The academic feminist community in Israel has recently been storming over a Facebook post by a senior professor
advising young faculty members on their way to achieving tenure. In response to that post, another researcher,
younger and without tenure, emphasized the degree to which the rules and advice provided by that professor were
blind to the gender, race, and class inequalities inherent to the structure and culture of academia and were tailored to
the needs of privileged individuals. Both posts received hundreds of comments and shares, discussing the neoliberal
individual responsibility imposed on subjects to learn the rules of the game by themselves and thereby negotiate
their path in academia, rather than transform its gendered and racialized structure by changing those very rules. The
intense discussion that followed the post dealt with gender and ethnoclass privileges, ideological gaps, and intergen-
erational differences in views related to gender and social inequalities.
As an organizational sociologist and a young faculty member—this discussion has left me and many of my
colleagues discouraged concerning our professional future. However, in a quite miraculous way (or rather, in a quite
algorithmic way, thanks to my filter bubble, which is also biased by my social class position), amid that social media
tempest, I became aware of the book by Victoria Reyes. I found out about it through Twitters academic feed, and
it turned out to offer a basis for an accurate conceptualization of the dilemmas and experiences of scholars from
marginalized groups, as well as for formulating a contemporary ideological and political agenda of researchers and
lecturers in Israel and worldwide.
Reyes' book is intersectional through and through. Currently a sociologist and faculty member at the Gender
and Sexuality Studies Department, UC Riverside, she was born to Filipino immigrants and lived her entire life in her
grandmother's home. At the very start, she reveals that she is the product of her mother's rape by a relative at the
age of fifteen. Her mother was sorry she was born and would often hurl it at her, so that her outsider position and her
sense of lack of love and recognition shaped her life as a subject and her social worldview and motivated her writing.
Despite her difficult life experiences, Reyes is aware of her achievements: a PhD from Princeton, fellowships,
grants, and a tenure-track position. Nevertheless, she still feels like an outsider in academia, in a demanding and hier-
archical workplace where people are driven by status, prestige, and resources. It is also a space replete with racism,
sexism, and many other forms of hatred and discrimination, which she has experienced personally.
Many scholars have addressed the patriarchal elitism and multiple forms of discrimination that characterize the
academic world (see, e.g., Collins, 1986; Margolis & Romero, 1998; Pullen et al., 2017). Still, this book is unique in the
depth of its analysis, exposure, and sheer honesty. As the author herself suggests, this is not another self-improvement
book designed to help young scholars attain the coveted tenure-track position, and it will probably not be a source
of self-confirmation for many. Above all, it sheds light on the mechanisms, both explicit and implicit, of inclusion and
exclusion in academia. Throughout its pages, Reyes provides stories and anecdotes to indicate how, despite academ-
ia's liberal self-pretenses, it is in fact a conservative and change-resistant space.
BOOK REVIEW
DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12949
751 Gender Work Organ. 2023;30:751–754. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gwao
Academic outsider: Stories of exclusion and hope
By Victoria Reyes
Tair Karazi-Presler
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Email: tairkar@gmail.com