10 April 2023

Women and Higher

Education Leadership:

Absences and Aspirations

Professor Louise Morley

Centre for Higher Education and

Equity Research (CHEER)

University of Sussex, UK

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

10 April 2023

Snapshot Statistics: Women Vice-Chancellors

Aust EU HK India JP Mal Kuw Swe Tur UK

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

10 April 2023

Where are the Women?

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

• ‘Velvet ghettos’ (Guillaume & Pochic,

2009)

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

• Middle managerial positions:

quality assuranceinnovationcommunity engagement marketing managers communicationhuman resource management

10 April 2023

Missing Senior Women

• Are women desiring, dismissing or being disqualified from academic leadership?

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

• Is leader identity still constituted through gendered power relations?

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

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

10 April 2023

Consequences of Absence of Leadership Diversity

Employment/ Opportunity Structures

Democratic Deficit

Distributive injustice/ Structural Prejudice.

Depressed career opportunities.

Misrecognition of leadership potential/ wasted talent.

Service Delivery

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

Reproduction of Institutional Norms and Practices.

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

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)

10 April 2023

Impeding Diversity in Senior Leadership

• Are certain groups, styles, talents and potential mis-recognised/ perceived as too risky? (Fitzgerald, 2011).

• Do dominant groups continue to appoint in own image/ clone themselves? (Gronn & Lacey, 2006).

• Is leadership still synonymous with structural positions and traditional types and displays of masculinity (Davies & Thomas, 2002).

• Are informal practices e.g. networks, head-hunters’ searches reproducing privilege? (Watson, 2008).

• Does decision-making lack transparency/ accountability? (Rees,

2011).

10 April 2023

Gendered Narratives of the ‘Ideal Leader’

• Maleness = resource (productivity, competitiveness, hierarchy, strategy, authority) (Hearn, 2009).

• Femaleness = negative equity (‘other’)/ difference /spoiled identity (Fitzgerald, 2011).

• Practices/norms/performances

reflect the life situations/ interests of men? (Billing, 2011).

• Is austerity reinforcing dominant masculinities and affective economies? (Hey, 2011)

10 April 2023

Vertical Career Success or Incarceration in an Identity Cage?

Leadership

• Punishment/Reward

• Morality of turn-taking, sacrifice and

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

• Managing self-doubt, conflict, anxiety,

disappointment & occupational stress (Acker, 2012; Watson, 2009)

• Restricting, rather than building capacity and

creativity.

10 April 2023

Diversity in Academic Leadership is Not…

• Treating identity simply as a demographic variable.

• Representational space.

• About being diverse but about ‘doing diversity’(Ahmed, 2006).

• Access to organisations monopolised by the elite.

• Allowing women/ minorities in

• But ensuring that they continue to lack capital (economic, political, social and symbolic) to redefine the requirements of the field

(Corsun & Costen, 2001).

10 April 2023

Action for Change: Promoting Informed and Inclusive Practices

• Accountability/ Transparency

• Data Collection/ Diversity

Monitoring

• Diversity Data in quality audits/

league tables.

• Equality Impact Assessments/

Mainstreaming

• Action on Bullying, Harassment

and Discrimination

• Developmental Opportunities -

Coaching, Mentoring and

Networking.

10 April 2023

Undoing Gender/ Re-Imagining Leadership

How can

• leadership narratives,

technologies and practices be

more:

than discursive performances

involving repetitions of the

values/ beliefs of new public

governance

more generative, generous and

gender-free?

10 April 2023

Follow Up?

• Morley, L. (2013) Women and

Higher Education Leadership:

Absences and Aspirations.

Stimulus Paper for the

Leadership Foundation for

Higher Education.

• Morley, L. (2013) "The Rules of

the Game: Women and the

Leaderist Turn in Higher

Education " Gender and

Education. 25(1):116-131.

CHEER

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

10 April 2023

Afternoon Session

10 April 2023

Identifying Actions for Change

• What are your gender equality objectives for senior leadership?

• What statistics and qualitative information would you collect?

• What would you include in an organisational gender analysis?

• What strategic points for actions are required to meet the gender equality objectives?

• What gender-sensitive monitoring and evaluation system will you put in place, including the establishment of indicators?

• What messages would you like to share with the LFHE about diversifying senior leadership?