Postdocs, Gender and Precarity in South African Universities

The neoliberal turn in higher education has socially constructed the public university as a private corporate entity, with students being the fee-paying clients entitled to the curriculum goods of academia. This neoliberal turn has also socially constructed the precarious postdoctoral research fellows (postdocs) who are instrumental in helping the neoliberal university achieve its ratings, rankings, and grants/subsidies, amongst other achievements. In this paper, I explore and theorise the precarious lives of eight postdocs in a research-intensive university in South Africa. I purposively recruited and conducted semi-structured interviews with all eight research participants across different faculties/departments. Two major findings emerged from the data: (1) the growing sense among the participants that postdocs are not recognised, supported, mentored and guided, and (2) the employment precarity and job insecurity that postdocs navigate and negotiate in their daily lives. Although not a major theme in the data, there was also a growing sense among the female research participants that the postdoc system is inherently a gendered and patriarchal system that marginalises female postdocs’ professional lives through career breaks and family commitments. I end the paper with some broader reflections on the need for more urgent and targeted interventions to ensure that postdocs are supported, mentored, and retained in the South African higher education system.