A worth reading chapter by Anna-Lena Rose, Sude Pekşen, Liudvika Leišytė, and Nina Bieling, titled: External Engagement of Academics in the Soft Sciences: Exploring Gender Patterns in the Baltic Sea Region in May 2026 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-17936-4_8 has been published in a book titled: The Shifting Balance of Academic Systems: National, Regional, Global? Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Scope and contribution of the study
The chapter provides a timely and nuanced contribution to ongoing debates about gender equity in higher education. Drawing on a cross-country comparison of Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, and Sweden, the authors examine how institutional factors – contractual arrangements, career incentives, and organisational expectations – shape the participation of male and female academics in third mission activities, with a specific focus on the soft sciences.
Challenging traditional gender patterns
The chapter’s most provocative finding concerns the apparent inversion of conventional gender hierarchies in external engagement. As the authors note, their results show that “traditional gender patterns are challenged within the soft sciences in selected countries of the Baltic Sea region, with female academics being more likely to engage in external activities than males.” This is a striking observation that requires careful interpretation. On the surface, it might suggest that the soft sciences in Northern and Eastern Europe have become spaces of relative gender equity, or even female advantage, in knowledge transfer and societal outreach. However, such a reading risks being overly optimistic.
Persistent structural inequalities
Recent scholarship across various European contexts continues to document persistent structural inequalities that complicate any straightforward narrative of progress. Female academics, even when they engage more frequently in external activities, often do so under conditions of greater precarity, heavier service loads, and more limited institutional recognition than their male counterparts. The quantitative measure of engagement – time spent on external activities – does not necessarily translate into equivalent career rewards, visibility, or influence. In this sense, higher rates of female external engagement may partly reflect an unequal distribution of “invisible labour” rather than a genuine dismantling of gender hierarchies.
Lessons from the Athena SWAN Charter
This concern is not new. Among the earliest and most influential contributions to this debate were the evaluations of the Athena SWAN Charter, launched in the United Kingdom in 2005 and later adopted in Ireland. The first analyses of the Athena SWAN programme already highlighted these dynamics: that women’s participation in academic life – including outreach, mentoring, and public engagement – was frequently high in volume but low in institutional reward, and that gender equity initiatives risked becoming bureaucratic exercises unless they addressed root causes embedded in organisational culture, promotion criteria, and resource allocation. These early critical assessments warned against mistaking activity for advancement.
Institutional incentives and perceptions
The finding by Rose and colleagues that “the perceived importance of external engagement to career advancement is positively related to time spent on external engagement, especially during teaching-free periods” adds an important institutional dimension to this picture. It suggests that when academics – regardless of gender – perceive external work as career-relevant, they invest more time in it. Yet the question of whether this perception is equally available and equally rewarded for women and men remains open, and is one that the Athena SWAN literature has repeatedly identified as a central fault line.
Conclusion: rethinking engagement and career outcomes
It will be worth continuing the debate on when women engage more, why they do so, and at what cost to their careers; ultimately, a higher number does not necessarily translate into a better position.
Chapter from: The Shifting Balance of Academic Systems: National, Regional, Global?
Part of the book series: The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective (CHAC,volume 25)
AI‑Assisted: Portions of this text were translated from Italian to English and reviewed for English language by AI, which also suggested paragraph headings. The entire content has been thoroughly verified by RB.