The Connection Between Gender Budgeting and Academic Housekeeping in RPOs

Gender Budgeting is a tool to apply the gender mainstreaming perspective to the accountability process in order to give evidence of the unequal distribution of public resources between women and men. Academic Housekeeping is any task “low-status, time-consuming, largely invisible, and that nevertheless needs to be done” (Kalm, 2019) in the academic daily business. It is a source of gender inequality since it is largely ascribed to women. Money and time are two sides of the same coin of Gender Inequality in Academia and therefore need to be identified and managed with an holistic approach that recognizes the interconnections between them. The results chain of the Performance-Oriented budgeting approach is therefore used to describe the transformation of the budget for salaries into the value of researchers’ work through time, activities, products and results. In this process, Academic Housekeeping emerges as a matter of Gender Budgeting, too. Literature describes Academic Housekeeping as an inequality regime echoing the domestic sphere and bringing its biases and limitations to the scientific race of competitiveness. The Housekeeping tasks are assigned largely arbitrarily and with unintentional side-effects. Its negative gender impact on women’s career is also clearly recognized by four main studies, in every field and with further intersectional spill overs. Gender Budgeting reports in Academia therefore do need to embed a Gender impact assessment of Academic Housekeeping in every step of the main methodologies adopted: Identity, Context Analysis, Planning Analysis, Budget Reclassification, Implementation and Performance Audit. The conceptual framework that emerges from the paper confirms the benefits that might arise from further researches on this field. The paper stems from the LeTSGEPs European Horizon Project (Leading Towards Sustainable Gender Equality Plans RPOs).