Tullia Jack

Women outnumber men in academia — until they don’t.

Last year a senior colleague asked if I could teach on a course with them. I said I couldn’t since I was finishing up a project.

Their response: “Oh, how nice — do you have a rich husband?”

In 2025. At a Nordic university. From a colleague who describes themself as a feminist.

This, friends, is bias. Not dramatic, not malicious, but structurally deep: not seeing a woman’s achievement as her own. It turns out there is a name for the belief that women don’t really belong in research -the silent standpoint.

The silent standpoint is a widespread but un-articulated belief that women are less qualified for the top academic positions. Too taboo to say out loud. But present, structurally, in how colleagues are evaluated, recruited, and imagined. My colleague Emma Lundin added that one of her “core annoyances in Sweden is the much-held belief that gender equality was achieved at some point in the recent past, and that structural inequality as a consequence doesn’t exist.” Except that it does, if you look at the leaking pipe graph above.

The authors of the silent standpoint, Järvinen and Mik-Meyer are both female professors at Danish Universities where women constitute only 26% of full professors in the social sciences. They interviewed 77 Danish professors in the social science (46 men and 31 women) and found remarkable differences in the explanations of men and women on gender imbalance of professors.

Women pointed to the university itself: male networks that advance careers, evaluation criteria that favour a narrow definition of research excellence, an unequal distribution of service and administrative work that drains women’s research time, and a culture where women are, as one interviewee put it, allowed — but not truly welcome.

Men pointed elsewhere. To family. To women’s choices. To women’s lack of competitive drive (p.7). Only about one in five male professors mentioned any structural or institutional factor — compared to 97% of women. And half of the male professors hesitated significantly or refused to answer at all.

Some of the consequences of the silent standpoint (random selection from my personal experience):

• Bachelor and Masters thesis students not taking feedback seriously.
• Visiting researchers asking for all male colleagues emails planning “to do something together” and not asking for mine.
• Male colleagues adding each other to their grant applications.

If my n=1 experience is widespread this is a huge potential loss for knowledge production. And since mixed-gender research teams produce more novel and higher-impact discoveries (Yang et al., 2022), women in political leadership significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Mavisakalyan & Tarverdi, 2019; Salamon, 2022), the silent standpoint isn’t just an obstacle for women in academia. It’s an obstacle for the kind of knowledge production the world urgently needs.

The response from Nordic academia has mostly been to fix the women. Mentoring schemes. Confidence workshops. Strategies for developing female talent.

But the intervention model isn’t working — because the problem is not women.

The problem is in the structures: who gets into networks, how excellence is defined, who absorbs the invisible service work, whose research is treated as “hardcore scientific thinking” (Järvinen & Mik-Meyer, 2026, p.9 (this is now my LinkedIn tagline)). These ideas are not neutral. They encode bias about what research is — and those assumptions have consequences some of which you can see in the above graphs and my n=1 experience, but many of which we don’t see, can barely think about and don’t have the vocabulary to speak about.

Thanks Järvinen & Mik-Meyer for giving us a new language to deal with this old problem.

Reference List

Järvinen, M., & Mik‐Meyer, N. (2026). The Silent Standpoint: How Professors Explain Gender Disparities in Academia. The British Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70095

Mavisakalyan, A., & Tarverdi, Y. (2019). Gender and climate change: Do female parliamentarians make a difference? European Journal of Political Economy, 56, 151–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2018.08.001

Salamon, H. (2022). The effect of women’s parliamentary participation on renewable energy policy outcomes. European Journal of Political Research, 62(1), 174–196. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12539

Yang, Y., Tian, T. Y., Woodruff, T. K., Jones, B. F., & Uzzi, B. (2022). Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(36), e2200841119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2200841119

In Sweden, almost half of all households are single-person households. That comes at a cost.

People living alone spend a large share of their income on housing — in rental accommodation, often more than those with families. Two adults sharing a home also share the bills: broadband, home insurance, streaming services. Housing — the single biggest expense — can be split in half. Are your housing costs too high? Try moving in with someone. It’s not about romance. It’s about mathematics.

You don’t need to be in love to move in together. Several people choosing to share a home — whether they already know each other or are strangers — is nothing new, but today, when so many of us live alone, share-housing is relevant in a new way. Two best friends can share a two-bedroom flat. A recently divorced 50-year-old can rent out their spare room to a student. Three pensioners can sell their small flats and buy a larger home together.

I recently completed a research project on solo living and published the study Home Alone: solo living pathways, everyday experiences and policy implications for sharing and sustainability. My research shows that most people who live alone did not choose it as their first preference — it came about due to various circumstances. It might be moving to a new city for a job, going through a divorce, or children leaving home. Many of the people I interviewed said they could imagine living with someone again, if the right opportunity came along.

It’s no secret that Sweden is an expensive place to live. Households spend on average a fifth of their disposable income on housing — and for renters, the figure is even higher. But living with others isn’t just about money. People living alone are more often at risk of loneliness and have fewer social connections.

In my study, thirteen out of twenty-three people living alone spontaneously brought up feelings of loneliness. It’s not an easy topic to raise with someone you’ve just met, which makes their accounts all the more significant. Several describe what it feels like to have no one to call when the sofa needs moving, to have to hire help through an app instead of asking a friend, or to come home to a quiet kitchen every evening. Sharing a home with someone else doesn’t have to mean deep conversations all the time — it’s about someone noticing when you’re tired, the smell of food when you walk in the door, having a “we” in your home.

Living with others is also better for the environment. People living alone have twice the per-person carbon footprint of those in larger households. Every household has its own kitchen, its own washing machine, its own heating bill to pay.

“But what if we start arguing?” is the most common objection to sharing a home. It’s easy to understand — most people have heard stories about unpaid rent, dishes that never get washed, or conflicts about the aircon. But conflict is no reason to avoid living with others. On the contrary, it shows how important it is to be able to talk to each other. Resolving problems respectfully and listening to one another can actually strengthen the relationship and contribute to everyone’s wellbeing.

Problems and arguments most often arise when there are no clear ground rules from the start. A great deal of that can be avoided by talking through the important things in advance — for example, how household chores, money, guests and quiet hours will work. One option is to draw up a simple written agreement together. It only takes an hour, but can save months of unnecessary conflict.

There is no right age for living with others. On the contrary: for pensioners, a shared home can be the difference between isolation and a rich social life. Older people living in collective arrangements consistently report higher quality of life, more companionship and a stronger sense of security. In Sweden and Denmark there is a long tradition of senior co-housing for those who have passed 60 — and interest is growing.

Nobody needs to start a full-scale commune with a shared garden and communal dinners. It’s perfectly fine to start small. Call your friend who lives in a four-room apartment. Ask a sibling if they want to go halves in a cottage. Put a room up on GumTree. Contact your local council to find out what local support is available for shared housing arrangements.

Sweden’s housing crisis is certainly a structural problem. But it is also a problem that people can partly solve themselves — one flat at a time, one spare room at a time, one conflict at a time.

Living together is cheaper, more fun, and healthier.

When I moved from Australia to Sweden more than a decade ago, I did not expect to fall for a small, fluorescent‑lit room in the basement, but tvättstuga are actually awesome.

At first it felt a bit weird to share washing machines with an entire building. You book a slot, carry down your laundry and suddenly you’re in a semi‑public space where intimacies of everyday life hang on communal drying lines. Over time, I realised the tvättstuga isn’t just a quirky Swedish custom – it’s a powerful piece of shared infrastructure.

I’ve written about this for The Conversation. You can read the full piece here:
https://theconversation.com/how-swedens-communal-laundries-shield-renters-from-rising-energy-bills-279415

Malin and Fredrik from Hörby decided not to renovate their 1970s house. You are my heroes.

Publicly saying no is inspirational. Renovating takes time, money, and energy—resources that could be spent elsewhere. With children, with friends, or in rest. Not renovating is not about settling for less; it is about choosing to be happy. I love that you are generous enough to share your story.

Doing less might be one of the most meaningful ways to live more. Thanks for pointing this out.

Dear students,

This is not a rehearsal.

When I started teaching sustainable fashion in 2012, “sustainability” was still daggy, hempy and a bit embarrassing. Back then, my students were just beginning to grasp the scale of the problem, but once they saw it, they couldn’t un‑see it. They organised guerilla clothes‑swaps, dumpster‑dived for dinner, turned up at protests with home‑screen‑printed banners and leaking dye‑stained fingers. Their projects were messy and sometimes naïve, but they were trying with their whole selves to live as if the climate crisis was real.

Now, in 2026 in the middle of an unfolding climate emergency, most of you can recite the crisis perfectly: 1.5 degrees, tipping points, IPCC, planetary boundaries, you probably even know the SDGs off by heart. You know the facts. And then, in the next breath, many of you tell me your dream is a sustainability role at a major oil company or fast‑fashion brand, ideally with an international relocation package and a fancy job title.

David Graeber called them “bullshit jobs” roles so pointless that even the person doing them suspects society could function fine without them. In sustainability, we’ve invented a sub‑species: green bullshit jobs. The ones that massage emissions inventories, polish “net zero by 2050” brochures, or design the reusable cup campaign for an airline that keeps opening new routes.

Here’s the hard part: I am scared I am helping train you for precisely these green bullshit jobs. Are my classes a conveyor belt into the greenwashing departments of organisations still betting on a cooked planet?

In 2018 hundreds of thousands of students signed pledges not to work for companies expanding fossil fuel extraction, and to use your leverage to push institutions to divest. I was proud, inspired, a bit in awe. What happened to you?

I lecture about climate justice, sacrifice zones, frontline communities already losing homes, livelihoods and lives. Then I mark essays about green influencers, sustainable energy drinks and innovative budget airlines.

Something is rotten in the state of sustainability.

Yes, the climate crisis is terrifying, and we have to deal with it in digestible chunks. I tell myself that wanting a salary and some stability is not a moral failure. But I still wonder if I am failing you, and if we are all, collectively, failing the critical moment we are living in.

So here is what I actually want for us.

I want us to treat the climate and biodiversity crises as the non‑negotiable background of everything we do. Not just a themed week. Not catchphrases you memorise and then forget, but the basic condition of our lifetime.

I want us to centre climate justice. To ask, in every case: who is this for, who is sacrificed, who decides? To trace how profits depend on extractive supply chains, unpaid care, land grabs – and to sit with the communities resisting that, not as stakeholders, but as political actors we stand alongside.

I want us to practice refusal. To treat saying NO as a skill – not just an individual moral drama. That might mean asking uncomfortable questions in job interviews, writing rejection emails to employers whose business model conflicts with your values, or joining others to push your future workplace, or this university, to change.

I don’t need you to be pure; there is no pure place to stand. I need you to be awake, situated, conflicted – and still willing to act. This is not a rehearsal. This is your one wild and precious life, in the only climate we will ever have.

With love, frustration and stubborn hope,

Tullia

I’m very happy to have received four years of funding from FORMAS explore starting this week. This is the first time I have been able to hire colleagues and I am super excited to have people who are interested in the same topic around. Watch this space for happy research discussions.

Project abstract:

IDLE explores idleness as a profound response to interconnected existential threats, including climate change, species extinction, inequality, and decreased life satisfaction. While efficiency measures have failed to reduce environmental impacts, IDLE proposes idleness as an alternative organising principle for society that can reduce production and consumption while increasing well-being. This four-year project will investigate societal idleness through in-depth interviews to understand lived experiences of idleness, and impacts of increased idleness, as well as examine relationships between policy, idleness, working time, production and consumption, and social and environmental sustainability. Combining social practice theory and critical theory, IDLE will analyse reduced working hours. Fieldwork in Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland will provide cross-cultural insights. By empirically investigating the lived experience of idleness, IDLE aims to generate groundbreaking knowledge on how idleness help can meet sustainability challenges. The findings have the potential to inform policies on work, consumption and well-being, and contribute to broader societal changes in how progress and fulfillment are perceived. This research is in line with growing interest in work-life balance and sustainable lifestyles, and can potentially inspire new directions in sustainability science, sociology and policy development.

A post on Lund University’s sustainable travel blog about my experiences of travelling for conferences with my family.

A write up by Izabella Rosengren in ETC. This is based on a recent article Feminist LCAs: Finding leverage points for wellbeing within planetary boundaries. I think her title is catchier 😉

In this holiday-intensive season, many are deep into boxing day sales, glittery tops for New Year’s parties and exchanging unwanted christmas gifts. But what footprint does our holiday consumption leave behind, environmentally and socially?
By now, most people are well aware of the climate crisis and the importance of stopping over-consumption and radically reducing C02 emissions.
Many have switched habits and traditions to greener alternatives, such as buying Christmas presents second hand and replacing traditional meat orgies with more environmentally friendly vegan holiday food. Changing consumption has a positive impact on the environment, but what are its effects on happiness and well-being?
New research shows that consuming less also makes us happier.

A Canadian research report Buying well-being: Spending behaviour and happiness shows that people who choose experiences and leisure over material things say they are happier and more satisfied with their lives than others. Experiences seem to increase the sense of meaning in life more than material possessions, which can quickly lose their allure.
There are many different ways to approach a life with fewer possessions. Thinning out excesses and choosing simplicity and minimalism are actions that contribute to reducing consumption while increasing the sense of well-being.
Voluntary simplicity can include cutting down on working hours and reducing financial dependency by living in a smaller home, ditching the car and taking public transport or cycling, buying second-hand, growing your own food and much more. Simplicity is not the same as poverty. It is a conscious choice to live with fewer possessions and focus on quality of life.
The European study Does less working time improve life satisfaction was published this year in the journal Health Economics Review. The results show that people who work less and cut back on consumption are less preoccupied with fashion trends and measuring themselves against others. Many people, particularly those in the middle class, feel they have more control over their lives and are less stressed.
The distribution of income across countries is usually expressed in terms of a Gini coefficient, where a low value means less income inequality and a high value means more. Zhang and Churchill’s study Income inequality and subjective well being from China, 2020 shows that people in societies with lower Gini coefficients feel happier than people in societies with greater income inequality.
In 2020, Sweden’s gini coefficient was 26.9, lower than the EU average of 30.8 and much lower than China’s 46.6. Sweden and the other Nordic countries also consistently top the list of countries in the world where people feel happiest.
The ability to choose to cut back to avoid getting stuck in a merry-go-round of jobs, shopping, debt and pressure is a good foundation for a good and happy life.

Our New Year’s resolutions can reduce the environmental footprint we leave behind, while making us feel happier and more satisfied with our lives. In the local community, replacing some of our consumption with spending more time with family and friends, has both environmental and social dividends.
At the societal level, people in countries with high levels of well-being and equality have every opportunity to redesign their lives. New Year’s Eve is an excellent opportunity to reflect on how well we are doing and decide to live so that future generations can enjoy similarly good lives.

A debate article Claire Hoolohan and I wrote for SydSvenskan – article available online.