Making choices but few changes : the discourse of choice and mothers working in research and innovation

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Making choices but few changes : the discourse of choice and mothers working in research and innovation © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited Published version Ikonen, Hanna-Mari; Korvajärvi, Päivi Ikonen, H.-M., & Korvajärvi, P. (2023). Making choices but few changes : the discourse of choice and mothers working in research and innovation. Gender and Education, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2250819 2023 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cgee20 Gender and Education ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgee20 Making choices but few changes: the discourse of choice and mothers working in research and innovation Hanna-Mari Ikonen & Päivi Korvajärvi To cite this article: Hanna-Mari Ikonen & Päivi Korvajärvi (2023): Making choices but few changes: the discourse of choice and mothers working in research and innovation, Gender and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2023.2250819 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2250819 © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 05 Sep 2023. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Making choices but few changes: the discourse of choice and mothers working in research and innovation Hanna-Mari Ikonen a and Päivi Korvajärvi b a Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland; b Faculty of Social Sciences, Unit of Social Research, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland ABSTRACT Based on the identification of the discourse of choice in debates on neoliberalism, meritocracy and post-feminism, this article analyses how highly educated mothers position themselves within the discourse of choice and use choice as their discursive resource when reflecting on how their demanding careers combine with motherhood. The data come from 26 interviews with mothers employed in research and innovation in Finland. The analysis reveals five ways in which the mothers positioned themselves within the discourse of choice. It appears these ways are all based on, and produce, the moral primacy of individual self-governance. We treat this as a demonstration of how neoliberalism is internalized and lived. Furthermore, the results show that an egalitarian welfare society whose policies support work–childcare reconciliation does not remove the need to use the individualistic discourse of choice. We suggest that this could be changed by voicing the challenges it poses to many women. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 10 June 2022 Accepted 16 August 2023 KEYWORDS Neoliberal research work; meritocracy; post-feminism; work–childcare reconciliation; mothers; choice discourse Introduction The successful reconciliation of women’s work careers and motherhood is a globally troubling issue for the women themselves, for the employers and for the society at large (Gerson 2002;Orgad2019). The issue is not only practical and institutional but also overwhelmingly imbued by the tensions that mothers face between emotional and morally laden commitments to themselves and others in any given culture or society (Gerson 2002). Finland, a northern welfare society, provides the cultural and social context for this study. There, a strong gender equality assumption prevails and childcare arrangements are institutionally provided, but the neoliberal discourse effectively dominates on the background of the political and economic agenda (Elomäki 2019; Kantola and Kananen 2013). This article takes its starting point from how the neoliberal research milieu, in alignment with meritocratic and post-feminist ideas on equal opportunity for all to excel at anything, produces an overwhelming discourse of choice, a ‘language’according to © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author (s) or with their consent. CONTACT Hanna-Mari Ikonen hanna-mari.p.ikonen@jyu.fiUniversity of Jyväskylä, Keskussairaalantie 4, 44014, Finland GENDER AND EDUCATION https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2250819 which individuals can craft their life path as free and unbound subjects (for a similar type of approach, see Baker 2008; Beddoes and Pawley 2014; Budgeon 2015; Canetto et al. 2017; Jacques and Radtke 2012; Sørensen 2017). Through this theoretical lens, the following research question is posed: how do mothers working in research and innovation (R&I) position themselves within the discourse of choice when they reflect on how their careers intertwine with motherhood? In particular, our analysis focuses on the discursive resources they draw on in this positing. We contribute to the research on lived neoliberalism and bring forth internalized neoliberalism, which refers to neoliberalism with a tight hold at all levels of society and that formulates subjectivities (Brown 2015). Relative to this, the article suggests possible views on questioning and changing the choice discourse. Many studies have shown neoliberal trends, and the meritocratic and post-feminist ideas that occupy them (e.g. Gill 2009; Nikunen 2012), pose particular challenges for reconciling research work with motherhood (e.g. Amsler and Motta 2019; Huppatz, Sang, and Napier 2019; Ivancheva, Lynch, and Keating 2019). The masculine ideal worker norm (Acker 1990) still runs strong in science, technology and their allied fields (Makarem and Wang 2020;O’Connor, O’Hagan, and Gray 2018; Seddighi and Corneliussen 2021), which refers to a culture in which care duties are not supposed to affect work performance (Haas, Koeszegi, and Zedlacher 2016; Hardey 2020). However, it is still expected for women to bear more responsibility than men for reproductive issues –not just childbearing but also years of childcare, nurturing and upbringing –while maintaining their careers (Currie, Harris, and Thiele 2000; Ward and Wolf-Wendel 2016). For example, in heterosexual relationships, men more often have ‘domestic capital’, meaning arrangements and resources provided by their wives to support their smooth career progression, than women, whereas women with a husband and children have domestic and care work waiting for them at home (Duberley and Cohen 2009). This gendered organization of care participates in maintaining gendered practices in organizations (Acker 2006). Simultaneously, neoliberal discourse produces a way of speaking that emphasizes free choices through which everything is possible and depends on individual efforts. Because universities and other research organizations have long been used to having a greedy and powerful hold over the individuals who voluntarily devote themselves to them (Coser 1974), the researchers’predisposition to ‘work hard’and ‘do well’has meshed perfectly with the neoliberal ideal of an autonomous, self-motivating and self-responsible subject (Gill 2009;also McRobbie 2015). Neoliberal discourse is fruitful ground for meritocratically explaining that potential, hard work and excellence (Ferree and Zippel 2015; Herschberg, Benschop, and Van Den Brink 2019; Wijaya Mulya and Sakhiyya 2021) are behind career advancement. Although meritocracy has been shown to maintain inequalities because self-acclaimed meritocratic organizations actually favour male employees (Castilla and Benard 2010; Cech and Blair-Loy 2010; Van Den Brink and Benschop 2012), it is hard to resist the idea of meritocracy because it seems to guarantee equal opportunities for all who deserve success, women and mothers included (Huppatz, Sang, and Napier 2019; Ollilainen 2019). In meritocratic cultures, gender inequalities appear irrelevant; at most, they should be lived with confidence and without complaining about marginalization, oppression or other structural issues (Acker and Armenti 2004; Gill and Orgad 2016; Lewis, Benschop, and Simpson 2017). Inequalities undeniably exist in working life, but they should be combated individually (Rottenberg 2014). Accordingly, subjects are responsible 2H.-M. IKONEN AND P. KORVAJÄRVI for their own choices, and the consequences of these, and they are only themselves to blame for the choices that turn out to be unsuccessful (Beddoes and Pawley 2014; Raddon 2002). In such contexts, when ‘choice’is signified as a positive concept and something available for everyone, women do not want to be labelled as ‘whiners’who cannot do well in their field (Harris and Guiffre 2015; Kivijärvi 2021). Neoliberalism and meritocracy are tightly linked with post-feminism (Banet-Weiser, Gill, and Rottenberg 2020; Gill 2009; Gill and Orgad 2016; McRobbie 2015). Organizational cultures in R&I-related fields are particularly sympathetic to post-feminism, which encourages women to make confident choices and smother any complaints they may wish to voice (Gill and Orgad 2018; Petrucci 2020). ‘Having it all’, including a career and children, is constructed as a matter of choice (Rottenberg 2014). To that end, complaints about possible challenges as a mother and an academic must neither be made nor voiced in women’s own minds. Thus, following Sørensen (2017), the concept of choice is where neoliberalism and post-feminism entangle. These three concepts contribute to the ‘choice discourse’, all from a slightly different angle: while neoliberalism stresses individualism generally, meritocracy emphasizes individualistic pursuit of success, which will be rewarded as academic positions. Postfeminist sensibility complements the picture with equalitarian women who can –by hard work and strong will –achieve the same as men and additionally perform the family responsibilities. Thus, the discursive circumstances are formed in which making appropriate choices is all what is needed for a successful career and family life. None of the three utilized concepts recognizes the social context of the individuals. In different but interlinked ways, they contribute to explain how and why women represent themselves as autonomous choice-making subjects, although norms and social practices of the society and institutions affect their decisions as professionals and mothers. Contours of the choice discourse and motherhood In addition to intensified work, changes to parenting cultures add new requirements for parents, more so for mothers (Hays 1996; Lee et al. 2014; Orgad 2019). Neoliberalism constructs ‘proper parenthood’as a pursuit that emphasizes parental responsibility, control, risk and competition to ensure children’s future success (Wall 2010). It is doubly challenging that although good parenting, for which mothers are largely responsible, is demanding, mothers also want and are supposed to use their skills and potential in the labour market (Gerson 2002). Importantly, the choice discourse provides a persuasive discursive resource in which very different end-results are understood as a matter of choice, thereby directing attention away from the conditions of those choices and the corresponding pressures experienced. Yet by positioning themselves as autonomous agents making free choices, mothers present themselves as personally responsible for their and their children’s lives; accordingly, women become isolated from one another (Jacques and Radtke 2012). We can draw on examples of analyses that have demonstrated the gendering effects of the choice discourse. A US study of young science graduates (Canetto et al. 2017) showed that the academic profession was seen by interviewees as the best route for pursuing their scientific interests and forging a career. Most of them viewed academic science careers as incompatible with having a family, an idea that gained strength when they GENDER AND EDUCATION 3 tracked their professors’work pace and patterns. Canetto et al. (2017) pointed out that women tend to explain their wishes and needs as different from those of men; women are happy to have different career alternatives to choose from –choices, however, that embrace moralized gender ideologies that see childcare as a mother’s responsibility. Speaking about choice obscures how women and men have very different options to choose from (Canetto et al. 2017) and that women self-select away from faculty careers due to the barriers they expect to face (De Welde and Laursen 2011; Van Anders 2004). Another example of explaining gender disparities as a choice comes from a US study of STEM faculty members who discussed the work–family balance by engaging with a discourse on choice to frame the challenges they faced (Beddoes and Pawley 2014). The participants believed that female faculty members faced, more than in an industry or governmental career, conflicts between having children and keeping up with a demanding, not-familyfriendly work culture that would require much time investment. It was evident to them that a mother would have more family-related responsibilities, making a scientific career incompatible with motherhood. Several participants recognized there was a need for a change to the larger system, but they expressed a belief that the system was too difficult to change. Context Importantly, the effects of the discourse of choice are influenced by the sociopolitical system. Finland, which is seen globally as an affluent and egalitarian Northern European country, provides the social context for this study. Since Finland operates a social-democratic welfare regime (Esping-Andersen 1990), state interventions in private life are greater than in other capitalist welfare regimes; for instance, the parental leave system is rather generous, high-quality public day-care services are affordable, a dual-breadwinner/dual-career model is the norm for couples and the system supports the individual rather than the family. All these contribute to women’s equal labour market participation (Thévenon 2011), albeit in highly gender-segregated labour markets (THL 2021). No wonder Finland is considered as gender-equal; according to EIGE’s(2021) Gender Equality Index, it scores fifth, clearly above the EU average. However, neoliberal governance transformations have contributed to pushing gender equality offthe political agenda, meaning that it requires continuous work to maintain and justify gender equality (Elomäki 2019). In addition, childcare in Finland is still much more of a mother’s issue. Finnish fathers take considerably less family leave than mothers or their Nordic counterparts (e.g. Swedes or Norwegians) (Koslowski et al. 2020; Miettinen et al. 2019), and only three percent have taken any parental leave days independently, without the other parent simultaneously being on leave, although a great majority have used at least some days of the part of the leave that is ear-marked for them (Miettinen et al. 2019, 257). This is partly because the Finnish family leave system, before reform in autumn 2022 to encourage parents to shoulder care responsibilities more equally, allocated more leave days to mothers than the other parent and allowed less flexibility than in other Nordic countries, which has contributed to maintaining a culture of mothers having the main responsibility (Eerola et al. 2019). What is more, the existing, if not dominant, political discourse in Finland emphasizes the positive outcomes of children’s home care (rather than attending nursery), which also advocates that mothers use their ‘freedom to choose’to choose home care and thus support their children through it (Nyby et al. 2017). 4H.-M. IKONEN AND P. KORVAJÄRVI Indeed, it has been suggested, through a comparison of the gender ideologies of 26 European countries, that Finland belongs to the choice egalitarian class of those countries (Begall, Grunow, and Buchler 2023). This is characterized by not only egalitarian attitudes towards mother’s employment and men’s childcare and domestic tasks but also endorsing the housewife’s role and having low support for prescribed dual-earning. The authors interpreted this as reflecting the discourse of ‘choice feminism’because it emphasizes individual choice. In sum, Finland, as a well-known equalitarian society with plenty of opportunities for women, and thus no visible structural obstacles, accompanied by choice egalitarian gender ideology, forms a particularly strong basis for people, including the mothers working in R&I who we sampled in this study, to rely on the post-feminist, meritocratic discourse of free choice. Procedure This research is part of the Nordic Centre of Excellence on Women in Technology Driven Careers (NORDWIT). The data used in this article consist of interviews with 26 mothers with PhDs (or in one case, a PhD candidate) working under the multidisciplinary umbrella of R&I, particularly in health technology. The interviewees included researchers, senior researchers, group leaders and professors at universities and research centres, although some had left academia shortly after completing their PhDs and worked in researchbased development, management or leadership positions in public or third-sector organizations, while a few were company partners. All were white and, except for two, Finnish-born. Some described having rural or working-class backgrounds, but at the time of the interviews, they were all urban, middle-class (or sometimes upper-class) citizens with a high level of education and intellectually demanding, recognized and research-intensive jobs. Most had salaries above the Finnish average. The interviewees were born in the 1950s–1990s, mostly in the 1960s–1980s, and had one to four (most often two) children. For a few, issues of caring for children of different ages were no longer part of their everyday lives. All the reported relationships were heterosexual. At the time of the interviews, most (22) lived with the father of their children; only a few were divorced, which is rarer than the general trend in Finland (Salmi and Närvi 2017) and the US, where women in academic careers are more likely to be single or divorced than their male counterparts (Winslow and Davis 2016). A larger proportion of the women we interviewed had children than Finnish women on average. 1 As is typical in Finland, public day-care was the most common childcare solution. Regular nannies were used rarely, mainly while the mother was working abroad. Most of the interviewees had returned to full-time work when their child started day-care, namely when the child was aged between one year and 18 months. Relatives, mainly grandparents, generally had roles in providing extra help with childcare (Ikonen, Salminen-Karlsson, and Seddighi 2022). Some fathers had taken childcare leave for several months when the children were babies, which was more often than is generally the case for fathers in Finland (see Miettinen et al. 2019). A few interviewees said that the father barely participated in childcare. Many said that their partners provided careerrelated support; this sometimes seemed to be mainly emotional/professional, but it also involved the sharing of everyday care duties. Mothers had the main responsibility GENDER AND EDUCATION 5 for these duties, and there was therefore not always a big difference in care duties between those who did not have a partner and those whose partners had little participation. This may be partly a question of personal cultural presentation; that is, the culturally shared conception adopted even by the interviewers was that professional mothers also hold the main caring roles, and accordingly, their partners’roles were not widely asked. Thus, it depended on the interviewed women themselves how much they discussed organizing their relational commitments. The interviewees, who provided informed consent, were found with the help of key actor interviews, via the webpages of R&I institutions and through the snowballing method. The interviews were conducted between 2018 and 2020 in Finnish by two members of the research group, lasted about 1–2 h and were transcribed verbatim by a service that signed a confidentiality agreement. The interview themes included the participants’R&I career histories, current work situations and future plans, the role of gender in R&I work and the relationship between work and personal and home lives. The research team read the interview transcripts several times to answer different research questions (Ikonen, Salminen-Karlsson, and Seddighi 2022;Korvajärvi2021; Vehviläinen, Ikonen, and Korvajärvi 2022). For this article, the first author wrote a summary of each interview, covering their situation and thoughts concerning mothering, childcare and R&I work/career prospects. In addition, the parts of the interviewsin whichchildcare andmothering issues were mentionedwereanalysedfurther.These accountswerereadinrelation tothe literature on neoliberal research work, particularly in the R&I sector, and the related discourses of choice and meritocracy. In this way, and following researchers who regarded individual, self-responsible choice as a governance technique ‘where individuals are persuaded to make meaning of their life as if it were the outcome of individual choices’(Baker 2008,54), it was possible to develop an understanding of how these mothers positioned themselves as choice-making subjects in the R&I context and how they used the choice discourse as a readily available discursive resource to justify their choices. In defining discursive resource, we followed Kuhn et al. (2008, 163), who stated that it is ‘a concept, phrase, expression, trope, or other linguistic device [ –] that guide[s] interpretations of experience and shape[s] the construction of preferred conceptions of persons and groups’. Since positioning is a discursive process whereby the self is located in conversations (Davies and Harré 1990), we saw that positing takes place by using culturally available, even conflicting, discursive resources, of which many wrap around choice. The discourse of choice was a predefined lens that the first author, based on the literature, identified when reading the interview narratives. This does not mean that everything the participants said could be interpreted through the choice discourse, but it was a frequently used resource that they drew on in their reflections on work and motherhood issues. Utilizing the choice discourse Next, we provide details of the conversations on choices in our interviews, identifying five ways to utilize the choice discourse. These refer to difficult choices, healthy choices, natural choices, regretting choices and facing the consequences of the choices made. The interviewees seemed not to have hesitated on whether they had sufficient personal resources, such as family/friendship networks and financial capacity –in addition to the taken-for-granted sociopolitical system with longish family leave, affordable day-care 6H.-M. IKONEN AND P. KORVAJÄRVI and free education systems –to support a child’s future. Their choices related to children were thus (contrary to some less-family-friendly countries), less about whether they could have children but more on a discursive level about how mothers working in R&I must struggle to strike a balance that enables them to meet cultural pressures to succeed as both good mothers and ideal workers. Difficult choices Sometimes, the choices a mother who is also an R&I professional must make about her career are, although happy, recognied as difficult. So, this definitely hasn’t been at all bad, my career path, and I’m really proud of myself and where I’ve gotten, despite the fact that I have these four wonderful kids. But. For example, one colleague of mine went to Europe, and you’re not going to do that kind of thing with a family. So, if you want to be at the very top of research, it does demand an awful lot. And, well, I don’t think it’s impossible that I would have wound up making that kind of choice, but then, of course, I found my wonderful husband, and we had these wonderful children. So, my choices ended up different, and I’m absolutely not saying I’m bitter about it, but I totally understand people who choose differently. (Mother of four, 40+ years, partner in a technology company) In this example, one of many, work can be read as a great passion of the mother. At the same time, she described how her responsibility for her children inevitably diminished the time and effort she could put into that work. There were hints that investing less in work was not completely voluntary (you’re not going to do that kind of thing with a family), which is why the choices were difficult. However, the governing discourse was that of choice because the account finished by saying that it was a choice, and that is how things had gone. It seems that women perform considerable emotional management to avoid dwelling on why they must make these difficult choices. A post-feminist, neoliberal ‘keep calm and carry on’type of self-help representation was present in this excerpt (Delany and Sullivan 2021; Gill and Orgad 2018). There seems to be no space for ideas of carving out a leading career in university research for a mother with a big family or giving a mother the scope to immerse herself in her work for any length of time, but these gendered social norms and practices are not recognized here. Instead, there is a belief that these are women’s choices and are rewarded accordingly. Healthy choices In knowledge work, such as in R&I both within and outside academia, workers seemingly have considerable autonomy over their working time. Yet the downside of this autonomy is that an employee is personally responsible for getting the work done without burning out. When the culture glorifies constant hard work, while such work is often underresourced, there is soon little room left in life for anything other than work. 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