ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the dialectical relationship between the promotion of scientific excellence and the pursuit of gender equality in research and in academia. It primarily focuses on the path taken by European research policies, to promote and disseminate an inclusive notion of excellence, while building European Research Framework programmes, a European Research Area, and European Higher Education Area largely grounded into the same metrics, competitive calls, and principles of selection and ranking as those typically used for assessing scientific excellence. Briefly “retro-engineering” this performative concept lacking a proper definition, the chapter recalls how its diffusion has been met with different contexts, highlighting the simultaneous development of the European Union’s (EU’s) research and gender equality policies, and the institutional relevance given at EU level to feminist critiques of this notion. Assessing the successive developments of those policies, the chapter highlights a cumulative effort to challenge gender-biased metrics of academic merit and scientific quality, and reveals how they have positively impacted EU research and innovation framework programmes and member states policies to support gender equality in academia, with two objectives still out of sight: bridging the East-West divide and adopting an intersectional approach.
