19 April 2023

Absent Talent: Women’s Participation in Higher

Education Leadership and Research

Professor Louise MorleyCentre for Higher Education and

Equity Research (CHEER)University of Sussex, UK

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

19 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%

19 April 2023

Some Provocations

• The global academy prides itself on innovation and hypermodernism (Morley,

2011).

• The archaism of male-dominated leadership remains.

• Does fair participation in the knowledge economy overlap with gendered social hierarchies (Walby, 2011)?

• Female undergraduate enrolment in HE has risen almost twice as fast as that of men over the last 4 decades (UNESCO,

2012).

• Is this translating into enhanced career opportunities for women in academia?

19 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?

19 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, minority staff seen as Organisational ‘Other’.

19 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).

19 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).

19 April 2023

Focus on East Asia

19 April 2023

Fastest Growing Higher Education Sector in the World

• Gross undergraduate

enrolment ratio of men

increased from 11% in 1970 to

26% in 2009.

• The ratio for women in the

same period tripled from 8% to

28%, now exceeding male

participation.

19 April 2023

Quality not Equality

Hong Kong

• 8 universities

• 3 in Global Top 50

• No Female vice-chancellor

Japan

• 86 (national) universities

• 3 in Global Top 50

• 2 Female vice-chancellors

(1 women-only)

19 April 2023

Collecting New Evidence: British Council Global Education Dialogue Workshops in Hong Kong and Tokyo

• 47 Workshop Participants (China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia,

Singapore, Thailand, UK, Vietnam).

• 13 Questionnaire Respondents (Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, the

Philippines, Thailand)

• 9 Panel discussants (Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines,

Thailand, UK)

• 4 papers (the Philippines, Malaysia Japan x2)

The rationale, attractions/ deterrents, enablers, impediments for women entering senior leadership.

19 April 2023

Why Diversify Leadership?

• Extending the Leadership Repertoire We do need different kinds of voices,

different kinds of leadership to be accepted (Japanese discussant).

• Widening the Talent Pool for Sustainability We have to draw on the whole talent pool to

have sustainability. We have to ... bring different ways of knowing and different ways of interpreting language and interpreting discourse to the table will provide us with many opportunities to fully understand problems and achieve greater sustainable solutions (UK discussant).

• Global Solutions The society won’t be able to survive in

globalization (Japanese respondent).

• Modernisation To be the leader in higher education is

something to show everyone that the world is now changing (Thai respondent).

19 April 2023

Identity Simply as a Demographic Variable?

Representation:

• Not always transformative

• New constituencies expected to

assimilate and conform to

normative practices

• Not all women are gender sensitive

• Do women continue to lack capital

(economic, political, social and

symbolic) to redefine the

requirements of the field (Corsun & Costen, 2001)?

19 April 2023

What Makes Senior Leadership Attractive to Women?

Social and Organisational Responsibility

• Desire to diversify leadership/ make it more representative of the wider population.

• Opportunity to modernise, influence, transform the academy.

Personal Rewards

• Achievement/ career progress/ financial gain.

• Flexible working arrangements.

19 April 2023

Why is Senior Leadership Unattractive to Women?

• The expanding, audited, neo-liberalised, competitive, performance-driven, globalised academy.

• Male-dominated culture.

• Oppositional relationship between leadership and scholarship.

• Affective load e.g. managing occupational stress, conflict, anxiety, morale, disappointment, resistance, pessimism and recalcitrance (Acker, 2012).

• Co-existing and contradictory identifications.

• The signifier ‘woman’ reduces the authority of the signifier ‘leader’.

• Greedy organisations.

• Navigating between professional and

domestic responsibilities.

19 April 2023

Glass Cliffs, Poisoned Chalices: Metaphors of Danger, Precariousness and Instability

Perception that senior leadership

positions will prevent research and

teaching in their discipline;

perception of negative political

environment; fear of the ‘glass cliff’

– there are many examples of

women achieving senior leadership

only to find it a ‘poisoned chalice’ –

i.e. the role becomes available

when conditions are such that

there is no chance of success (Australian respondent).

19 April 2023

What Enables Women to Enter Leadership?

19 April 2023

Recognition

• Support

• Training/ Development/

Capacity-Building

• Mentorship, Advice and

Sponsorship

• Policy contexts

• Legislative frameworks

• Effective advocacy

• Leadership identities and

capacities = forged in relation

to how women are seen and

invested in by others.

19 April 2023

Decoding the Rules of the Game (Morley, 2013)

Build the research credentials,

experience, confidence and

acknowledgement to achieve

appointment to leadership roles

requires sustained focus within a

particular discipline over many

years. It also requires the capacity

to play politics, be aligned with the

right people, get publications in the

right journals and win research

grants…knowing how to play the

promotions process and be

recognised as being of ‘merit’ (Australian respondent).

19 April 2023

What Impedes Women from Entering Leadership?

19 April 2023

Cultural Climate/Hidden Curriculum

• Women’s aspirations/ career orientations depressed by:

• Mis-recognition • Unsympathetic classification of women’s

skills, knowledge and potential

• Hostility, discrimination, toxic social relations

• Favouring of men

• My university is an inbreeding society. And I received academic harassment and could not get professorship at then university and moved a new university and finally received professorship there. It took so long years in comparison with other male teachers

(Japanese respondent).

19 April 2023

Socio-Cultural Norms: The Educated Woman as the Third Sex

• Happiness = traditional choices/norms • Unhappiness = de-traditionalisation

(Ahmed, 2010) • Leadership/ HE = transgression • Social and affective consequences.

A saying that ‘people can be classified into three categories: male, female, and female PhD’ (Chinese respondent).

Even now, young women don’t want to go to the University of Tokyo because their parents say that if you go to the University of Tokyo you won’t be able to get married, you won’t be able to be happy (Japanese discussant).

19 April 2023

Gendered Division of Labour

• Incompatibility of women’s caring responsibilities with the temporalities and rhythms of academia (Cheung & Halpern, 2010).

• A woman in Japan has to take care of her children, as well as both her parents, and sometimes even her husband's parents, besides the domestic duties on daily life. They do not have enough time to concentrate on doing research. And the percentage female university teachers in Japan who do not marry is 47.5 per cent (Japanese respondent).

19 April 2023

Sex Role Spillover

• Women tasked with inward-facing responsibilities e.g. teaching and student support.

• Male counterparts more external-facing e.g. international networks and research.

• A rather bitter memory of a line manager (of the opposite sex) beating me out of an opportunity for funding assistance. The line manager was constantly travelling and on leave and having taken on studies was constantly away on study leave too. This gave me no space to focus on expanding my career and when opportunities arose, I was talked out of applying and no importance was placed on professional development for fear that there will be a gap and no one to man the fort so to speak (Malaysian respondent).

19 April 2023

Summary of Research Findings

• The under-representation of women leaders in higher education is a form of distributive, cognitive and epistemic injustice.

• Lack of diversity is an indicator of archaism in a hypermodernising sector.

• Diversity is important for sustainability in a globalised knowledge economy.

• Potent socio-cultural messages still exist about what is gender appropriate.

• Women are entering middle management, but are not being identified, supported and developed to become the most senior leaders in universities.

• Women are often located on career pathways that do not lead to senior positions.

• Time for action for change.

19 April 2023

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.

19 April 2023

Follow Up?

• Morley, L. (2013) International

Trends in Women’s Leadership

in Higher Education In, T. Gore,

and M. Stiasny (eds) Going

Global. London, Emerald Press.

• 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/