Lost Leaders:
Women in the Global
Academy
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 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
Women in Politics Globally
• 20.9% of national
parliamentarians
(Rwanda 56.3%)
• 37 States below 10%
• 8 Heads of State.
(UN, 2013)
Women leaders = contextual
discontinuity/ interruptive in
their shock quality.
Aminata Touré, Prime Minister of Senegal, 2012
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 assurance
community engagement
marketing managers
communication
human resource management
Some Provocations
•How has gender escaped the logic of the policy
turbulent global academy?
•Why/ how is women’s capital devalued/
misrecognised in the knowledge economy?
•Who self-identifies/ is identified by existing
power elites, as having leadership legitimacy?
•Do cultural scripts for leaders coalesce/collide
with normative gender performances?
•Are norm-saturated narratives constructing
who is intelligible as leaders?
•Are informal practices e.g. networks, headhunters’ searches reproducing privilege?
•Does decision-making lack transparency/
accountability? (Rees, 2011).
Evidence
• International Questionnaires,
Focus Groups and Literature
Reviews for the British
Council
(participants from 5 continents)
(Morley, 2014)
• Rigorous Literature Review Leadership Foundation in
Higher Education
(Morley, 2013)
Leading the Global Academy
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Australia (White, 2013)
Canada (Acker, 2012)
China (Chen, 2012)
Finland (Husu, 2000)
Ghana (Ohene, 2010)
Guyana (Austin, 2002)
Hong Kong (Cheung, 2012)
Ireland (O’Connor, 2013)
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 (Bagilhole, 2009)
USA (Bonner, 2006)
Berating/ Explaining Absences
• Gendered Divisions of Labour
• Gender Bias/ Misrecognition
• Cognitive errors in assessing
merit/leadership suitability/ peer review
• Institutional Practices
• Management & Masculinity
• Greedy Organisations
• Women’s Missing Agency/ Deficit
Internal Conversations
• Socio-cultural messages
Counting more women into existing
systems, structures and cultures = an
unquestioned good.
(Morley, 2012, 2013)
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’
Diversity = Representational
Space?
Norm-saturated (essentialised)
policy narratives
add more under-represented
groups
into current higher education
systems as students and
academic leaders
=
a form of distributive justice/
smart economics
organisational and epistemic
transformation.
Development of a sociology of
absences, rather than gender
as a demographic variable.
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)
An Affective Load/ Identity Work
• Working with resistance,
recalcitrance, truculence, ugly
feelings.
• Colonising colleagues’
subjectivities towards the goals
of managerially inspired
discourses.
• Managing self-doubt, conflict,
anxiety, disappointment &
occupational stress.
=
• Restricting, not
• Building capacity and creativity.
Leaderism: Resilience, not
Resistance
Evolution of Managerialism?
•Disguises corporatisation/ values shift in
HE
•Transformative leadership is valueladen/ 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
28
(O’Reilly and Reed, 2010, 2011).
Expanding the Theoretical Lexicon
Barad’s (2007) theory of ‘intra-action’ examines:
•how differences are made and remade
• stabilised and destabilised
•how individuals exist because of the existence
of given interactions
Leaders made via power relations/ politics of
difference.
Ahmed’s (2010) theory of happiness:
• is a technology/ instrument
•re-orientates individual desires towards a
common good.
Leadership = sign of vertical career success.
Berlant’s (2011) theory of cruel optimism:
•Depending on objects that block our thriving.
Leadership = normative fantasy and/or a bad
object of desire .
Optics and Apparatus
• What is it that people don’t
see?
• Why don’t they see it?
• What do current optics/
practices/ specifications
reveal and obscure?
Leadership Potential
= observable, separate static
structure?
• = struggle for value/
intelligibility?
• co-production?
A Two-Way Gaze?
• How are women being
seen e.g. as deficit
men?
• How are women
viewing leadership
e.g. via the lens of
neo-liberalism/
austerity?
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?
Why is Senior Leadership
Unattractive to Women?
•The expanding, audited, neo-liberalised,
competitive, performance-driven,
globalised academy.
•Being ‘Other’ in male-dominated
cultures.
•Oppositional relationship between
leadership and scholarship.
•The signifier ‘woman’ reduces the
authority of the signifier ‘leader’.
•Navigating between professional and
domestic responsibilities.
•Women lacking capital (economic,
political, social and symbolic) to redefine
the requirements of the field
(Corsun & Costen, 2001).
Leading Women in Malaysia: A Woman
Vice-Chancellor Advances Others
Then the limited aspiration due to lack of self esteem. .. I force them
whenever the search committee looks for candidates and they come up
with names, and I see there are no names but I think there is a woman
capable. And they will tell me ‘oh but she doesn’t want to do it.’ So I will
call them up. ...I call them up and ask them ‘why can’t you do it?’ and
they tell me all kinds of stories. The same things: no confidence in their
ability to do it. But I know. ‘I worked with you on this project and I can
see how you do, I think I trust and know you can do it’. And low and
behold at the end of the day they say ‘yes!’ So I think I have done this to
about eight to ten women, literally forcing them to do it. And they are
good. None of them have failed me. So you need, as a leader, I feel, to
push them…
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’…they classify these PhDs
as a third gender. (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).
Gendered Research/ Prestige 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)
Women likely to be:
 Cast as unreliable knowers (Longino, 2010).
 Tasked with inward-facing
responsibilities.
Research resources/opportunities:
 competitively structured
 replicate/reproduce gender hierarchies.
28 J
Women Reflexively Scanning
Women Are Not/ Rarely
•Identified, supported, encouraged and
developed for leadership.
•Achieving the most senior leadership
positions in prestigious, national co-
educational universities.
•Personally/ collectively desiring senior
leadership.
Women Are
•Constrained by socio-cultural messages
•Entering middle management.
•Often located on career pathways that do
not lead to senior positions.
•Burdened with affective load:
 being ‘other’ in masculinist cultures
 navigating between professional and
domestic responsibilities.
•Attracted to labour intensity of competitive,
Often perceiving leadership as loss.
audit cultures in the managerialised global
academy.
Demanding change.
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.
Disqualified, Desiring or
Dismissing Leadership?
•Situational logic of career progression/
upward mobility.
•Normative fantasy about what constitutes
success.
•Socially articulated and constituted by a
social/ policy world that many women do
not choose/ control.
•Perceived as structurally and culturally
restorative/promotional of the status quo.
•Not an object of desire.
Making Alternativity Imaginable?
How can leadership narratives,
technologies & practices be more:
than discursive
performances/repetitions of:
 values
 regulative norms
of new public
governance/austerity/HE reform
narratives
generative, generous and genderfree?
Follow Up?
• Morley, L. (I2014) Lost Leaders: Women in the
Global Academy. In press, Higher Education
Research and Development.
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):116131.
• 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