She’s taking the minutes again. Nobody asked her to — she was simply told it “could be something for her.” Four or five men are talking. She never says anything. Her opinion is never asked.
Nothing here looks like discrimination. No one said anything overtly sexist. If you asked the room, most people would probably describe it as a normal Tuesday meeting. And that, it turns out, is exactly the point.
Together with Ella Oelbrandt and Christophe Vanroelen, I’ve just had a paper accepted that looks at exactly these moments: the ones too small and too ambiguous to report, but common enough to shape how women experience academic careers. We spent time with 24 interviewees and 5 focus groups — women and men across the social sciences and business and management disciplines at a Belgian university — asking not “does gender inequality exist here,” but “what does it actually look like when it happens, in the room, in real time.”
Beyond the obvious
There’s already a well-established vocabulary for gender inequality in academia: the “chilly climate,” misrecognition, the “leaky pipeline.” These concepts are accurate, and they matter. But they mostly describe outcomes and atmospheres — they don’t tell you what actually happened in the meeting, the supervision session, or the hallway conversation that produced that atmosphere in the first place.
That’s where the microaggressions framework earns its keep. Originally developed to describe subtle, everyday expressions of racial bias, it directs attention to the interaction itself: the specific comment, the specific silence, the specific way credit got allocated. We weren’t trying to relabel what’s already known about gender inequality in universities. We wanted to see it happen.
Three kinds of small
Across the interviews, three distinct patterns emerged.
Microassaults — the openly sexist comment or gesture — came up constantly, but almost always framed as something from the past. Senior academics described specific men, specific decades, specific incidents, usually the 1990s. Tellingly, participants tended to treat these as deviations from an otherwise fair system, attributable to one difficult colleague rather than to the institution. Overt sexism, in other words, has become socially unacceptable enough that people now locate it safely in someone else’s past.
Microinvalidations were different: ongoing, routine, and normalized as “just how things work.” One participant described bringing in a male co-supervisor for a PhD student who wouldn’t accept her feedback — and watching the student’s tone change instantly once another man was in the room. Another put it more bluntly: “It is not necessarily that someone is sexist. It is the structure of how things work. […] The structure is built in a way that heads have more say, and they tend to be mostly men.” A male participant offered his own version of the same pattern from the outside: “In meetings, men talk a lot and women do the work behind the scenes. […] In the end, men talk about the results, and their names appear on the publication.”
Microinsults operated closer to identity and competence — the subtle mismatch between “woman” and “ideal academic.” Women described being expected to absorb caring and coordinating work that never appears in a job description, being read by students as “sweet” rather than knowledgeable in teaching evaluations, and — for those who had been pregnant — watching a gap appear in their publication record at exactly the career stage when “uninterrupted productivity” is quietly the norm being measured against.
None of these, on their own, would likely meet anyone’s bar for a formal complaint. That’s not a flaw in the framework — it’s the finding. Ambiguity is the mechanism, not a side effect of it.
The coping paradox
The part of this study I keep coming back to isn’t the microaggressions themselves — it’s what people did about them.
Broadly, coping fell into two camps. Problem-focused coping meant speaking up: raising something in a meeting, approaching a supervisor, filing a report. This was consistently the riskier route. One participant described the predictable response to voicing concern: being framed as “a troublemaker who is looking for something that is not there,” or “too sensitive.” We ended up calling this a secondary microaggression — the act of naming the problem becomes its own new instance of it.
Emotion-focused coping was far more common, and mostly involved talking to trusted colleagues. This mattered more than it might sound: several participants described how an isolated, self-doubting feeling (“was that actually weird, or am I overreacting?”) turned into confident recognition the moment they compared notes with other women having the identical experience. Other participants leaned on something less relational — intrinsic passion for the work itself, as a kind of ballast that made the rest bearable.
Here’s the paradox: both strategies help people stay in academia. And both strategies can quietly reinforce the exact system producing the problem. Talking it out with colleagues is validating, but it stays private, so nothing structural changes. Leaning on passion for the work is a genuine source of resilience, but it also aligns neatly with the institution’s own preferred image of the fully devoted, always-available academic — which is itself part of what makes deviation (a maternity leave, a slower year, a boundary) look like a problem in someone’s file. Coping, in other words, isn’t just a personal-resilience story. It’s doing organizational work, and not always work that helps.
From theory to practice
If ambiguity is the mechanism, then the fix can’t only be “better reporting channels,” although those matter too — several participants described existing reporting points as poorly followed up, which undermines trust in the system even when it’s used correctly.
What stood out more is a gap in vocabulary. More than one participant described institutional leaders — deans, in this case — as not resistant so much as unequipped: they “lack knowledge about how to talk about these things,” and default to “this is just the way it is.” That’s a trainable, fixable gap, and a cheaper one to close than most people assume. Concretely, that means giving people in leadership and evaluation roles a shared, practical language for naming what’s happening in the room — not just a policy document, but the ability to recognize a microinvalidation while it’s occurring and say something about it on the spot.
It also means looking hard at evaluation criteria themselves. If “uninterrupted output” and “constant confident performance” are the implicit yardsticks, they will keep converting ordinary life events — a pregnancy, a period of self-doubt, a preference for careful over performative — into something that reads as a deficiency, regardless of how gender-neutral the criteria look on paper.
The broader picture
This paper sits alongside a question I keep returning to in my own research: what makes some careers sustainable and others quietly unsustainable, even when nothing dramatic ever happens? Economic precarity is one lever. This study is about a different one — the ordinary, well-intentioned, hard-to-name interactions that accumulate into the same outcome: people deciding, gradually, that they don’t quite fit.
The uncomfortable implication is that individual coping — however resourceful, however necessary right now — isn’t a substitute for organizations doing the harder, structural work. Our data can’t tell you that any one meeting matters. It can tell you that meetings like it, repeated often enough, are doing more than anyone in the room probably intends.
Oelbrandt, E., Schreurs, B., & Vanroelen, C. (in press). Navigating gender microaggressions: Coping practices and organizational dynamics in gendered higher education institutions. Gender, Work & Organization.