The Positioning and Making of Female Professors

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction: The Positioning and Making of Female Academics—A Review of the Literature

   • Denise Mifsud

   Pages 1-26

3. Being Tough, Being Humorous and Being Explicitly Feminist—The “Intrinsically Disordered Nature” of My Ways Around Academia

   • Isabel Menezes

   Pages 27-48

4. ‘You Must Wait to Be Asked’: Career Advancement and the Maternal Body

   • Caroline Gatrell

   Pages 49-73

5. Babies Taught Me How to “Do” Academia: Crafting a Career in an Institution That Was Not Built for Mothers

   • Catherine M. Mazak

   Pages 75-87

6. Writing Myself into an Academic Career

   • Rowena Murray

   Pages 89-111

7. Academic Fluidity? An Unconventional Route to the Professoriate

   • Jackie Potter

   Pages 113-131

8. My Personal Journey on the Pathway of Resilience

   • Sarah Skerratt

   Pages 133-153

9. Actively Constructing Yourself as a Professor: After Appointment

   • Beverley Anne Yamamoto

   Pages 155-176

10. Mis-Making an Academic Career: Power, Discipline, Structures, and Practices

    • Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

    Pages 177-200

11. A Personal Journey of a Long and Winding Road to Professorial Status: An Alternative Pathway and the Challenges, Trials and Tribulations

    • Moira Lafferty

    Pages 201-215

12. How to Fall into a Career Trap (Without Even Realising)

    • Inger Mewburn

    Pages 217-220

13. Conclusion: The Process of Becoming a Woman Professor and Unbecoming Gender Equality: A Female Drama of Resistance

    • Denise Mifsud

    Pages 221-234

14. Back Matter

    Pages 235-241

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This book explores the experiences and perspectives of female professors. Analysing the gendering of this process using various theoretical perspectives, this edited collection examines the active ‘making’ of careers, and how this has been possible. The editors and contributors cut across institutions, cultures and continents to seek to understand how women navigate the gendered process of becoming a professor, with each chapter applying a different theoretical or methodological approach to her experience. The chapters are not mere descriptions of career trajectories, but analytic narratives anchored within distinct theoretical and philosophical frameworks. In turn, they shed important light on how – and if – institutional structures and systems are adapting to move towards gender equality. Offering practical advice as well as thoughtful reflection, this book will be of especial interest to early career female academics. 

• Female Professors
• Glass ceiling in academia
• Women in academia
• Sexism in academia
• High achieving academic women
• Athena Swan
• Academic female career advancement

• School of Education, University of the West of Scotland, Ayr, UK

  Rowena Murray

• Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

  Denise Mifsud

Rowena Murray is Professor and Director of Research in the School of Education at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. 


Denise Mifsud is an Associate Fellow of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre of Educational Research, Malta and part-time lecturer at the University of Malta.

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