Working in Higher Education in France Today: A Specific Challenge for Women

Abstract

By 2017, French higher education had undergone a dramatic restructuration following the Bologna process twenty years earlier which impact all the European universities (Rüegg, 2010), and the implementation of the French LRU in 2007 (Stavrou, 2017). Some studies examined this new model’s effect on university academics through international or european comparative approaches (Musselin, 2008 ; Tiechler, Höhle, 2013). A decade after the French LRU, our particular focus concerns the activity of women with children like in others organizations (Bercot, 2014). The associate professors have to overcome in a very competitive context where the time management is a real challenge as the 3 coordinators at different levels in the faculty point it out. At first, an extensive survey (1409 returned questionnaires) shows that women are significantly more concern than men by these contraints. Then, in a qualitative approach, some 28 biographical interviews identify the different strategies women find.