Sexism and Silence in the University: Barriers to Institutional Accountability in the Informal Sites of Student Life

Sexism remains a pervasive issue in the experience of university students. This study investigates barriers to institutional accountability, when it comes to articulating and reporting sexism in the informal settings of student life in academia. We conducted thematic individual interviews with 11 female students from the same study track in a research university and analysed the interview accounts with feminist discursive institutionalism. The interviewees reported instances of sexism that had occurred mostly in informal student life. By interpreting these accounts from a discourse analytic approach, we investigated how students orient themselves towards the prospect of sexism becoming a matter of institutional accountability. We identified three orientations: resigned distancing, in which sexism was trivialized and silence performed as maturity; evidential ambiguity, in which sexism was treated as addressable in principle but difficult to substantiate; and systemic disillusionment, in which accountability was recognized as possible but foreclosed by informal power structures. The results suggest that silence of sexism involves rational strategies of self-protection in the delicate social-interactional setting and its embedded informal power relations. As universities consolidate their procedures for fighting sexism at formal levels, our study emphasizes the necessity but also the social-interactionally complex challenge of intervention at informal levels.