Leading Higher Education
Differently: 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
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?
•Women leaders = contextual discontinuity/
interruptive in their shock quality.
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 (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)
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 e.g. the highly
educated woman as the ‘third sex’.
Counting more women into existing
systems, structures and cultures = an
unquestioned good.
(Morley, 2012, 2013)
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.
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 .
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).
Women Reflexively Scanning
Women Are Not/ Rarely
•Identified, supported and developed for
Women Are
•Constrained by socio-cultural messages
•Entering middle management.
leadership.
•Achieving the most senior leadership
positions in prestigious, national co-
•Entering some senior leadership positions in nonelite universities.
educational universities.
•Often located on career pathways that do not lead
to senior positions.
•Personally/ collectively desiring senior
•Attracted to influence, rewards and recognition.
leadership.
•Burdened with affective load:
•Attracted to labour intensity of competitive, being ‘other’ in masculinist cultures
audit cultures in the managerialised global  navigating between professional and domestic
responsibilities.
academy.
Often perceiving leadership as loss.
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.
Higher Education Leadership
•Situational logic of career
progression.
•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.
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