Are equality and excellence a happy marriage of terms?: How gender figures in the business case for change

Abstract

This chapter offers a critique of the business case for gender equality in the context of academic neoliberalism. The power of the advocacy narrative the business case provides is undeniable, but whom does it really benefit? What projects does it build and which projects does it neutralise or displace? If gender equality has long implied a levelling process, its proxy, diversity, is now reimagined as a site of resource-rich differences, and as building, not undermining, excellence. How is this story constructed, what are its presuppositions, and what work does it do in the neoliberal academy? The chapter examines these questions with particular reference to impacts this narrative may have on certain types of feminist scholarship, arguing that the business case for gender equality promotes ideals of balance, coherence, and social value at odds with more dissonant and critical approaches. This may have particular significance for research in the social sciences, and for feminist approaches that value critical standpoint theory in their methodology. Moreover, the neoliberal academic conception of excellence as a marketised form of public good is shown to be a problem for certain feminist projects. Marrying excellence to equality, as the business case promises to do, may not be as felicitous as it seems.