Lived experiences of precarity: the gendered paths of precariousness in Italian and Polish contexts

Globally, the scientific community has been experiencing radical changes. The neoliberal turn, aimed at enhancing the competitiveness of research organisations and national science systems (Eren, 2025), brought not only audit mechanisms, ‘metricisation’, and managerial solutions, but also cuts to state funding that led to financial instability (Burton and Bowman, 2022). An increase in unstable and insecure employment is part and parcel of these processes, due to unpredictable external funding sources, including grant money. Job precarity is becoming the new normal in higher education (Blackham, 2020) and is no longer a short and transitional stage for early-career (EC) researchers, often expanding until mid-career (Vatansever and Kölemen, 2020). This inevitably has an impact on all other spheres of life and often expands to become an existential precariousness (Armano and Murgia, 2013). While the eroding working conditions increasingly concern all researchers both in academia and research institutes, job precarity is argued to perpetuate gender inequalities, with women affected more severely by its consequences (O’Keefe and Courtois, 2019) and finding it harder than men to access secure job positions (Picardi, 2019). Given all this, there is a need to ‘move the discussion of precarity from one centred on employment practices, institutional decisions, and career progression to a more holistic perspective on precarity as both a set of structures which (re)produce inequalities but also as a pervasive and dominating culture or atmosphere’ (Burton and Bowman, 2022, p. 499). Against this background, this chapter explores the perception and experience of precarious working conditions of men and women researchers at different career stages and from different fields, in two countries: Italy and Poland.