KADRI AAVIK (Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies Fellow / Tallinn University )

“The Vulnerability of Gender Equality Mechanisms in the Post-Socialist Academia: "Doing Neoliberalism" in Estonian Universities”

This paper explores the production of a gendered neoliberal rationality in post-socialist academic settings. Drawing on interviews conducted with key stakeholders in four major Estonian universities, I trace how three key gender equality policy measures are understood – quotas, workplace flexibility, and the involvement of men in efforts towards gender equality.

The findings suggest that these key ideas that form the basis of gender equality policy in Western, Nordic and EU contexts are filled with alternative meanings by Estonian academic stakeholders, in ways that distort their original purpose. These meanings primarily serve the interests of the corporate university, enabling and reinforcing the atomisation and exploitation of academic labourers, particularly women.

Collectively, these articulations constitute, along with other practices, the “doing of neoliberalism” in post-socialist university settings. Academic stakeholders do not (just) reflect an already established totalising neoliberal framework, but in fact, discursively create and reproduce what we have come to understand and refer to as “neoliberalism” in the academia.
This has implications for devising and implementing gender equality policies in higher education in the post-socialist region, as the solutions applied elsewhere in Europe might not work in the same way in Central-Eastern Europe


Kadri Aavik is a Lecturer in Sociology at Tallinn University and a Kone Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. She is interested in understanding privilege and disadvantage from an intersectional perspective, and has studied this mainly in the context of the labour market. She is using and and developing intersectionality as a research method. Her latest research focuses on men and masculinities, gender and the neoliberalisation of universities, and critical animal studies. Her recent publications in English are:
Aavik, K. (2015). “The most important decisions are made in the sauna”: The Role of Social Capital in Creating Intersectional Privilege in the Career Narratives of Estonian Male Managers. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 10(1), 39-54
Aavik, K. (2015). “Resistance to gender equality at work:
Discursive practices of Estonian male managers”. In: M. Flood,
with R. Howson (Eds.), Engaging Men in Building Gender Equality.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 182-192
Aavik, K., Kase, D. (2015). Challenging Sexism While Supporting Speciesism: The Views of Estonian Feminists on Animal Liberation and its Links to Feminism. Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 13(1), 92-127

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Christina Research Seminar is an open advanced seminar focused around interdisciplinary gender studies. The seminar is organized by Gender Studies (University of Helsinki) and is currently a part of the doctoral programme of Gender, Culture and Society (SKY). For the future programme and more information, please see: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/research/doctoral-education/doctoral-schools-and-programmes/doctoral-school-in-humanities-and-social-sciences/doctoral-programme-in-gender-culture-and-society.