Originally published here.

Over the last decade, the interaction between higher education and the labor market has become a hot topic in Sweden. This is due to the Bologna process and its aim to achieve a closer relationship between higher education curricula and subsequent employment, often called ‘employability’ (Knight and Yorke, 2003). This intervention needs to be read against the backdrop of the organization of the, so called, neoliberal welfare state (Giddens, 1998; Rose, 1999), and as a consequence of what Slaughter and Leslie label ‘academic capitalism,’ which describes a situation in which research and higher education are gov-erned by the market or market-like forces (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997: 8), and education is valued according to how employable the students are considered to be.

The effects of this regime may be witnessed in particular in evaluations of higher education. When Gender Studies education – at both the undergraduate and master’s level – was evaluated by the Swedish Council for Higher Education in 2007, the report stated that the subject’s links to career paths on the labor market were too weak (HSV, 2007). Furthermore, it was concluded that the efforts made by the universities to make Swedish Gender Studies edu-cation useful on the labor market were limited. According to the report, employability for Gender Studies students needed to undergo serious discussion, both locally at universities and on a national basis.

For these reasons, the report calls for a systematic follow-up of where the students end up after graduation (HSV, 2007: 11). Similarly, the importance of Gender Studies education being practically useful on the labor market was highlighted in the subsequent evaluation conducted by the same Swedish council in 2012 (HSV, 2012). The directive from 2007 generated a number of university-specific reports based on sur-veys conducted by Gender Studies departments in several universities around Sweden of former Gender Studies students about their situation on the labor market (Åkesson, 2009; Brüllhof et al., 2007; Goedecke, 2011). The results indicated that former students were employed and mostly satisfied with their education in Gender Studies.

At the same time, public debate in Sweden has been concerned with the quality of, and use-value of, higher education. Public actors such as journalists, NGOs, politicians, and scholars have debated whether students should be encouraged/allowed to study ‘un-useful’ subjects, like art, philosophy, and gender, given that this would make them unavailable to work in areas where there is a shortage of personnel, to put it bluntly (Fölster et al., 2011). To counter this discourse, and defend the humanities, some have argued that the humanities is useful: in that it teaches the skill of critical thinking and the ability to analyze and handle complex social and cultural issues, which therefore improves society and culture (Ekström and Sörlin, 2012; Forser and Karlsohn, 2013).

The results of the Swedish study of Gender Studies students can be used to argue for (mainly) two very different issues. First, students and former students of Gender Studies seem to be needed on the labor market: they are employed and use their Gender Studies knowledge and skills, and some form of ‘gender expert’ job description seems to be increasing in popularity. At the same time, the participants in our study worry a great deal about their chances on the labor market as a result of their Gender Studies education. Ultimately, the high employability of the former students presents an ideological dilemma: they come to work within, and strive to be employed by, a labor market that is not feminist, but rather has implemented certain feminist issues: economic independence and labor force participation for individual women (Larner 2000). In their discussions about studies and work, this dilemma is present throughout: they want to get a good job, a job with a proper title, and at the same time they want to change the world and the very (capitalist) logics and mechanisms they strive to work within.Second, Gender Studies as a discipline is attracting Swedish-born, middle-class women-identified subjects who, because of the cultural capital they already possess, are likely to succeed in pursuing a career in Sweden. This makes the anxiety among respond-ents and participants even more interesting. While they are finding work, are employa-ble, and possess cultural capital and specialized skills, they are still very anxious about not being employed. How can this be understood? As a group, they have influenced the labor market in a new direction, where Gender Studies skills are professionalized. On the other hand, this is happening in a time and place where the labor market is significantly influenced by neoliberal discourse – the very discourse critiqued by many Gender Studies scholars for its participation in creating inequality and marginalization on a global scale. A Gender Studies critique is perceived as powerful by the former students, powerful enough to be an obstacle to their ability to get a job – some of them are not sure if they should even mention Gender Studies on their résumés. However, their fear should be understood as existing in a context where feminist issues are widely discussed, both by those in favor and those who violently oppose feminism. Gender Studies’ relation to the labor market, and the ideological dilemmas expressed in the study help us pose new questions: How can Gender Studies, through former students, have an impact on the Werner and Lundberg  83labor market and neoliberal politics without losing its critique? And, further, how can Gender Studies include a wider group of students?

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