Gender Barriers in Academia: Perceptions of Inequality in Professional Development among Female Academics in the Faculty of Education, University of Alicante, Spain

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In my opinion, the current manuscript explores a highly important area of research that highlights female academics’ attitudes toward gender barriers in academia. While only a local scale survey was carried out, the study has strong implications and potential for future work. 

I have some suggestions for the authors’ consideration prior to acceptance for publication:

1. It is not clear to me from the current manuscript version why Faculty of Education at University of Alicante was selected for this study. More importantly I think the limitations given this choice should be made clear in the text, e.g., how generalisable are the findings; how the faculty may differ to others in view of the current study, etc.

2. While the data is likely to be too small for statistical modelling, I think this should at least be discussed as a future possibility if the number of respondents is increased.

3. It may be worthwhile exploring the demographic data (if available) for the faculty where this survey was carried out. From my experience, there are already studies that show quantitatively that as the academic position ranks rise, the proportion of females decreases. Is the same observed at the current faculty/university? And how does that correlate with the survey results.

4. I assume that the survey was carried out ensuring the respondents are anonymised from their responses, and that the respondents know that when completing the survey. And that there are no risks in any respondents and their response to be identifiable. However, it would be ensuring to have these stated in the manuscript, as this may have implications for potential bias in the survey responses.

Some other minor issues:

1. For the sub-section “Research Context and Participants” – There seems to be slight inconsistencies in the way numbers are rounded off and how many decimals are reported in the text. There also seems to be a type in line 117: 41.8% should be 41.2% instead. In line 121 – my understanding is children are also often part of the dependent cohort, so perhaps this should be re-worded as “…both children and other dependents…”.

2. Line 7: “The study used a mixed method…”.

3. Paragraph starting from line 69: please consider re-wording the first two sentences, as they currently do not make sense to me.

I appreciate the opportunity to review this very interesting manuscript and hope that the authors find my suggestions useful.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

First of all, we would like to thank you for taking the time to read our article.

Secondly, we are deeply grateful for all the indications and suggestions for improvement of our article.

Among the suggestions for improvement, we have included some more recent references and reformulated some sentences.

Regarding the sample, we have explained the selection of the sample, and the low percentage of the sample and we have adjusted the rounding of some percentages.

Regarding the results, we have explained the use of a 7-point scale and changed the naming of the scale values in a clearer way. 

In the discussion, we have included some indications that seemed appropriate to explain the results. 

Similarly, in the conclusion, we have added the implications and limitations of our study. In the limitations, we have highlighted the fact that our sample is not very representative, due to the fact that it is a research study in which the participants have accepted a specific data protection policy and that this, together with the sensitive issue of gender in the workplace, has meant that our research has a low sample size. Despite this, we underline our commitment to increase the sample in our future research.

Finally, we have corrected some errors in the manuscript and corrected some references. 

We hope that our modifications will be to your pleasure.

Kind regards.

Reviewer 2 Report

Although the author specifies that "This article does not intend to offer a clear evaluation of the barriers faced by female academics in the Faculty of Education of the University of Alicante", the sample is very small and unrepresentative: there are only 17 individuals and among them not all the professional categories of the university teaching profession in Spain are represented. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis should appear in the results. It is not in the results but is included in the discussion. 

The article should be published with a larger sample. I would recommend that the subjects investigated should be five times larger than the study items, at least in the qualitative analysis. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

First of all, we would like to thank you for taking the time to read our article.

Secondly, we are deeply grateful for all the indications and suggestions for improvement of our article.

Among the suggestions for improvement, we have included some more recent references and reformulated some sentences.

Regarding the sample, we have explained the selection of the sample, and the low percentage of the sample and we have adjusted the rounding of some percentages.

Regarding the results, we have explained the use of a 7-point scale and changed the naming of the scale values in a clearer way. 

In the discussion, we have included some indications that seemed appropriate to explain the results. 

Similarly, in the conclusion, we have added the implications and limitations of our study. In the limitations, we have highlighted the fact that our sample is not very representative, due to the fact that it is a research study in which the participants have accepted a specific data protection policy and that this, together with the sensitive issue of gender in the workplace, has meant that our research has a low sample size. Despite this, we underline our commitment to increase the sample in our future research.

Finally, we have corrected some errors in the manuscript and corrected some references. 

We hope that our modifications will be to your pleasure.

Kind regards.

Reviewer 3 Report

This is potentially a very interesting piece of work, on a topical issue. There is some good summary of some of the barriers faced by female academics and some of the findings are interesting. However, as it stands the article needs further work. The introductory section is a bit disjointed and needs further supporting evidence and references in place, eg. the discussion of perceptions of gender inequalities needs to be linked more clearly to the issue of the glass ceiling. As the focus of the article is on women's perceptions, I would expect some reference to the literature on this, eg there is a recent special edition of the Journal of Gender Studies (eds Rosa and Clavero) that may be of help. A lot of the cited literature is also quite old and needs to be updated. The discussion of barriers on p.2 could also be improved. The introduction could also be more contextualised. The article states at the end that the focus is on the perceptions of female academics rather than the actual barriers experienced, but it would be helpful to have even a short overview of the particular institutional context, eg data on female participation at different levels, promotion outcomes, equality measures taken to date etc.

The methodology and findings also need further work. Eg as mixed methods are used, you need to clarify if the quantitative findings are regarded as representative (I assume they are not, with only 17 participants in one faculty). You should also discuss the ethical aspects of the research, as you are focusing on a small number of participants in an identified faculty (eg there may be concerns about identifiability). Clarify if ethical approval was obtained and how any ethical issues were dealt with. Also in terms of methods, you might consider how helpful a 7 point scale is when dealing with only a small number of responses, and why this was selected.

In terms of presenting the findings, the text really added little to the content of the tables, so you could probably save word count by focusing on the tables only. The tables themselves could be made clearer if instead of listing the values by number you listed the values by response (eg 'totally disagree'). This would be more understandable for the reader. It might in fact be better to outline only the key findings rather than outlining absolutely everything, as this would enable you to spend more time on the discussion. The main concern at present is that there is very little discussion of the findings and the level of analysis is quite weak. This really needs to be developed. There are some interesting points in the conclusion but again these could be discussed in more detail.

Overall, there are some interesting findings here, but you could make more of your material through engagement with more recent literature and more thorough discussion and contextualisation of the findings.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

First of all, we would like to thank you for taking the time to read our article.

Secondly, we are deeply grateful for all the indications and suggestions for improvement of our article.

Among the suggestions for improvement, we have included some more recent references and reformulated some sentences.

Regarding the sample, we have explained the selection of the sample, and the low percentage of the sample and we have adjusted the rounding of some percentages.

Regarding the results, we have explained the use of a 7-point scale and changed the naming of the scale values in a clearer way. 

In the discussion, we have included some indications that seemed appropriate to explain the results. 

Similarly, in the conclusion, we have added the implications and limitations of our study. In the limitations, we have highlighted the fact that our sample is not very representative, due to the fact that it is a research study in which the participants have accepted a specific data protection policy and that this, together with the sensitive issue of gender in the workplace, has meant that our research has a low sample size. Despite this, we underline our commitment to increase the sample in our future research.

Finally, we have corrected some errors in the manuscript and corrected some references. 

We hope that our modifications will be to your pleasure.

Kind regards.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The study is interesting; however, the sample is still not representative. It is not clear why only the faculty of education of Alicante was chosen, since the rest of the faculties of education in Spain also suffer from high rates of female students and faculty. 

I would recommend the authors to extend the study to other faculties in order to have a more representative sample.

Author Response

Estimated reviewer.

We understand your recommendations and deeply appreciate them. Furthermore, we understand your concern about the sample. 

As you explain, it is true that in many other universities the rate of female students and female professors is very high. In our case, we chose the Faculty of Education of the University of Alicante for two reasons. The first reason is that our area of knowledge is linked to education. On the other hand, the second reason is related to the fact that we work and study in this faculty and university, it is our closest environment and our direct interest has been to know the barriers and difficulties experienced by female teachers in the Faculty of Education of the University of Alicante. 

We hope you understand our reasons and our commitment to the line of research so that in the future we can continue the research in other universities.

Likewise, we have included studies and references from recent years in the bibliography, updating our article.

Kind regards, Andrea and Rocío.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article has been improved in terms of presentation, and the results are significantly easier to understand. The discussion has also been expanded and there is an additional literature reference. There is also a bit more clarity in relation to the methodology.

However, many of the points raised in the previous review have not really been addressed, eg the engagement with recent literature is minimal, including on the issue of perceptions, and there is no explanation of institutional context. I am also still unclear if ethical approval was obtained. A consent form is mentioned but there is no discussion of other ethical issues. It is also unclear that the data is not intended to be generalisable as the sentence in the conclusion that appears to address this is unclear.

In terms of presentation, the quantitative data are clear but the qualitative findings are not set out in the findings section. There are some references in the discussion but they should be included in the findings, for clarity.

Finally, the discussion could be strengthened further and more related to the literature. On a minor point, some of the sentences need a little reworking, eg they are incomplete (see eg the sentence beginning 'Alluding..' on p.9.

Author Response

Dear reviewer. 

First of all, we thank you for taking the time to read our article. We also thank you for considering the changes and improvements we have made. 

We have updated and added new bibliography to complete and improve our research as you advised us.

Regarding ethical issues, we used a consent form that ensured the confidentiality of the participants. These are public data as long as they are requested from the authors. No other ethical issues were necessary in our case, as we do not do research on individuals as in the field of biology or medicine.

In our research, we present quantitative data. Despite this, I want you to know that we have improved the discussion of the results.

We hope you understand our reasons and our commitment to improving the article. 

kind regards, Andrea and Rocío.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Congratulations! The changes made have greatly improved the article. I recommend its publication. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your kind words, they make us very happy. Thank you for your collaboration and recommendations during this time.

Kind regards, Andrea and Rocío.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx