Many of us working on gender equality in academia will recognise a familiar pattern: progress occurs because someone is passionate enough to pursue it, often without sufficient support, training, or institutional backing. A recently published article in Gender, Work & Organization examines this pattern closely, and the findings are both illuminating and sobering.
What the study found
Kai Lo Andersson’s article, “Doubting Commitment – Uncovering Window Dressing in a Technical University” (2026), investigates events at a Swedish technical university following disruption to its gender equality infrastructure.
The university maintained two parallel structures for gender mainstreaming: a network of departmental Gender Equality Officers (GEOs), coordinated by a central Gender Equality Coordinator (GEC) within HR, and a well-funded separate initiative, the “40 Percent Project,” designed to increase women’s representation among faculty. When the GEC voluntarily left in 2020 during a financial crisis, the position remained vacant for nearly two years. The GEOs received no explanation or transitional guidance.
As the author demonstrates, this silence conveyed a clear message. Through semi-structured interviews with seven GEOs, most of whom were engineers, Andersson identifies four interconnected themes:
- organisational silence interpreted as institutional devaluation;
- a shift from commitment to cynicism;
- equality work falling to passionate individuals rather than systems; and
- engineering and excellence culture serving as a structural barrier to change.
The familiar problem: individuals carrying responsibilities that systems should bear
The third theme (equality work falling to passionate individuals rather than systems) resonates most strongly with my lived experience in academia, and I will focus on it.
Without central coordination, GEOs were left to improvise their roles, often uncertain about what the university actually expected of them. This is not an isolated failure of individual officers; it is a structural problem with structural consequences.
When gender equality work lacks clear mandates, dedicated staffing, and protected budgets, several outcomes predictably follow. Officers act without shared guidelines, making the work highly variable across departments. Progress becomes contingent on the motivation and available time of individuals who, in most cases, are already carrying full research and teaching loads. The work becomes fragile: vulnerable to burnout, turnover, and being quietly deprioritised whenever competing demands arise.
The burden reliably falls on those already committed, meaning the people doing the work are often sustained only by personal conviction long after institutional support has gradually withdrawn.
Kai Lo Andersson’s article also highlights how the simultaneous existence of a generously funded, high-visibility project alongside an underfunded and understaffed HR-led structure produced a damaging contradiction. Officers noticed.
The contrast between rhetorical commitment and actual resource allocation is precisely what the literature on “window dressing” (see at the end of this post for more information about this concept) describes – and precisely what erodes trust.
A few thoughts worth reflecting on
The study’s broader argument is that EDI vulnerability is not merely a result of external political backlash, but is often fostered internally through organisational choices that subtly indicate what truly matters, a disclosure of priorities. This has implications that should be taken seriously.
First, structures matter more than goodwill. The enthusiasm of individual officers can sustain a gender equality effort temporarily, but it cannot replace institutional infrastructure. Permanent roles, clear mandates, and protected resources are not administrative luxuries; they are the conditions necessary for sustainable work.
Second, silence is never neutral. When equality work is restructured, deprioritised, or left without coordination, the lack of communication is itself a message. Institutions that fail to explain what is happening and why should not be surprised when those doing the work conclude that the commitment was never genuine to begin with.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the familiarity of this pattern is itself problematic. The fact that so many people working on gender equality in academia will read this article and recognise the situation suggests that, decades into these efforts, we are still treating structural work as if it can rely indefinitely on individual passion. It cannot.
Interested in knowing more about the concept of “window dressing”?
Here are the three bibliographic references cited in the article on the concept of “window dressing”:
Dobbin, F., and A. Kalev. 2017. “Are Diversity Programs Merely Ceremonial? Evidence-Free Institutionalization.” In The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, edited by R. Greenwood, C. Oliver, T. B. Lawrence, and R. E. Meyer. Sage.
Leslie, L. M. 2019. “Diversity Initiative Effectiveness: A Typological Theory of Unintended Consequences.” Academy of Management Review 44, no. 3: 538–563.
Dover, T. L., C. R. Kaiser, and B. Major. 2020. “Mixed Signals: The Unintended Effects of Diversity Initiatives.” Social Issues and Policy Review 14, no. 1: 152–181.
The most direct contribution to defining the concept is by Dobbin and Kalev, who explicitly describe many diversity practices as “symbolic” or “window dressing.” Leslie develops the concept within a broader theory of the unintended consequences of diversity initiatives. Dover and colleagues focus on the “mixed signals” generated when initiatives are not followed by adequate resources, which is one of the mechanisms that produces window dressing.
Based on: Andersson, Kai L.. 2026. “Doubting Commitment—Uncovering Window Dressing in a Technical University,” Gender, Work & Organization: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70159.
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.