„Умни, но бедни" (Жените-учени в постсъветския фолклор)
“Clever but Poor” (Women Scientists in Post-Soviet Folklore)

Summary/Abstract: The ethnography of professions, including also the profession of a scientist, is a new trend in present-day ethnology. The striving to describe and analyze the professional traditions of the scientific workers, employing the terms of subculture, both in denoting the signal (symbols, attributes, folklore) and the socio-behavioural (forms of communicating, norms, stereotypes of behaviour) aspects of these traditions, helps the reconstruction of the professional subculture of the academic community. The exploratory objective of the article has been to determine the degree of dissemination of the traditional gender and sexist stereotypes in the midst of the highly educated social strata. The analytical task set has a distant “message”, associated with the study of the everyday life of the deprived social groups. The gender aspect of this topic envisages not so much a traditional description of the specificities of the socio-professional existence of men and women in a scientific environment, nor is it an answer to the question how much scientific output is generated by women research associates in research institutes and what its quality is. Coming to the foreground is the problem about the attitude to the work of women in the academic community, the reproduction (by way of cultural stereotypes) of the sustainable forms of oppression of all and any kinds of manifestation of female domination in a scientific environment: both obvious and difficult to identify. The specificity of the everyday life of the women-scientists has been reflected in proverbs, slogans, metaphors and, mostly, in anecdotes.

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