Women’s participation in public research organisations in Argentina: evaluation mechanisms in the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA) and Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA)

Abstract

In recent years, the unequal participation of women in science and technology has been a subject of political and scholarly debate. With the goal of understanding how inequalities are problematised in academic and documentary sources, we focus on the situation of women in two public research organizations in Argentina, namely the National Atomic Energy Commission (Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, CNEA) and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria, INTA). In addition to systematising the processes that prove meaningful in producing gender gaps and barriers, our study is aimed at identifying the role attributed to mechanisms for scientific and technological recruiting, evaluation, and promotion. In both institutions, gender gaps and barriers, as well as arbitrariness and inconsistency in evaluation processes, have been extensively problematized; however, these problem areas do not engage in dialogue with one another. Drawing on contributions from the political sociology of science, we propose that an analysis of recruiting, evaluation, and promotion is key to understanding gender barriers that, in the form of institutionalised mechanisms, can interfere with women’s access to certain hierarchical positions and areas of expertise. An examination of these mechanisms can also contribute to the uncoupling of generic notions, such as STEM, which have often been used to address the problem, putting the focus on institutional processes characteristic of public research organisations.