Oldal 63 [63]
WHAT IS BEHIND THE ACADEMIC ELECTION?
If we were to make evaluations based on this data, the academic election of
2016 in Hungary where 26 men were elected and not a single woman, appears
to be a somewhat tragic situation. With this turn of events, even the previous
meagre 7% ratio of women decreased. Among others, this was one of the reasons
for which, after the elections of 2016, several researchers set their pens to paper
and articulated their opinions regarding the distressing events. Predominantly
these articles stated the results as “unacceptable”, “impermissible” and “woeful”.
The voices articulated on the pages of Magyar Tudomany [Hungarian Science]
blamed mainly our academic election system for the situation. Péter Somogyi,
a full member of the MTA shared his hypothesis that the Academy’s voting
system is the main issue, and that the proportion of representation of the sexes
did not improve not because Hungarian women would have been less qualified
for academic roles than their western counterparts. “At the general meeting
we voted in the twenty-six exceptional associate male scholars to be taken in
as correspondents, besides external members as well as honorary members,
as a contribution to their academic advancement. I am ashamed that no woman
was admitted; this is unequivocally discrimination and it needs to be changed.
This wailsome fact is that it is a reflection of our electoral system.”!”
Most of the academics who made a stand in this matter believe that changing
the obsolete voting system might be an adequate way to give women more
access to the highest level of the academic hierarchy. The Western academies
provide very clear models for it.
Because of the ossified traditions, habits and public opinion driving the
logic behind the elections, however, it seems that more radical modifications
are needed. The unreasonable neglect of qualified and available female post¬
doctoral researchers will remain just as it is for decades if we just keep waiting
to see female academic participation becoming natural instead of taking them
into scientific circulation with the help of regulations from above, for example,
with a quota system based on equal accomplishments. Because “women often
say that they made it to the academical field ’almost accidentally’, they were
lacking the confidence to believe that they could befit such a place”.!”* The main
reason for this is that the identities of female scholars and their scientific self¬
articulation became problematic because of their lack of a solid rooting in the
academic ground, their lack of reassuring models and their fragmentation. The
vocational self-defining process in this scientific environment, which has been
unknown to women because of the strong walls of male dominance within the
Academy so far, means extra challenges for them in addition to their
achievements. From this perspective, the quota would be an affirmative model
2 Somogyi: Alkalmasak-e a magyar nök, 862-864.
13 Caplan, P.J., guoted by Papp, E. (2007): A nők és férfiak közti esélyegyenlőség a kutatásfejlesztésben
Magyarországon nemzetközi összehasonlításban, https://adoc.pub/doktori-ertekezes-papp¬
eszter.html (accessed 1 May 2017), 32.
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