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
28 June, 2016
Snapshot Statistics: Women ViceChancellors
Aust
EU
HK
India
JP
18%
13%
0%
3%
2.3%
Maly Kuw
Swe
Turk
UK
15%
43%
7%
14%
2%
28 June, 2016
Where are the Women?
• Adjunct/assistant roles
(Bagilhole and White, 2011; Davis, 1996).
• ‘Velvet ghettos’
• ‘Glass cliffs’
(Guillaume & Pochic, 2009)
(Ryan & Haslam, 2005)
• Women = inferiority, supplementarity,
domestic labour.
• Middle managerial positions:
 quality assurance
 innovation
 community engagement
 marketing managers
 communication
 human resource management
28 June, 2016
The Gendered Research Economy
Women less likely to be:
Journal editors/cited in toprated 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 Structures
 Democratic Deficit
 Distributive injustice/ Structural
Prejudice.
 Depressed career opportunities.
 Misrecognition of leadership potential/
wasted talent.
Service Delivery
 Reproduction of Institutional Norms
and Practices.
 Margins/ Mainstream hegemonies, with
women, BME staff seen as
Organisational ‘Other’.
 Knowledge Distortions, Cognitive/
Epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007)
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)
28 June, 2016
USA (Bonner, 2006)
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)
28 June, 2016
Disqualifying Women
•
Opaqueness in decisionmaking/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
Hermeneutical Injustice
• When prejudice causes a hearer to • Gap in collective interpretative
give a deflated level of credibility to
resources/ structural identity
a speaker’s world.
prejudice put someone at an unfair
• e.g. women rape victims not being
believed.
• Sharia Law
(Mahmood, 2005; Salime, 2011).
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.
28 June, 2016
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
Women Are
•Constrained by socio-cultural messages e.g. the
highly educated woman as the ‘third sex’.
leadership.
•Entering middle management.
•Achieving the most senior leadership
•Entering some senior leadership positions in nonelite universities.
positions in prestigious, national co-
educational universities.
•Personally/ collectively desiring senior
leadership.
•Often located on career pathways that do not lead
to senior positions.
•Attracted to influence, rewards and recognition.
•Attracted to labour intensity of competitive,•Burdened with affective load:
audit cultures in the managerialised global  being ‘other’ in masculinist cultures
academy.
 navigating between professional and domestic
responsibilities.
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)
28 June, 2016
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
28 June, 2016
mainstreamed into all organisational practices and procedures.
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?
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?
28 June, 2016
Follow Up?
• Morley, L. (2013) "The Rules of the
Game: Women and the Leaderist Turn
CHEER
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/
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.
28 June, 2016