Female Academics in Higher Education: Conducting Qualitative Research against All Odds

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

A potentially valuable contribution. To improve, the following are suggested:

1. Describe clearly how and when collaborative autoethnography was conducted.

2. Describe the analysis used for the Discussion section.

3. In the Results section, discuss results against the Research questions.  

Careful English editing is needed.

Author Response

 

Dear Reviewer:
First of all we thank you for your comments. We are sure that your suggestions improved our manuscript. Below we respond to each of your suggestions. 

 

We add:

First, we wrote our own stories and then continued to build on the stories of others associated with these voices, presented in this text as a process of co-construction and assembly (Chang and Hernandez 2013). Thus, our "us" was connected in each of the shared stories formed in different layers according to the order of writing the stories presented in this paper. Each story represents an essential experience of our lives, allowing us to draw a line between science and the sentences we use.

As Pelias (2004) says, experimental writing as a form of autoethnography breaks the traditional academic discourse to humanize and understand the academic experience of researchers. In this sense, our prose relates to aspects of our lives as academic women that are usually unspoken and "often oppressively silenced" (Chang 2016, p. 446 ).

This collaborative autoethnography was initiated from conversations between colleagues and friends, several of whom regularly attend the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, in the group “A Day in Spanish and Portuguese (ADISP).”

    In our reflections as women and academics, in the diverse spaces where we have encountered each other, our role in academia and the changing circumstances and challenges have been highlighted constantly while conducting qualitative research in our university contexts.

We are relatively young academics (between 40 and 50 years of age) that have achieved distinct management responsibilities in our institutions. Without doubt, this presumed stability was shaken during the pandemic in our institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic as expectations and demands, considered “normal” given our gender and age group, became more apparent in our lives; we all experienced similar concerns, while our role, or the role expected of us, became a challenge to maintain while also working and researching. 

According to this, we held conversations via messenger and in person in diverse conferences and the university in the case of the two authors that work at the same institution in the north of Chile.

On another occasion, we responded to an invitation issued by the organizers of the World Conference on Qualitative Research (WCQR) to the first author to present the work of our research group. She invited her co authors to write about the questions that are included in this manuscript; they worked individually on their stories which we incorporated into a file on her drive. Subsequently, we presented our individual texts at the WCQR and this opportunity allowed transversal elements of the autoethnographies to be developed in the collective parts of the manuscript, thus using this file as a platform of online storage of information

For the analysis, the authors referred to commonalities between their stories, which they developed collaboratively in the file of Google drive. In this section the first author reviewed the circular manner of each story in regard to the questions that this work generated as mentioned in the abstract of this work, and in this way, this section was created. Granted, this section could be improved on; however, this exercise was circular and repetitive regarding the initial questions, the presentation, the conversations held by the authors and their texts.

Our story illustrates the process of developing our voice as key researchers in contemporary qualitative research. Morse (2002) and Gergen (2014) regard them as external criteria, considering multiple levels of critical analysis as quality criteria when incorporating them into individual texts.

A problematization of the authors' research experiences was carried out through this methodology. Voices are shared, identifying challenges and assessing implications for qualitative research in these difficult times in academia.In addition, we paid for the service of a native English editor with whom we worked the last few weeks to improve our text. We have incorporated everything you requested.
We thank you for your dedication and valuable contribution to our work, we hope this version meets your requirements.

Greetings from all the authors

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

A well written paper overall.

In the discussion section, you may like to synthesize and attempt to link the contextual and cultural differences between Chile and Spain, when it come to gender and leadership in research.

Author Response

Dear reviewer:

Thank you very much for your appreciation of our work and for your suggestion. We have incorporated it in the text. 

For example:

"At present, gender research in Chile is becoming increasingly relevant, given the reforms and legislation that have been implemented in the last five years. Undoubtedly, qualitative research, through its different epistemological approaches and techniques, allows us, as women, to position ourselves as an active part of the phenomena we are studying.

In the case of Spain, it is concluded that governments can support scientific research by providing tools and resources for funding through state and regional research plans. In the same way, it is concluded how their policies and calls for proposals determine the priority lines of research aligned with international policies and agendas. An example is the latest research plans that are aligned with the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations, prioritizing the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). It is concluded that gender is a priority line, which intersects with other variables such as academia, employment, digitalization, groups at risk of social exclusion, inclusion, among others."

Hoping that our improvements to the text that have been this and others in the text meet your request, receive greetings from all the authors.

 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for submitting this important paper. In general it could be published in the future if the argument was more concise and better contextualised amidst related research. 

Writing should be improved at the sentence level as there are frequent run-on sentences throughout and overuse of semi-colons. More sign posting should be given with a tighter and more explanatory introduction and summary conclusion.

Author Response

Dear reviewer.

Thank you for your valuable comments.

We have worked hard on all the points you have made and you will see that in our final version. For this purpose, we have restructured sentences and hired the service of a native English speaker editor. In addition, the required adjustments were made. 

best,

The authors. 

Reviewer 4 Report

This article is excellent and should be published with minor revisions. I really liked these lines "Do I have the "right" to lead? If I have no space because I am a woman? I take my chair and demand space. I am invaded by doubts. Despite the fear, I move forward. I do not know how far; I only know that I move forward to open roads for the women to come, be they academics, settlers, girls, women, or adolescents, because the dream is made by hand and without permission." Poignant words. Very glad to have been chosen to peer review an article by female Hispanic and Latin American academics which highlights the gender-based challenges women face in the academy and how they relate to their students differently whilst also carrying additional family and other domestic burdens but also reveals how they are part of an epistemic community through which a point of view is generated by female academics that paves the future for our world and our women. The piece is thought-provoking and very necessary.

There are some revisions required: I would like the English to be cleared up. Can the women maybe get some help from someone whose native tongue is English?

I would like to see clear headings in Bold, situated a line above the section with maybe not just authors name but also a section title that indicates what that paragraph is about.

It is not #me too but #metoo.

Author 3's section was the least engaging for me, while the others moved me through affect and emotion in the autoethnography bringing in clearly women and women's problems the entire time, author 3 did not do this. They spoke about young people but I want them to write about the particular challenges women face in the current context. See the hubris humility effect for example and also the work of people like Furnham, Robinson on how women underestimate their intelligence. Also I would like to see worked into the article the following work: on the imposter syndrome in women and women leaders

 

Sturm et al on Leader Self-awareness

Heylighen and Kingsbury: obstacles to self-actualisation in women

Also I would like to see a brief mention of gendered violence in terms of femicide in Chile and Peru where sentences are rarely handed out to men who kill women (think #niunamas or #niunamenos) what does this do to the self-confidence of women to see they can be killed with impunity? See Lagarde on Feminicidio also Munevar.

Not sure what is meant by "petite" in the text?

Also please fix on page 15, "I may be, biased"

 

Finally for discussion this was my least favorite section. It seemed like disassembled phrases presented in short paragraphs then one long one. It needs to summarize all the ideas together neatly like the introduction did.

Overall, as a female academic this article resonated very deeply with me and I recognized so many of the worries, experiences, fears, doubts, challenges and yet hopes which I too experience and my female friends in academia too. I enjoyed reading the logical but also emotional stories of the women. Some of them moved me very deeply. This article just needs to be tidied up and stream-lined. I hope to see this published soon.

Thank you for sharing so honestly your experiences with us. I hope we can pave a brighter future for girls, adolescents and women across the world.

 

 

 

Needs to be cleaned up and made more coherent. Please get help from a native speaker if possible.

Author Response

 Dear reviewer:
Thank you very much for your comments. Your words are an inspiration to us. 
We have taken each of your suggestions regarding the bibliographic references and authors you suggest and hired the services of a native English speaking editor. We worked hard with her to rewrite and improve many sentences of the text.
We also included the titles you suggested. 
Author 3 made some adjustments to her text.
The only suggestion that we considered inappropriate to include was the one related to femicide, because it was outside the topic of the text. We also changed the unclear words and restructured the discussion.

We hope this version meets your requirements. Thank you very much.

The authors.