them solar energy research and astroparticle physics, and ask for the role of the institutional setting in which physical research takes place. In the course of the fieldwork there emerged different levels on which gender cultures become relevant: Firstly, the day‐to‐day explicit talk about „gender“, mostly in the context of gender equality, secondly, the doing gender in the interactions of physicists and, thirdly, performing gender through research practices of doing physics. Borrowing a notion from physics it will be discussed inasmuch gender cultures “resonate” with cultures of doing physics and inasmuch they can diverge from them.