Women Leaders in Higher Education

Shattering the myths

Tanya Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135048662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Leadership in universities is physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding work. It involves multiple and complex tasks and responsibilities such as staff management, strategic management, operational planning, financial and resources management, policy development, quality assurance processes, improving student outcomes, and engaging with community and the professions/industry. Leadership is not simply the act of being a leader, it is the act of leadership that projects 'success' and 'desirable' attributes. Leadership has the capacity to be deeply seductive yet it is not an immediately attractive option for women, particularly for those who carry the burden of family and domestic responsibilities, for whom finding a space for leading is no easy task. Yet despite the almost pessimistic research evidence, women are in senior leadership positions in higher education, however precarious their numbers. There can be little doubt that universities benefit from diversity in their student and staff population This book addresses the central questions; Who are the women who survive and occupy elite leadership roles in universities? How might their leadership be shaped by and a consequence of institutional climate? What strategies do they learn and adopt and how do they lead and manage their female colleagues? What about those women who do not 'fit' the gender script? The chapters overview the changing policy landscape in higher education; provide a critical commentary on the interplay between gender, leadership, higher education, and organisational diversity, and draw on education and critical management literatures in order to offer a broader understanding of gender and elite leadership;

This book will be essential reading for anyone involved or interested in higher education policy and management, academic leadership, organisational diversity and gender studies.

Chapter 1

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Telling lives

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The intention in this book is to uncover the significant contribution of women as senior leaders in universities across Australia and New Zealand. Drawing on narratives from 30 women I examine why women seek to be leaders and how they enact leadership. Importantly, this book draws on the perspectives of 25 women colleagues that provide a nuanced understanding of the complexities and ambiguities women leaders face. This opening chapter introduces the reader to the challenges this book offers to the field, overviews the use of narrative to explore everyday experiences and outlines the central concerns that the book will traverse.

Introduction

In 1931 Virginia Woolf addressed members of the London and National Society for Women’s Service. A well-known literary figure and established scholar, Woolf mused on her own biography and used the metaphor of a room of one’s own to underscore the challenges women faced in their professional lives:

You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men, You are able, though not without great labour and effort to pay the rent…. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare.

(Woolf 1957: chapter 27)

In her closing remarks, Woolf encouraged the audience to consider how they might furnish the room, with whom they might share it and under what terms. Based on a series of lectures, ‘Women and Fiction’, that she delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, two women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge, A Room of One’s Own draws together the central ideas. Woolf ’s proposition was that while women may face a number of limitations based on their gender, they should be given opportunity to be creative and independent. Her insistent plea is for women to have the freedom to venture into public spaces and to be able to develop their own capabilities. A Room of One’s Own is also about the fiction women write as well as the fiction written about women (Barrett 1979). Woolf ’s words are a backdrop to the stories of women leaders that filter through the chapters of this book. These stories are forms of autobiographical discourses that reveal aspects of women’s professional lives. Containing details of women’s lives, anxieties and triumphs, these stories are deeply personal.

Having a room of one’s own is about the personal spaces that women occupy. The room or rooms that women call their own are furnished with their own books and memorabilia. These rooms can be places of solitude in which beliefs and behaviours can be formulated and examined. The suggestion in Woolf ’s work is that having a room or space of one’s own is a pre-condition to speaking one’s own mind, particularly within an environment that is both known and safe. In much the same way that Woolf uses the voice of another to express her views in A Room of One’s Own, my voice is used in this book not to distance myself from the participants or audience, but as a way to enter into a conversation about the spaces and rooms that women leaders occupy. And like Woolf, as a narrator I stand between the readers and the participants, or characters in the stories I recall and recount.

In similar ways to Woolf ’s own writings, there is a connection in this book between speaker, narrator and reader. Following Woolf ’s example I do not play the ‘hostess’ and offer polite and conciliatory stories. Neither do I overlook the negative stories told about women leaders from the view of their female colleagues. Hence, I present a collection of observations in order to secure ‘the greatest release of all … which is the freedom to think of things in themselves’ (Woolf 1957: chapter 39).

A Room of One’s Own suggests that women occupy spaces as solitary inhabitants or that the room is one of many in a house where others are present. Drawing on this metaphor, I suggest that women leaders occupy rooms (offices) as leaders and managers in an institution (house) in which the majority of academic occupants are male. But it is in these spaces that women undertake a great deal of labour and emotional toil and, despite decades of affirmative action strategies and equity legislation, still struggle to claim a leadership space as their own. However, the academic house will remain bare until numerical imbalances are remedied and more inclusive institutional cultures emerge. The diversity of space that Woolf alludes to is notably absent across institutions of higher education. In this book my interest lies in uncovering ways in which women have negotiated and claimed a space for themselves in higher education, and how, once in this space, they act as leaders and managers.

The 30 senior women and 25 academic women whose voices trickle through the chapters of this book have generously shared their stories – stories that are infused with anger, laughter, pleasure and raw emotion. The women are all very aware of their privileged position at the apex of the academic hierarchy and many consider they ‘pave the way for those who come behind us’ (Aroha, Indigenous academic). Intensely mindful that their colleagues across the sector look to them for advice, guidance, support and mentoring, a number of the senior women leaders are conscious of a mandate to ‘be unruly, to transgress boundaries and… unpick power relations and see what happens, what can be restructured and deconstructed’ (Kathleen, senior leader SL).

My intentions are twofold; to examine the everyday experiences of women in senior leadership roles in higher education, and to explore the perceptions of their female colleagues. These intentions echo the work of Sinclair and Wilson (2002) who suggest that leaders and leadership are constructed in the minds of their audience. This has the potential to produce a dissonance between how leaders view themselves and how they are viewed. Women are acutely aware that their performance as leaders is frequently perceived, presented and viewed differently from that of men (Avis 2002; Blackmore 1997; Deem 2004). Such perceptions are based on gendered stereotypes and expectations of what is ‘[in]appropriate behaviour for women and men leaders’. Indeed ‘a woman leader is not viewed as androgynous or undifferentiated from her male counterparts. She is viewed as a woman who is a leader’ (Adler 1999: 259).

The emphasis is on making audible the voices and experiences of women leaders in universities across Australia and New Zealand. Although I draw on examples from these two settings, the issues and experiences surfaced are not uncommon across Western institutions of higher education (see for example Allan 2008; Bagilhole and White 2011; Cotterill et al. 2007; Sagaria 2007). Despite local variations, common struggles for women include establishing boundaries around work-life balance, securing promotion and recognition, balancing career expectations and choices, negotiating high teaching and administrative loads, meeting demands of research audits (Hazelkorn 2011) and negotiations in and around the gendered cultures of higher education (Currie et al. 2002).

A common thread across the literatures and contexts is the varying impacts of institutional cultures that inspire or restrict women leaders. In the words of Noelle, one of the senior women participants, ‘it is important to show how women leaders lead and act in the quiet spaces’ and ‘create opportunities for women to think about what is possible and permissible’. This is about creating room for women’s voices to be heard (Fitzgerald 2010; Marshall 1995) and their leadership lives to be made more visible.

The impetus for the project and book originate in my own career trajectory and leadership work. My experiences as a feminist academic have spoken to me about the joys and rewards of a scholarly career as well as the isolation and loneliness of leadership roles in the academy, particularly for women. I have worked in four universities across three countries as well as in a corporate company. In all of these settings I have occupied formal leadership roles and all of my managers have been women. Frequently too I have felt like an outsider. First, this has originated from my being a scholarly immigrant to a new culture, a new institution and a new country. Second, this has been due to the marked absence of women in mid-senior positions in the places I have found myself. I have frequently attended meetings in which the majority of participants are male and at times the only two women present have been the committee secretary and myself. Third, I have been an outsider as the previous incumbent in each university, occupational role and geographical location has been male. In three of the settings, I have been the first woman in that department or school to take on a leadership role. This brief career vignette speaks to the different rooms I have occupied and how I have sought to furnish each in particular ways and at particular moments.

Being a leader as Noelle (SL) suggested is about creating a different space. And like Virginia Woolf, it is about creating a space for women to transgress, to cross into spaces that she has not been previously permitted to enter, and in that space to realize her capabilities. Helen’s (SL) comments speak to the spaces that leaders are required to occupy:

When you apply for a job as a lecturer or senior lecturer, the emphasis, the questions and the PD [position description] is all about you. All about what you might bring to the place. But when you apply for a senior management job, it’s all about what you can do for others. What you are prepared to do for others and how you are going to bring about the change that is needed.

Helen’s words here highlight the extent to which leaders are situated in relation to others. And it is from this relationship that leadership can be simultaneously pleasurable and painful. Leadership can, and does, consume time, energy and emotions. In the current managerial climate of higher education, leaders are expected to act as autonomous self-regulating and self-maximizing individuals (Blackmore and Sachs 2007; Davies et al. 2006) yet they are defined in relation to those they lead. Accordingly, these relationships and perceptions are important to interrogate in order to think more broadly about leaders and leadership.

My purpose from the outset is to complicate ‘leadership’ and tease out the ambiguities, silences and contradictions of women’s lived leadership lives. I do not wish to solidify prevailing assumptions about women’s conscious and unconscious leadership work (see for example Coleman 2011; Glazer-Raymo 2008), but examine why they seek to be leaders and how they enact leadership.

In numerous ways, this book is a departure from thinking about leadership as a set of personal attributes to thinking about leadership as relational. An uneasy tension that I bring to the surface is the recognition that women do not always exercise leadership in positive and self-affirming ways. Not all women in senior roles have paved the way for their female colleagues. As Gini (2001: 99) explains ‘having achieved success by playing hardball and working hard, they [women] expect the same from others’. It is possible that institutional climates that legitimate aggressiveness, competitiveness and autonomy (Collinson and Hearn 1994, 1996) through promotion, recognition and reward systems create rivalries between women colleagues (Miner and Longino 1987). Or is it the case that some women have successfully assimilated to these ways of working?

Within this inhospitable atmosphere, instead of laying the groundwork for the advancement of their female colleagues (Mavin 2006), women are less than positive role models. In some instances, women are perceived by their female colleagues to abuse leadership. But as I disclose, this abuse might rest on flawed assumptions of collegiality and support from women at senior levels as well as unrealistic expectations that women who have broken through the glass ceiling (Davidson and Cooper 1992; Liff and Ward 2001) will inevitably represent the interests of all women. Furthermore, women can be labelled queen bees (Mavin 2008) if they either act or fail to act in gendered ways. Competing expectations and anticipations about women leaders from both female and male colleagues can create leadership as an almost untenable space for women.

As a strategy for survival women leaders can adopt internalized masculinist practices (Collinson and Hearn 1996; Connell 1995) and are consequently perceived as oppositional by their peers and colleagues. Those women who do talk the language of managerialism shatter any myths surrounding the ‘woman leader’ and can open themselves up for rebuke and criticism precisely because they do not operate in gendered ways. The backlash against women who seek power in institutions is not restricted to their male colleagues (Parks-Stamm et al. 2008). Women leaders can face vertical and horizontal oppression from their female colleagues as well as engage in a level of aggression themselves. Being a leader is risky work.

Dangerous terrain

The introduction of managerialism and managerial practices has created a new level of workers within higher education (Morley 2001), the manager-academic (Deem 2003), many of whom are women. In a devolved system where risk and responsibility are located at the school/department level this is dangerous terrain for women as they bear the burden for ensuring that performance indicators are met, compliance secured, financial viability and profitability enhanced and the student experience improved. In these roles women are required to act as change agents as well as managers of the increasingly corporate culture of the university. The intolerable and unrelenting pressures of corporatized universities (Marginson 2000) require certain forms of leadership and management.

Managerialism encourages ownership of and participation in decision-making, the building of networks within and across institutions, a flexible and responsive approach to ‘client’ needs, innovative capabilities, relational skills and collaborative approaches to leadership. It is these supposedly soft skills that are increasingly promoted as women’s ways of leading (Blackmore 1999; Due Billing and Alvesson 2000; Manning 2002). Images of being tough, entrepreneurial, decisive, flexible and self-interested are linked with being male and masculine (Acker 1990; Bradley 1999; Collinson and Hearn 1996).

Women who have been successful in obtaining senior roles are unable to openly discuss the discriminatory structures, attitudes or practices they encounter as they may well be labelled as troublemakers and provoke a structural backlash (Sinclair 1998). Parading women as a ‘symbol and measure of organizational change’ (Wajcman 1998: 2) might well be perceived as a threat to male and masculine power as well as providing ammunition for intolerant discourses that assert women are appointed to these roles because of their gender and not on merit.

I am troubled by assumptions that leadership can be reduced to an adjective or that there is a specific set of lenses through which leadership can be viewed. Populist feminized discourses suggest that women lead in ‘softer’ and more ‘feminine’ ways (Coleman 2011; Hall 1996). These universalizing and reductionist discourses make leadership for women difficult if not impossible. Depicted as essentially lacking hard skills, women are required to upgrade their skills in order to meet current leadership demands. This places women at risk because they are then cast as being ‘one of the boys’. Being ‘one of the boys’ is a risky business as women can be subsequently located in token roles as they have ‘failed’ to meet the standards set by the benchmark men (Thornton 2000). Lynette (SL) observed that:

there are females who tend more to the masculine side and if that is what they are doing they are going to get the blokey blokes particularly off side. I do believe there are differences in the way males and females lead, construct themselves, think of themselves … the interesting thing is when it doesn’t work and you are playing by your rules as a female leader they don’t know that game. It is very difficult to play a game if you don’t know what the rules are, that can really be a very interesting tussle.

Being too similar to the ‘blokey blokes’ was seen by Lynette as a way to provoke a level of opposition. Women who ‘play a different game’, that is, act in feminine ways, are in a difficult position as the ‘blokes’ neither know the game nor understand the rules. Wajcman (1998: 7) contends that ‘women’s presence in the world of men is conditional on them being willing to modify their beha-viour to become more like men or to be perceived as more male than men’. This can be seen in the comments offered by Lillian (SL):

I do think they [women] face this blokey culture that can develop, and the banter and the kind of in-club that can form. That can be as equally threatening for the non-blokey bloke as it can be for some women. I know men who feel just as alienated as women. In academia there is that potential for it to be a very blokey culture. The statistics tell us that. Trying to overcome this blokey culture is almost impossible.

When a woman behaves as a leader and exercises authority, it implicitly suggests that women’s leadership performance ‘fts’ and fits in. This obliges women to play a range of roles depending on the circumstances. Fundamentally women are a threat to the worldview of their male colleagues and must ‘play the game’ and ‘learn the rules’, that is, conform to the male worldview, accept their (limited) role, or be excluded for transgressing these boundaries (Fitz gerald 2012b).

According to Lynette (SL) ‘a female way of playing the game is that you won’t play the game – their game – because they want to play a political game which ties you in knots’. Lynette’s refusal to play the game or communicate ‘what the rules are’ placed her simultaneously in a tentative and a liberating position. Her reluctance to ‘play the game’ exposed her lack of commitment to masculinized management styles and she could well be excluded from further participation in the world of what she termed the ‘blokey bloke’. Her own political response to the situation was to devise her own rules; rules that she predicted would lead to ‘a very interesting tussle’ with her male colleagues. Both Lynette’s and Lillian’s narratives show that women spend a great deal of time and energy engaged in the process of self-analysis about what it means to ‘lead’ and be a ‘leader’. Both attempted to find a comfortable space for themselves as women and as leaders despite the complexities and uncertainties they faced as they attempted to collude with a game that was not of their making.

Margaret, a senior leader, remarked on the climate of competition and individualism (Metcalfe and Slaughter 2008) that she witnessed. ‘I do see in male managers a lot of posturing and ego-driven behaviour’ she said. ‘I see empire building. It’s not true of all of them but it is more common amongst men than it is amongst women.’ This is the climate that is increasingly chilly for...