Precariousness and Gender Asymmetries Among Early Career Researchers: A Focus on STEM Fields in the Italian Academia

This article analyses how the growing instability and uncertainty in the Italian academic system intersect the mechanisms that reproduce gender disadvantages in scientific careers. More precisely, it focuses on how job instability influence career chances among male and female PhD holders at the very beginning of their career in STEM disciplines, paying attention to the mechanisms that foster the exclusion from the academic system. On the base of the results of the Doctorate Holders’ Vocational Integration survey, conducted by ISTAT in 2014, and of a qualitative organisational case study conducted in an Italian STEM department, working conditions and career strategies of male and female early stages researchers are explored adopting both an objective and a subjective perspective. The analyses point out that the current precarisation of scientific careers does not seem to scratch and/or undermine the organizational culture in the Italian universities, which relies on a traditional gender model.