leaderism in academia: desiring, dismissing or disqualifying women? professor louise morley centre...
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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. Where are the Women?. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
25 April 2023
Leaderism in Academia: Desiring, Dismissing or Disqualifying Women?
Professor Louise MorleyCentre for Higher Education and Equity
Research (CHEER)University of Sussex, UK
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer
Snapshot Statistics: Women Vice-Chancellors
25 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
25 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)
25 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)
25 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.
25 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.
25 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. 25 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?
25 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?
25 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/