10 April 2023

Leaderism in Academia:

Desiring, Dismissing or

Disqualifying Women?

Professor Louise Morley

Centre for Higher Education and Equity

Research (CHEER)

University of Sussex, UK

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer

Snapshot Statistics: Women Vice-Chancellors

10 April 2023

Aust EU HK India JP Maly Kuw Swe Turk UK

18% 13% 0% 3% 2.3% 15% 2% 43% 7% 14%

Where are the Women?

• Adjunct/assistant roles (Bagilhole and White, 2011; Davis, 1996).

• ‘Velvet ghettos’ (Guillaume & Pochic, 2009)

• ‘Glass cliffs’ (Ryan & Haslam, 2005)

• Women = inferiority, supplementarity,

domestic labour.

• Middle managerial positions:

quality assuranceinnovationcommunity engagement marketing managers communicationhuman resource management

10 April 2023

The Gendered Research Economy

Women less likely to be:

Journal editors/cited in top-rated

journals (Tight, 2008).

Principal investigators (EC, 2011)

On research boards

Awarded large grants

Awarded research prizes (Nikiforova, 2011)

Desiring, Dismissing or Disqualified?

• Who self-identifies/ is identified by existing power elites, as having leadership legitimacy?

• Do cultural scripts for leaders coalesce/collide with normative gender performances?

• Why is women’s capital devalued and misrecognised?

• How does gender continue to escape organisational logic/rationalities?

• Is leadership a sign of upward mobility/normative fantasy and/or a bad object of desire (Berlant, 2011).

Consequences of Absence of Leadership Diversity

Employment/ Opportunity StructuresDemocratic Deficit

Distributive injustice/ Structural Prejudice.

Depressed career opportunities.

Misrecognition of leadership potential/ wasted talent.

Service DeliveryReproduction of Institutional Norms and

Practices.

Margins/ Mainstream hegemonies, with women, BME staff seen as Organisational ‘Other’.

Knowledge Distortions, Cognitive/ Epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007)

10 April 2023

Absences and Aspirations in the Global Academy

• Australia (Fitzgerald, 2011)• Canada (Acker, 2012)• China (Chen, 2012)• Finland (Husu, 2000) • Ghana (Ohene, 2010)• Guyana (Austin, 2002)• Hong Kong (Cheung, 2012)• Ireland (Lynch, 2010)• Japan (Shirahase, 2013)• Kenya (Onsongo, 2004)• Nigeria (Odejide, 2007)• Norway (Benediktsdottir, 2008) • Pakistan (Rab, 2010)• Papua New Guinea (Sar & Wilkins, 2001) • South Africa (Shackleton et al., 2006)• South Korea (Kim et al., 2010)• Sri Lanka (Gunawardena et al., 2006)• Sweden (Peterson, 2011)• Tanzania (Bhalalusesa, 1998)• Turkey (Özkanli, 2009)• Uganda (Kwesiga & Ssendiwala, 2006) • UK (Deem, 2003)• USA (Bonner, 2006)

10 April 2023

Accounting for Absences/ Expanding the Theoretical Lexicon

• Gendered Division of Labour

• Gender Bias/ Misrecognition

• Management & Masculinity

• Greedy Organisations

• Women’s Missing Agency/

Deficit Internal Conversations

(Morley, 2012, 2013)

Disqualifying Women

• Opaqueness in

decision-making/lack of

transparency

• Institutional practices

• Cognitive errors in assessing merit,

leadership suitability.

• Gender bias in assessment of

excellence/peer review.

• Women leaders = contextual

discontinuity/ interruptive in their

shock quality.

(EU, 2011; Rees, 2011; Wenneras and Wold, 1997)

Epistemic (In)Justice (Fricker, 2007)

Testimonial Injustice

• When prejudice causes a hearer to

give a deflated level of credibility to

a speaker’s world.

• e.g. women rape victims not being

believed.

• Sharia Law (Mahmood, 2005; Salime, 2011).

Hermeneutical Injustice

• Gap in collective interpretative

resources/ structural identity

prejudice put someone at an unfair

disadvantage when it comes to

making sense of their social

experiences.

• e.g. suffering sexual harassment in

a culture that still lacks that critical

concept.

10 April 2023

Leaderism

Evolution of Managerialism?•Social and organisational technology •Disguises corporatisation/ values shift in HE•Transformative leadership is value-laden/ not neutral. •Diverts attention to personal qualities/ skills.

Certain •Subjectivities •Values•Behaviours•Dispositions •Characteristics

Can •Strategically overcome institutional inertia•Outflank resistance/ recalcitrance•Provide direction for new university futures

(O’Reilly and Reed, 2010, 2011).

Vertical Career Success or Incarceration in an Identity Cage?

Leadership• Punishment/Reward• Morality of turn-taking, sacrifice, domestic

labour• Rotational /fixed term

Can Involve • Multiple/ conflicting affiliations, resignifications & unstable engagements with

hierarchy & power (Cross & Goldenberg, 2009)

• Working with resistance & recalcitrance • Colonising colleagues’ subjectivities towards

the goals of managerially inspired discourses • An affective load/ identity work (Ahmed, 2010)

• Managing self-doubt, conflict, anxiety, disappointment & occupational stress

(Acker, 2012)

• Restricting, rather than building capacity and creativity.

Globalising Patriarchy

• Transcribed Panel and Group Discussions in

British Council Seminars in Hong Kong,

Tokyo and Dubai.

• 20 questionnaires: Australia, China, Egypt,

Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait,

Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, the

Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Turkey.

• What makes leadership attractive/unattractive

to women?

• What enables/ supports women to enter

leadership positions?

• Personal experiences of being enabled/

impeded from entering leadership?

Women’s Internal Conversations (Archer, 2003)

Women Are Not/ Rarely

•Identified, supported and developed for

leadership.

•Achieving the most senior leadership

positions in prestigious, national co-

educational universities.

•Personally/ collectively desiring senior

leadership.

•Attracted to labour intensity of competitive,

audit cultures in the managerialised global

academy.

Women Are•Constrained by socio-cultural messages e.g. the

highly educated woman as the ‘third sex’.

•Entering middle management.

•Entering some senior leadership positions in

non-elite universities.

•Often located on career pathways that do not

lead to senior positions.

•Attracted to influence, rewards and recognition.

•Burdened with affective load: being ‘other’ in masculinist cultures navigating between professional and domestic

responsibilities.

10 April 2023

Leadership Performances = Unliveable Lives? (Butler, 2004)

Dismissing•Extreme profession/ virility test.

•Affective capital deployed to direct? (‘soft’ skills/ ‘hard’ messages)

•Reinforces organisational identity categories?

Desiring

•Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ -

maintaining an attachment to a

problematic object in advance of its

loss? (2011)

Manifesto for Change: Accountability, Transparency, Development and Data

Equality as Quality - equality should be made a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in quality audits, with data to be returned on percentage and location of women professors and leaders, percentage and location of undergraduate and postgraduate students and gender pay equality. Gender equity achievements should be included in international recognition and reputation for universities in league tables. Research Grants - funders should monitor the percentage of applications and awards made to women and to actively promote more women as principal investigators. The applications procedures should be reviewed to incorporate a more inclusive and diverse philosophy of achievement. Gender implications and impact should also be included in assessment criteria.Journals - Editorial Boards, and the appointment of editors, need more transparent selection processes, and policies on gender equality e.g. to keep the gender balance in contributions under review.Data - a global database on women and leadership in higher education should be established. Development - more investment needs to be made in mentorship and leadership development programmes for women and gender needs to be included in existing leadership development programmes. Mainstreaming - work cultures should be reviewed to ensure that diversity is mainstreamed into all organisational practices and procedures. 10 April 2023

Summary: Determinism or Voluntarism?

• Global academy = hypermodernisation.

• Male leadership = archaism (Morley, 2011)

• Accounts for women’s absences = often

socially deterministic/essentialised.

• Leadership perceived as structurally and

culturally restorative of the status quo.• Representation is NOT transformational.• Women/minorities = access to some leadership

positions.• Lack capital (economic, political, social and

symbolic) to redefine the requirements of the field (Corsun & Costen, 2001).

• Women exercising their personal powers to

reject the situational logic of career

progression?

• Women making affective bargains re.

costliness of attachment to leadership

aspirations?

10 April 2023

Making Alternativity Imaginable?

How can

• leadership narratives

• technologies & practices be more:

than discursive performances

involving repetitions of the values/

beliefs/ regulative norms of new

public governance/austerity

than legitimating HE reform

narratives

more generative, generous and

gender-free?

10 April 2023

Follow Up?

• Morley, L. (2013) "The Rules of the Game:

Women and the Leaderist Turn in Higher

Education " Gender and Education.

25(1):116-131.

• Morley, L. (2013) Women and Higher

Education Leadership: Absences and

Aspirations. Stimulus Paper for the

Leadership Foundation for Higher

Education.

• Morley, L. (2013) International Trends in

Women’s Leadership in Higher Education

In, T. Gore, and Stiasny, M (eds) Going

Global. London, Emerald Press.

CHEER http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/