Changing academic roles and shifting gender inequalities: a case analysis of the influence of the teaching-research nexus on the academic career prospects of female academics in The Netherlands

The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the change in academic roles for female academics and the implications of this change for their career opportunities. In this article, we therefore aim to answer the following research questions: (1) How have the changes introduced by the new public management affected the division of academic labor in universities? (2) What academic role differentiation can be found in the Dutch higher education system? (3) How is the workload of female academics distributed in the managerial Dutch university? (4) How does this workload differentiation influence their career prospects? We investigate these questions by concentrating on the Dutch academic system in general and on one case-study university in particular. Our findings indicate that the teaching-research nexus is changing in the Netherlands in that new career paths with a focus on either teaching or research have already been integrated into the formal job classification regulations. Furthermore, we find that the changing nexus is likely to be negatively related to the career prospects of female academics, while this relationship is more pronounced for mid-career academics than others.