1. Leaderism in Academia: Desiring, Dismissing or Disqualifying Women?
Professor Louise Morley
Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER)
University of Sussex, UK
28 March, 2017

2. Snapshot Statistics: Women Vice-Chancellors
Aust EU HK
India JP
Maly
Kuw
Swe
Turk UK
18%
13% 0% 3%
2.3%
15% 2%
43% 7%
14%
28 March, 2017

3. Where are the Women? Adjunct/assistant roles
(Bagilhole and White, 2011; Davis, 1996).
‘Velvet ghettos’ (Guillaume & Pochic, 2009)
‘Glass cliffs’ (Ryan & Haslam, 2005)
Women = inferiority, supplementarity, domestic labour.
Middle managerial positions:
quality assurance
innovation
community engagement
marketing managers
communication
human resource management
28 March, 2017

4. The Gendered Research 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)

5. 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).

6. 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)

7. 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)
USA (Bonner, 2006)
28 March, 2017

8. 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 March, 2017

9. Disqualifying Women Opaqueness in decision-making/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)

10. Epistemic (In)Justice (Fricker, 2007)
Testimonial Injustice
When prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s world.
e.g. women rape victims not being believed.
Sharia Law
(Mahmood, 2005; Salime, 2011).
Hermeneutical Injustice
Gap in collective interpretative resources/ structural identity prejudice put someone at an unfair 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 March, 2017

11. 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).

12. 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.

13. 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?
28 March, March, March, March, March, March, 2017

14. Women’s Internal Conversations (Archer, 2003)
Women Are
Constrained by socio-cultural messages e.g. the highly educated woman as the ‘third sex’.
Entering middle management.
Entering some senior leadership positions in non-elite universities.
Often located on career pathways that do not lead to senior positions.
Attracted to influence, rewards and recognition.
Burdened with affective load:
being ‘other’ in masculinist cultures
navigating between professional and domestic responsibilities.
Women Are Not/ Rarely
Identified, supported and developed for leadership.
Achieving the most senior leadership positions in prestigious, national co-educational universities.
Personally/ collectively desiring senior leadership.
Attracted to labour intensity of competitive, audit cultures in the managerialised global academy.

15. 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 March, 2017

16. 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 March, 2017

17. 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?

18. 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 March, 2017

19. Follow Up?
CHEER
Morley, L. (2013) "The Rules of the Game: Women and the Leaderist Turn in Higher Education " Gender and Education. 25(1):
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 March, 2017