Institution's Third Gender: The Making of Mother in Geoscience at Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency

This study examines gendered dynamics within the geoscience domain of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), a major research institution in Southeast Asia. The institution has undergone extensive restructuring in recent years that coincides with the former presidential term. With the changes made, performance-based evaluations and centralized procedures became the core of researchers’ work. The policies and regulations introduced practical constraints across the agency, including complex funding processes, limited autonomy in laboratory work, and inadequate facilities for storing field and laboratory samples. These challenges are felt across disciplines but accumulate more intensely in geoscience, where most research depends simultaneously on fieldwork, (large) physical samples, and laboratory analysis.

 

Using in-depth interviews (n=30) and focus group discussions (FGD), the study finds that these formally equal conditions affect researchers differently. Especially, mothers, who typically carry a full-time caregiving role alongside their full-time research role, experience these constraints more sharply. Mothers receive increased understanding and flexibility regarding their time and participation (in field- and lab-work, handling samples, etc.). However, this accommodation does not reproduce their labour power as researchers but reinforces their caregiving responsibilities. As mothers repeatedly enact the expectations attached to this given framework, the institution comes to treat the subsequent performances as natural and appropriate. In this way, mother, distinguished from female or male, emerges as a third institutional gender, with its own norms and performances. Ultimately, ‘mother’  becomes a site where conservative ideologies are reproduced.