Making Women Full Professors. How Promotion Programmes May Supersede the ‘Fixing the women’ and ‘Fixing the system’ Binary

This paper examines the co-dependence between individual support mechanisms and organizational structures in advancing gender equity at Norway’s largest university. We analyse outcomes and experiences from two decades of targeted funding initiatives: qualification grants for women associate professors and start-up grants for women faculty. Our mixed-methods approach combine surveys and in-depth interviews with grant recipients, department heads, and administrators. The qualification grants facilitated promotions to full professor positions, while start-up grants assisted recipients in establishing themselves as accomplished researchers. Grant recipients predictably valued these resources, as did department heads, who appreciated these initiatives both as direct support for women faculty and as catalysts encouraging them to engage more broadly with gender equality issues.Notably, many recipients interpreted these grants not merely as opportunities for personal advancement but as institutional acknowledgements of systemic barriers. They viewed the programmes as legitimate compensation for structural gender inequities. This perspective challenges the conventional binary between “fixing the women‘ and ’fixing the system.” Rather than simply addressing presumed individual deficiencies, these grants functioned as tangible manifestations of organizational commitment to gender equality, demonstrating how targeted individual support can simultaneously represent and facilitate structural change.