Absent Talent: Women’s
Participation in Higher
Education Leadership and
Research
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 Vice-Chancellors
Aust
EU
HK
India
JP
Mal
Kuw
Swe
Tur
UK
18%
13%
0%
3%
2.3%
15%
2%
43%
7%
14%
28 June, 2016
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?
28 June, 2016
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?
28 June, 2016
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
28 June, 2016
‘Other’.
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).
28 June, 2016
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).
28 June, 2016
Focus on East Asia
28 June, 2016
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.
28 June, 2016
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)
28 June, 2016
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.
28 June, 2016
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
28 June, 2016
now changing (Thai respondent).
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)?
28 June, 2016
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.
28 June, 2016
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
28 June, 2016
domestic responsibilities.
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).
28 June, 2016
What Enables Women to Enter Leadership?
28 June, 2016
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. 28 June, 2016
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).
28 June, 2016
What Impedes Women from Entering Leadership?
28 June, 2016
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).
28 June, 2016
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).
28 June, 2016
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).
28 June, 2016
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).
28 June, 2016
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.
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
mainstreamed into all organisational practices and procedures.
28 June, 2016
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.
CHEER
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/
• Morley, L. (2013) "The Rules of
the Game: Women and the
Leaderist Turn in Higher
Education " Gender and
Education. 25(1):116-131.
28 June, 2016